hedged round by jealousy and governed by a small group of rascals
calling themselves patriots! Of course men will die for what they
believe to be the true faith.”

“Quite so,” agreed Henry Carvell. “Unfortunately, all national
education—in a South African tribe or a European state—is intensive
suggestion to primitive minds that their community, alone in the world,
is in possession of the true faith. Their tribal custom becomes the only
code of honour. They are encouraged to impose it, with missionary and
murderous zeal, upon the rest of humanity. German ‘Kultur,’ for example,
British ‘Justice,’ French ‘Liberty,’ and so on.”

“British Justice is a pretty good thing,” said Bertram. “We believe in
fair play.”

“In Ireland?” asked Christy, and Bertram was silent. No, somehow, for
five hundred years, British Justice had rather fallen down in Ireland.
It had been dragged into the mud since the War.

These conversations in Christy’s room were altering his whole outlook on
life, drawing him further and further away from the ideas of Joyce and
her people. He resisted some of the extreme doctrines put forth calmly,
as though they were accepted platitudes, by Christy’s friends, but he
found himself agreeing more and more with their fundamental principles,
and leaning heavily to their side of life’s argument.

These men, Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, Hubert Melvin, the
novelist, Arthur Birchington, the critic, Nat Verney, the Labour member,
W. E. Lawless, the political economist, and Bernard Hall, the editor of
_The New World_,—to name but a few of those who came to Christy’s
rooms—differed from each other in a thousand ways of thought, never
agreed in detail, engaged each other in endless controversy, over words,
quotations, facts, ideas, philosophy, but Bertram, as an outsider and a
younger man, seemed to discover in them some common denominator of
character and quality.

What was it that bound them by invisible threads? Not any party creed,
for some called themselves Liberals, and others Socialists, and others
Individualists, and others declined all labels. Not any code of caste,
for they belonged to different strata of English life, by birth and
education.

Henry Carvell had been a Balliol man and a rowing Blue, before he
disappeared into the wilds of Central Africa on his first expedition.

Hubert Melvin, who wrote satirical novels, had never been educated at
all, according to his own account, and belonged to that vague,
ill-defined middle-class which stretches around London from the mean
streets of Brixton to the garden suburbs of Wimbledon, and treks
northward from the artistic seclusion of St. John’s Wood to the outer
wilds of Golders Green and Finchley.

Nat Verney, the Labour member, had wielded a pick in the mines of
Lancashire before taking a course, out of Trade Union Funds, at the
London School of Economics.

W. E. Lawless, the economist, had been President of the Union at Oxford,
his father was the well-known Judge, and his mother the beautiful
Gwendoline Ashley, daughter of the actor.

Bernard Hall, whose editorship of _The New World_ had founded something
like a new school of English journalism—critical, scholarly, pledged to
international peace, scornful of popular clamour and political
insincerity, had been educated in France and Switzerland, and his
swarthy face, his dark, brooding eyes, and the passionate temperament
which he tried to hide under a mask of irony, came from a French mother
and a Colonel of Seaforth Highlanders, his father.

A strangely assorted crowd, not more like each other in experience and
heritage than others who drifted into Christy’s rooms. What, then,
brought them together, and inspired them with some common quality and
purpose?

Bertram thought he had found the key to the puzzle in the word
“Tolerance.” These men were wonderfully tolerant of things that divide
other men—religion, race, social environment. Henry Carvell had been
brought up as a Catholic, Christy was an advanced sceptic on all
religion, Lawless, a Christian Scientist. They had no race hatreds. At a
time when the English people, and especially English women, continued to
keep the hate fires burning against “the Hun” who had caused such agony
in the world, these friends of Christy’s denounced the Peace Treaty as
an outrage, because of its harsh terms to the beaten enemy, raged
against the continuance of the blockade which had forced the Germans to
accept its “humiliations” and “injustice”—

“It’s new in our code,” said Carvell, “to make war on women and
children,”—and they believed that by generosity the German people could
be induced to abandon their militarism and link up with a peaceful
democracy in Europe.

There were times when Bertram, listening to this talk, felt uneasy,
guilty of something like treachery. These men were too tolerant. They
seemed more sensitive, sometimes, to the sufferings of the German people
than to the sacrifice of their own. He quarrelled with them for that,
and was beaten every time in argument because he found himself yielding
to their sense of chivalry, to their belief in the “common man,” to
their faith in the ultimate commonsense of an educated democracy, to
their hatred of cruelty.

No, it was not tolerance that he found the binding link between them,
for they were violently intolerant of those whom they called
“reactionaries”—all men not in agreement with themselves—arrogantly
intolerant of ignorance and stupidity in high places. What seemed to
bind them in intellectual sympathy was hatred of cruelty, to humble men,
to women and children, to primitive races, even to animals and birds.
They were instinctive and educated Pacifists, believing in the power of
the spirit, rather than in physical force, in civilisation rather than
in conflict, in liberty and not in oppression, in free-will, and not in
discipline.

“Discipline is death,” said Christy, and when Bertram cried out against
that as blasphemy, he consented to modify his statement by admitting the
necessity of “self-discipline,” based on understanding and consent, but
not imposed by external authority.

“We must kill the instinct of cruelty in the human brain,” said Bernard
Hall, of _The New World_, and the flame in him leapt through his cold
mask. “We must give up teaching our children the old cave-man stuff,
about soldier heroes and hunters of beasts. We must make it a public
shame for women to be seen wearing the plumage of lovely birds.”

This hatred of cruelty was at the bottom of their arguments about the
Peace Treaty. It coloured their views on India, Ireland, Egypt, the
exploitation of Africa, the Negro problem in the United States, the
unemployed problem in England, the relations between Capital and Labour,
even the question of Divorce.

It was all very difficult. . . . It would be more difficult with Joyce,
if he allied himself definitely with this group of men and their
philosophy. He felt they were trying to “convert” him, to win him over
wholly to their side.

“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.

“You’re pulled two ways, old man,” he had said one night, as they had
sat each side of his fireplace, here. “There’s a tug of war between two
opposing ideals in your brain. You’re a traditional Conservative, trying
to make a truce, or Coalition Government, with Liberal ideals. A foot in
both camps.”

“A Jekyll and Hyde!”

Bertram laughed, but he had been touched by this sword point which had
pierced his armour.

“A Hamlet in Holland Street,” said Christy. “You want to murder your old
uncle, Tory Tradition, but you can’t bear to ‘kill him at his prayers.’
You’re still under the spell of Caste.”

“It’s my caste by proxy. It’s my wife’s.”

“True,” said Christy; “and out of chivalry to her, you will deny the
light that sometimes gleams in you—the fierce, white flame of truth.”

He quoted Scripture. It was a habit of his, though no Churchman.

“‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and
he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he
that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.’”

“A harsh doctrine, if harshly interpreted,” said Bertram. “It sometimes
leads to the cruelty which your friends hate so much.”

“One must be hard for honesty’s sake.”

Christy spoke of the secret in his own life which only once before he
had revealed to Bertram—on a night before a morning of battle.

“When I found that my wife was dragging me down into the dirt of lies,
into the squalour of self-pity and spiritual impotence, I left her—with
my blessing. It was hard—because I had loved her.”

“Hard on her,” said Bertram.

“For a time,” Christy agreed. “Afterwards she was glad. We had nagged at
each other for five years, before the war. That gave her relief. She was
sorry I didn’t get killed. Of course I ought to have been, for her
sake—perhaps for mine. After the Armistice life became intolerable. She
had changed and I had changed—or rather, developed on separate lines.
We were worlds apart. She hated my Socialistic tendencies. I hated her
damned little suburban philosophy. You see, she’d married beneath her. A
clergyman’s daughter. Think of that—with me!”

Bertram remained silent for a while. Was Christy’s story to be repeated
in another sphere of life; in another quarter of London? Joyce had
married “beneath her”—a peer’s daughter to a lawyer’s son.

“Christy, old man,” he said at last, “I believe in Loyalty. It’s my
central faith. Loyalty to one’s country, one’s wife, one’s code of
honour. Without that life, to me, is unlivable.”

Christy puffed at his old burnt pipe for several minutes before
replying.

“Loyalty’s good,” he admitted presently; “but to the highest and not to
the lowest. Loyalty to lies is disloyalty to truth. That’s one of life’s
little ironies. A damned nuisance, sometimes!”

The conversation was broken by Janet Welford, who came in to see
Christy, whom she loved.

                                  XIV

That lady, Janet,—Janet Rockingham Welford, as her name was given in
full on the title pages of several novels and below the columns of
articles in _The New World_—was an old friend of Bertram’s. Not old
herself, for she was on the vital side of thirty, but they had played
together and pulled each other’s hair at a kindergarten in the Cromwell
Road, read fairy tales together under the trees in Kensington Gardens,
and, years later, had met each other at “parties” in the wonderful
remote days before the War—was it a thousand years ago, or in another
life. After that they had not met until, surprisingly, one night, in
Christy’s rooms.

While Bertram had been in the trenches, Janet had been at Boulogne, with
more buttons to her uniform than Bertram could boast, driving ambulances
and maimed men from the railway to the “clearing stations,” after a wild
three months with a convoy in Belgium, when she was often under fire in
Dixmude and Pervyse, more reckless of danger than the Belgian officers
and English stretcher-bearers.

Now she was living in a little flat in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea
Park, writing audacious fiction (Bertram blushed when reading it),
pacifist articles (rather too bitter!), and occasional verse—very
mystical—for evening newspapers. She also found time to play the
companion and guide to blinded soldiers in Regent’s Park, to act as
secretary of a Socialist club, to speak at Labour meetings, to give
evenings at home to young men and women of advanced views, and to call
on Christy for inspiration, advice, and intellectual refreshment.

She was what she called “decidedly Left but not extreme.” Bertram, after
some conversational enquiries and experiences, found her so extreme that
he could see no further way “Left” than instant and bloody onslaught
against established order. Her political, social and moral views made
him feel that his hair was rising on his scalp. She frightened him. She
also attracted him by an irresistible gaiety and audacity—by an
overflowing good nature and joy of life.

The first time he’d met her in Christy’s rooms, she had come in like a
gust of south wind, calling Christy absurd, newly-invented names because
he had failed to come to one of her “receptions.”

“You reptilian, hypersensitive Bohunk! You self-absorbed,
psychoanalytical Pumpdoodlum!”

Then she had seen Bertram, with an instant recognition met by a
slow-dawning remembrance in his mind. Those big, brown eyes, that short,
straight nose, that whimsical, biggish mouth—in what former life had he
seen this girl, kissed her, if he remembered well, pulled that mass of
coiled hair, not coiled so neatly then?— Why, yes, Janet Welford!

She made a dart at him and seized him by a coat lapel.

“Bertram Pollard, by all that’s romantic! My boy lover of Cromwell Road!
My dream knight of Kensington! He whom first I kissed, and would gladly
do again, but for maidenly modesty and Luke Christy! Lord, how my little
heart throbs within this silken bodice!”

Of course he was utterly embarrassed, shy as a schoolboy, red-faced as a
cut beetroot.

“Don’t mind me,” said Christy. “Only I ought to warn you that Bertram’s
a married man. And his wife’s a real lady.”

“That makes the operation safer and more delicate,” said Janet Welford.
“Bertram, for old time’s sake? To catch again the fleeting impress of
youth’s delight? How say you?”

She offered him her cheek. The invitation could not be refused without
default of chivalry, but he was awkward and restrained in his salute.

Janet Welford rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand and said,
“_Quelle violence! Qu’il est féroce, cet Anglais, et formidable!_”

She sat on the arm of the old leather chair, and put her arm round
Christy’s neck and her cheek against his cheek, and called him a
beautiful pterodactyl, and a most wise old plesiosaurus.

“Don’t you come vamping me too recklessly,” growled Christy, with mock
resentment. “I may be ugly, but I’m human.”

“You’re impregnable in virtue,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “Alas for
amorous womanhood in a world of surplus women!”

She sighed deeply, and then pulled Christy’s ears, left the arm of his
chair, and sat demurely opposite Bertram.

“Tell me,” she asked, “are you one of Us?”

Bertram enquired in what way, and she explained she meant the Only Way,
the Far, Far, Better Way. Was he one of those who had turned their back
on an old and wicked world, full of old and wicked men (and women) and
marched forward with youth to the New World of equality, brotherhood and
universal peace?

It was Christy who murmured with a grin:

“Pollard’s groping towards the light.”

“Let me take him by the hand,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “I’ll lead
him into such a blaze of light that his young soul will be dazzled. He
will see the vision of the glory of light and the bright coloured
garments of radiant humanity. . . . Will you come, my friend?”

“Is it far to walk?” asked Bertram, “or must I take a ’bus?”

She told him that it was no further than the Charing Cross Road, over a
bookshop, on Tuesday and Friday evenings, at the club meetings of the
“Left Wing.” She was secretary, and would make him a probationary
member. Fee, two shillings and sixpence. Including coffee.

She made other enquiries as to his political and philosophical
mentality, and found him doubtful. She diagnosed him as a case of
psychic suppression, with a political complex. His instincts, she
thought, were healthy, but his opinions idiotic. If he would leave
himself entirely in her hands, with placid faith, she would undertake to
root up his inherited and developed prejudices, and turn him out a fresh
young soul of the Left Wing, eager for exalted flight.

“Your marriage, Bertram dear?” she enquired presently; “are you fretting
at the yoke, or have you acquired that technique which makes it possible
for two human beings to dwell under the same roof-tree, day after day,
even week after week, without agony of boredom and a nerve strain beyond
endurance? Tell me frankly. I can help you.”

Bertram flushed to the roots of his hair, said “Hang it all!” and then
laughed heartily. Janet Rockingham Welford was really the most
remarkable specimen of modern young womanhood that he had yet met.

She seemed glad to amuse him.

“That laugh will do you good,” she informed him. “You’ve been worrying
about things. You’ve secret fears. I expect your dreams ought to be
regulated. Laughter is the great remedy of fear. I know that from my
blind men.”

“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.

                                   XV

Not a word of news had come from Susan or Dennis O’Brien, and Bertram’s
anxiety had been allayed for a time because of the argument he used to
his mother, and to his own sense of uneasiness—that no news is good
news.

His mother was fretting miserably. It seemed to age her, and he noticed
that she was weak in health, and no longer had that placid resignation
to the worries of life which had made her so comforting as a mother to
unruly but devoted children.

A greyness had crept beneath her skin, so white and transparent in the
old days. She seemed to have lost her interest in the little duties of
domestic life which had filled her time in all the days and years of
Bertram’s remembrance, and it came as a shock to him, greater than any
other sign of distress in her, that on his last visit some withered
flowers remained unchanged in the vase on her table, and her writing
desk was disorderly with many letters and household bills hopelessly
mixed up, as he remarked when she tried to find a letter from his
brother Digby. She had made a religion of “tidiness.” Susan’s rampageous
carelessness had been a source of constant annoyance to her sense of
order. This litter in her desk, and those unchanged flowers, were signs
that something had broken in her spirit, and Bertram was shocked by
that, and by the grey sadness of the little woman who had given him
life, as she sat, with restless hands in her lap, and a kind of hidden
fear in her eyes.

She was afraid because Susan hadn’t written one word to her about her
secret marriage or her present whereabouts. That marriage, which Bertram
had revealed, was like a blow to her. She had prayed that Susan might
marry a “nice” man, so that she would settle down and have babies, and
be happy. She’d even asked God to let her live until she had that sense
of security in Susan’s happiness—her wild, beautiful, reckless Susan.
But now this secret wedding with a young man who was in conflict with
the law, and had done dangerous and dreadful things, was worse than
anything she had feared.

“What does the governor think?” asked Bertram.

Mrs. Pollard’s eyelids quivered as she looked at her son.

“Your father thinks it’s all my fault.”

“He would!” said Bertram, bitterly.

“First Dorothy. Now Susan. One married to a German, the other to an
Irish rebel! It makes him feel like King Lear, he says. He forbids me to
mention his daughters.”

“What a man!” cried Bertram. “What colossal intolerance!”

His mother reproved him, timidly.

“Your father’s a good man, my dear. You must be patient with his point
of view. Those dreadful politics—”

Bertram raged inwardly against his father, with a storm of anger at the
unyielding, deep-dug, inhuman prejudice of his attitude to life, but for
his mother’s sake he swallowed the bitter words that rose in him. He
tried to comfort her by reminding her of news she’d received from young
Digby. The boy was coming back from Dublin on leave. He might have heard
something about Susan and Dennis. Anyhow, it would be good to see him.
He had been very lucky.

But his mother shook her head, and refused to be comforted.

“Digby is my chief anxiety. I lie awake at night thinking of him in the
midst of all those raids and searches and murderous attacks. I can
hardly forgive your father for letting him join the Black and Tans, as
they call them. He’s so young. Such a child!”

Bertram growled that it was a disgrace to the family, anyhow. The Black
and Tans were dragging England’s reputation in the mud. They were no
better than hooligans. The scum of the Army that had fought for Liberty.

Again his mother reproved him. They were doing their duty In upholding
law and order, she said, and Bertram laughed bitterly, thinking of what
old Christy would say to that, and Janet Welford. But how could he argue
with his mother, so wan-looking, so melancholy? She had withered like
the flowers in her vase. He had been tempted to tell her about his own
troubles, to ask her advice about Joyce, who was so “distant” from him
now, so unresponsive to his love. . . . But he could not burden his
little mother with more family tragedies. He rose and kissed her
forehead, and said, “It’s all very difficult!” It was his old familiar
jest.

She smiled at him, and seemed to brighten.

“You’ve always been good and true,” she told him. “How’s dear Joyce?”

“Splendid,” he told her, and then left her, to get some news of Susan,
if he could, by way of Dennis O’Brien’s sisters.

He’d been reminded of those girls by Janet Welford, to whom he had told
the story of Susan and Dennis. Janet knew everybody, it seemed to
Bertram, and he was not surprised when she said, “Dennis O’Brien? Of
course! And his three sisters in Maid of Honour Row. Don’t you remember
how they learned dancing with us in the old days at the Kensington
Academy?”

Yes, he remembered now, three little girls with pigtails down their
backs and an Irish way of speech, and a habit of dropping rosaries out
of their pockets when they danced. They were Irish Catholics, and he and
Janet, alone together in her rooms, had discovered them at the old
address in the telephone directory, under the name of their father, Sir
Montague O’Brien.

No news is good news, as Bertram found when he went to the O’Briens’
house. They had received news of their brother Dennis, and it was bad.
He guessed that at once, when the maid showed him into one of the rooms
of their house in Maid of Honour Row, a little Queen Anne house with
panelled walls and a powder closet, where once the waiting ladies of a
Stuart Queen had lived, not far from the old red-brick palace in
Kensington Gardens.

The three O’Brien girls suited the house, and the panelled room, painted
white, with little chintz curtains in the casement windows, and
gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, and miniatures of Irish gentry in
old-fashioned dress.

The girls whom he remembered with pigtails, had their dark hair coiled
high, and their frocks were cut low at the neck, showing their full
white throats, not unlike the portrait of a Georgian lady over their
mantelpiece. Bertram remembered their names now, long forgotten, as he
thought, though tucked away in his subconscious storehouse of old
memories—Rose and Betty and Jane, in order of age.

A young priest was with them, and Bertram, as he entered the room, saw
at a glance that they’d been praying on their knees, for they had risen
hastily at the maid’s tap on the door. The young priest held his beads.
They had been reciting the rosary, as Catholics do, for the dying or
dead. The girls had red eyes, and tried to hide the sign of tears when
Bertram announced himself as “a kind of brother-in-law” and asked for
news of his sister Susan.

A letter lay open on the table, and Rose O’Brien, the eldest sister,
handed it to him without a word, while another gush of tears came into
her eyes. It was in Susan’s handwriting and was but a short message.
Dennis had been arrested near Dublin, and taken to Mountjoy Prison. She
was in hiding with friends they knew. It would not be safe for her to
write any more. She sent her love, and ended her letter with the words,
“God save Ireland—and my dear Dennis!”

There was silence in the room while Bertram read the letter. So Susan
had crossed to Ireland with the boy, as he had guessed. Dennis had been
taken to Mountjoy Prison. On what charge?

He asked the girls that.

“What has Dennis done?”

None of them answered. It seemed to Bertram that they weren’t sure of
trusting him.

It was the young priest who answered.

“Does it matter to the Black and Tans what an Irishman has done, or not
done? It’s only surprising that they didn’t kill poor Dennis at sight.
It’s a Reign of Terror, without law, without justice, without mercy.”

“On both sides,” said Bertram, sharply. “I see no distinction in
murder—Sinn Fein or Black and Tan.”

The priest laughed uneasily, but into his large dark eyes leapt a little
flame of passion.

“Sinn Fein does no murder. It fights in self-defence for the liberty of
Ireland, and executes spies and murderers—the British soldiery and
their bloody rabble, the Black and Tans.”

Bertram groaned with a kind of anguish. He had used the same arguments
with Joyce, with Kenneth Murless, with all that crowd. But when the
priest spoke them his mind refused to admit this one-sided view, this
assertion that Ireland had no guilt.

“It’s all madness,” he said. “Madness and murder. Insane anarchy.
Black-hearted crime. How can you defend it as a Catholic priest—even as
a Christian?”

The priest shrugged his shoulders.

“You’re an Englishman. How can you understand the Irish point of view?
The divine passion of a people fighting for freedom against ruthless
oppression? It’s not in your mentality.”

“I’m half Irish,” said Bertram, bitterly, “and sometimes I wish, by God,
that I hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in my veins! But because I’m half
English as well as half Irish, I say that England cannot surrender to
Irish gun-men. You’re fighting with the wrong weapons in a dirty way.”

Rose O’Brien had whispered to the priest, and he answered as though he
had gained new understanding.

“I don’t argue about Ireland with a son of Michael Pollard, K.C.”

It was a shrewd blow, and Bertram was silent under the thrust of it. He
turned from the priest to the three girls.

“Your brother’s wife is my sister,” he said. “What’s to be done?”

Rose O’Brien answered him.

“There’s nothing to do but pray.”

Betty O’Brien saw something else to do.

“I’ll go to Dublin to-night. If the dirty Black and Tans touch me with a
little finger—I’ll lay a whip across their faces. I’m Irish, body and
soul.”

“Hush, Betty, for the love of God!” said Rose, and Jane, the youngest,
said, “Be quiet, darling!”

It was Jane who showed Bertram out of the house, after he had written a
line to Susan, in case Betty saw her.

The girl touched his arm, and whispered to him:

“I’m not Sinn Fein, like Rose and Betty. I’m sure our Lord wouldn’t like
it. But I’m Dennis’s sister, and he’s the noblest boy I know. Dear God!
what will I do if they take him from us?”

She leant up against the door-post and wept bitterly but very quietly.

“They’ll send him to prison for a time,” said Bertram; “it’s not so
terrible.”

He kissed her hand, to make her understand his sympathy.

“God help Ireland—and England!” he said, and then lifted his hat and
walked away. If he had been wholly Irish, he would have been Sinn Fein
too. His passion would have flamed out for Irish liberty. But he was the
son of an English mother, and loved England first and best. Why was he
always pulled two ways? Why did this infernal tug-of-war go on in his
heart and brain, between the extremes of thought? Most men walked on one
side or the other, on their own side of life’s hedge. He tried to keep
to the middle of the road, and both sides flung stones at him.

                                  XVI

That night young Digby came to see him. The boy was not wearing his
uniform in the Black and Tans. It was not popular in London, and the
authorities kept it out of sight.

They greeted each other in the usual way.

“Hulloa, old man!” from Digby. “Hulloa, young fellow!” from Bertram.

They were alone together in the “study,” Joyce having gone out to dinner
again.

“How are things?” asked Digby.

“How’s yourself?” asked Bertram.

“I feel good to be in England again, after that hellish place, Ireland!
One feels safe in the streets. No need to keep an eye over one’s
shoulder. A knock at the door doesn’t make one jump out of one’s giddy
seat!”

And yet, a little later, he started and looked towards the door when
there was the double rat-tat of a postman’s knock.

“Sorry!” he said, with a queer grin, as he fumbled for his pipe and lit
it.

He was barely twenty, and had escaped the Great War by a year or two,
though he had been in training as an officer-cadet before the Armistice;
a fair-haired boy, with clear-cut, delicate features, almost girlish,
and something of his mother’s look. But altered, thought Bertram.
Something had changed in him. There was a loose look about his mouth,
and his eyes were shifty. He had developed a slight stutter in his
speech.

“Any whiskey, old man?” he asked Bertram, after some preliminary
conversation about his father and mother, Joyce, and the right thing to
see at the theatre.

Bertram produced the whiskey, but raised his eyebrows when Digby poured
out half a glass and drank it like water.

“I say! That’s a stiff dose, isn’t it?”

The boy said it was nothing. He had got into the habit of it. Everybody
drank like a fish in his crowd. Nothing else to do in the old barracks.
It was rather encouraged by the “Officer commanding.” Even the men could
drink as much as they liked before going out on search parties and
raids. It made ’em a bit fierce and kept up their spirits. Otherwise
they would be too easy with the Irish, especially the Irish girls, who
were damn pretty, many of them.

It wasn’t a pleasant thing to search girls’ bedrooms at night. At night?
Yes, of course. All search parties went out at night, drew a cordon
round certain streets, then banged at the doors, or bashed them in,
while an officer, with a sergeant and five men or so, went through the
house looking for rebels, and fellows on the run, concealed arms, and
all that.

A rotten job for a gentleman.

One night he had a lot of trouble with his men. They routed out three
girls in their night-shirts—ladies, too, and amazingly pretty—and
started mucking about with them. One girl had her night-shirt torn off,
and screamed enough to pull the house down. It was the sergeant’s fault.
He was drunk that night, and beastly amorous. Digby had threatened to
shoot him, and did actually knock down one of the men. That sobered them
up, and they left the girls alone, but it made them savage, and in the
next house they shot a young boy—just a kid—who tried to shut a door
in their faces.

“Killed him?” asked Bertram in a strangled voice. This narrative made
his blood feel like boiling lead. Hot and cold waves passed up his spine
to the top of his scalp.

“Oh, Lord, yes! Plugged through the head.”

On another night there had been a hell of a scene. They had run to earth
a young rebel in Collin’s command. He had been in the ambush at Black
Rock where five Scotties had been killed. O’Callaghan by name. His
mother and sister had hidden him in a linen cupboard. Of course, they
found that pretty quick, but the sister stood between his men and the
cupboard, with a red-hot poker, and threatened to burn the eyes out of
the first man who tried to pass her. The sergeant drew his revolver, but
the mother flung herself at him and he had to shoot her. Then the sister
attacked, and one of his fellows ran her through with a bayonet, to save
himself from the red-hot poker. What else could he do?

It was worse when the women started screaming and praying round their
men folk. It put the fellows’ nerves on edge. Their nerves were always
on edge. They couldn’t walk a yard without the chance of getting a
sniper’s bullet in the brain, or being plugged in the back of the head
by some fellow who had just passed, in a busy street, or a lonely lane.
That sort of thing gave a man the jim-jams. It was worse than real war,
he imagined.

No wonder the men treated the Irish “rough” at times or got out of hand
and shot up a village in which some of their pals had been killed.
Killed without a dog’s chance. What did it mean, exactly, “shooting up”
a village? Oh, just driving through in an armoured car and spraying the
windows and door-ways with machine-gun bullets. Women and children
killed like that? Often, of course. A rotten game, but guerrilla warfare
was like that. . . .

“Any more whiskey, old man? Oh, thanks.”

He went on talking, describing raids and ambushes and reprisals, for an
hour or more, until Bertram could listen to no more of this narrative by
his “kid brother” as he used to call him. It made him feel physically
sick. It seemed to drain him of all vitality, so that he trembled at the
knees when he began to walk about the room.

“It’s frightful! It’s devilish! After the Great War and all our
sacrifice for liberty! Two English-speaking peoples, bound together by
blood, by Christian faith, by heroic memories! My God! Digby, I implore
you to chuck it. Hand in your papers. Resign. Cut your right hand off
rather than do that dirty work! It’s dishonouring. It’s filthy. It’s
murderous.”

Digby’s face flushed. He gulped down some more whiskey, and lit a
cigarette.

“It’s got to be done,” he said, sullenly. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s
what happens in this bloody world.”

He was less than twenty years old, and all his memories were of war, and
blood, and death. He was annoyed by the emotion of his elder brother. He
was also a little drunk. Presently he said, “So long, old man, I think
I’ll go and do a show.”

Bertram had not asked him about Susan and Dennis. When the boy had gone,
he raged about the room again. He remembered this boy, Digby, when he
was a little fair-haired thing to whom he used to tell fairy-tales in
bed. Their mother used to come and kiss them and tell them to go to
sleep. Now this! Bertram was overwhelmed by a sense of pity for the
mothers of the world.

                                  XVII

Tucked into the frame of the Jacobean mirror (sham antique, but rather
good-looking) over the mantelpiece of Bertram’s “study,” was the card
given to him by Lady Ottery for her lecture on “The Religion of
Revolution: Past and Present.” He had glanced at it several times from
day to day with a sense of annoyance, as at the notification of an
impending menace, such as a date with the dentist or any distant
disagreeable and inevitable duty.

                               APRIL 10.
                      THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTION:
                            PAST AND PRESENT
                                   BY
                         THE COUNTESS OF OTTERY
                                CHAIRMAN
                 HIS GRACE, THE DUKE OF BRAMSHAW, K.G.

Once or twice he had murmured, “Oh, Lord! I suppose I’ll have to go!”
and then, as familiar objects lose their force of impression, he’d
forgotten the lecture and its date. It was Joyce who reminded him one
morning, at the breakfast table, to the music of an early piano organ in
Holland Street,

“I suppose you’re going to Mother’s lecture?”

He said “Oh, Lord!” again and “When is it?”

It was on the following afternoon, and Joyce was naturally annoyed with
him when he showed signs of shirking the engagement. She couldn’t
understand, as she said, fretfully, why Bertram disparaged her Mother’s
intellectual ability—Joyce always spoke of her Mother with a distinctly
capital M—to say nothing of her historical knowledge. Lady Ottery had
studied considerably more than Bertram, who was a desultory reader, and
had read a good deal at the British Museum last winter, as well as
belonging to the London Library, which allowed her to take out eleven
books at a time on serious subjects.

“The amount of knowledge Mother has amassed is stupendous,” said Joyce.
“Whether you agree with her or not, I think you ought to respect her
research work.”

Bertram muttered something about not believing much in book-knowledge,
but retreated on that line of argument as the author of a book which
soon he hoped to present to Joyce with love and homage, as the
first-fruits of his new-found gift. In the end, he capitulated, and
agreed humbly to go to the lecture and behave himself with due deference
to his exalted Mother-in-law. He tried to give a touch of humour to the
surrender, and obtained the glimmer of a smile from Joyce. But she froze
him by saying that she hoped her Mother’s lecture would convert him to
more reasonable views, and make him see the frightful danger of the
opinions held by his revolutionary friends at a time when England was
threatened by mob-law.

“My dear Kid!” he said, making light again of her over-serious mood. “In
the first place my friends aren’t revolutionary”—he had to make a
mental reservation of Janet Rockingham Welford—“and in the second
place, I don’t agree that England is threatened by mob-law.”

“Not by the coming strike?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then said: “The men call it a lock-out.”

She called that hair-splitting over words, and though he would not
consent to that—it made all the difference to the argument—he agreed
that there would be a serious situation in England, dangerous, even, if
all the miners left their pits, and millions of unemployed and idle men
were added to the two millions already without work. The stoppage of
coal would gradually strangle all industry, and the railways, which were
the vital arteries of the nation.

“There may be Civil War,” said Joyce, calmly, and Bertram answered
sharply, “Nonsense! Who suggests that?”

“General Bellasis. As the Home Office man, he knows.”

“I wish to goodness he’d keep his precious knowledge to himself!” said
Bertram angrily, “and not come round here mixing scaremonger politics
with tea-table dalliance!”

Joyce’s colour rose slightly, as a hint that she was “vexed.”

“He’s one of the best. If you weren’t so unreasonably jealous, I’d ask
you to make a friend of him.”

“Why?”

All Bertram’s nerves jangled at this suggestion of friendship with a man
he detested as one of the professional warriors of Whitehall, with
Prussian instincts and supercilious manners.

“Because he can put you in the way of a job. In fact, I think he’s going
to offer you one.”

“Did _you_ ask him?”

“More or less. Don’t you want a job? It’s time you began to keep your
end up.”

Bertram rose from his chair, walked to the window, and tossed a blind
tassel to and fro.

Presently he spoke, in a low, emotional voice.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that! I’ll pay you back for board and
lodging when my book’s published.”

She followed him to the window, and put her hand on his shoulder, with a
caressing touch, which surprised him. It was some time since she’d done
that.

“Bertram, I’m not playing the spiteful cat. You know it’s not my style
of play. I’m not flinging anything in your face, or any rot of that
kind. But you know you want a good job. You’ve said so a hundred times!
Now General Bellasis is ready to offer you one. Why get huffed?”

He was melted by her words, by the old comradely tone of them, by her
hand on his shoulder. If she only knew how a touch from her could kill
his temper!

“Give my book a chance,” he said. “I believe I can do something at the
writing game. Meanwhile, if Bellasis has anything to offer, I’ll think
of it, seriously. What sort of a job, do you think?”

“Organising,” she told him, and he liked the word. “Something to do with
the home defence of England—in case of trouble.”

“Trouble?” He looked at her vaguely.

“The strike.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Why not?”

He didn’t tell her why not, and indeed, she couldn’t wait to hear why
not, for some friends called with a car to take her to Brighton for
lunch and tea. But his mind went quickly to recent conversations with
some of the people whom Joyce didn’t know and didn’t care to know—Bill
Huggett, down in Lambeth, Janet Welford, Luke Christy, Nat Verney, the
miners’ leader, Lawless, the economist, Bernard Hall, editor of _The New
World_. They also had been talking about the coming strike, which they
called a lock-out, and had seriously disturbed his mind on the subject.

Christy and his friends declared that the ultimatum issued to the miners
was the first challenge of Capital in a conflict which they intended to
wage with Labour, until the spirit of the workers was broken and they
were reduced again to the cheap standards of pre-war wages upon which
the prosperity of British industry had been developed—for the
employers.

While the Government was squandering millions of money on maintaining
overstaffed departments filled with “limpets” pouring more millions into
Imperialistic adventures in Mesopotamia, and the East, giving immense
financial support to any Russian ruffian of the old régime who gathered
together bands of bandits to invade the Republic, and generally ignoring
the realities of financial ruin in Europe, following the War, they were
engineering a systematic assault on Labour, in order to weaken its
political power and reduce it to economic subjection.

The heroes of the War, “our brave boys in the trenches,” were already
being branded as “Bolshevists” by Government spokesmen. The men who had
fought at Ypres, on the Somme, and across the Hindenburg line, and whose
patient courage in years of mud and misery and devouring death had won
the War, in spite of the stupidity of generals, and the personal
intrigues of politicians, were now to be denounced as revolutionary
rascals, unpatriotic “blighters,” who must be “taught a lesson,” and
forced back to a low standard of wages, and of life.

That was Christy’s way of thought about the ultimatum to the miners. It
was supported with facts and figures by Nat Verney, the Labour member.
He took the trouble to analyse the proposed scale of wages at a little
conference of writing men in Christy’s rooms, brought there by Bernard
Hall, of _The New World_. He seemed to prove that they were less than a
living wage, so grotesquely out of scale with the prevailing cost of
life that if the men accepted the ultimatum—hurled at them suddenly
without previous warning or discussion—they would surrender their very
birthright—the right to exist.

Verney spoke quietly, with a smouldering but masked passion.

“We shall fight them to the last ditch. The Government, in league with
the mine-owners—that’s certain—have forced an issue which we’re ready
to accept. We’re not afraid, for the judgment of the people will be on
our side.”

Bernard Hall admitted that, personally, he _was_ afraid. There was a
sense of bitterness among millions of men who had fought in the war and
now were disillusioned with the promises made and betrayed by
politicians. With so many men idle—lack of coal would shut down every
industry—there might be a violent conflict. The Government was prepared
to use force. He understood they were calling out the Army reserves.
Some act of hooliganism, some shot fired accidentally, or otherwise, by
any fool, and frightful things might happen.

“Supposing the soldiers refuse to fire on their own crowd?” asked
Verney, and something in his eyes showed his hope for that.

There was silence in Christy’s room, until Christy himself broke it.

“That means Revolution—and the end of England as a world power.”

“We’re not out for Revolution,” said Verney, in a low voice. “We’re out
for a decent rate of wage—nothing more than that.”

Then he raised his voice a little, and it had a thrill in it.

“If the Government asks for Revolution, if it arranges it, the blood
guilt will be on its head.”

Bertram spoke for the first time. He was irritable, because all this
grave discussion had come as a surprise to him, and suggested unpleasant
possibilities which he hadn’t imagined, and didn’t believe.

“Don’t you think we’d better drop all mention of the word Revolution?
It’s an ugly damn word, and oughtn’t to be in our English vocabulary. It
isn’t in our English character, if I know England.”

The company had been startled by Bertram’s intervention, all but
Christy, who understood his silences and his outbursts, and the working
of his mind.

“Do any of us know England?” asked Bernard Hall, after a slight pause.
“The men who went out to the war—to France, Palestine, Egypt, Salonica,
Russia—have come back again. We don’t understand what’s going on in
their minds. They don’t understand themselves. We’re dealing with
uncertain, unknown forces.”

“I know the men pretty well,” said Bertram. “I keep in touch with them.”

They paid some heed to that, and admitted his claim to give evidence,
acknowledging their own distance from the labouring classes, their
theoretical guesses.

“You don’t think they’re out for trouble?” asked Hall. His dark, Celtic
face, with its brooding eyes, was heavily overcast by the shadow of
anxiety.

“They want peace,” said Bertram, “and enough to eat, decent house-room,
and a little pocket-money for the fun of things.”

It was Bill Huggett who had given him that view of the situation. He
used Huggett as a guide to the mind of the London crowds, the average
mind of the dreary processions of men, marching with trained step
through London with banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and the
point of view of the seedy-looking groups lounging about the Labour
Exchanges, and of other assemblies of men listening on Sunday afternoons
to political orators in Hyde Park. Bill Huggett was his interpreter.

The man had succeeded in getting back some of his work as “French
polisher.” He was earning about two pounds ten a week, out of which he
paid eighteen shillings for two miserable rooms in the slums of
Walworth. With the rest he could manage to get food for himself and his
four children, in spite of high prices. Getting back to work had changed
his whole aspect. He was more alert, and less inclined to “grouse,” and
he’d regained some of the old Cockney humour which had made him popular
as a company sergeant in France and Flanders.

Bertram spent half an hour with him, now and again, in his lodgings, or
in a public-house round the corner, and Hugget, though always
embarrassed by this comradeship of his former officer, and somewhat
suspicious of its motives, was not ungrateful or unfriendly.

It amazed him that Bertram seemed pleased to sit in his dirty little
room for a few minutes, not bothering when the youngest “brat” began a
howl in the next room, and dozens of other children, sickly, ailing,
underfed some of them, joined in a chorus of wailing in this block of
“workmen’s dwellings.”

Women railed through open or broken windows, looking into a courtyard
filled with “washing”—and threatened to break the jaws of small
children, if they didn’t “be’ave,” or insulted each other for certain
grievances connected with the water supply on the common stairways.
Doors banged, cheap gramophones blared out jazz tunes. Somewhere a
violin was being scraped like the crying of a soul in agony, by a
diligent practiser of finger-exercises. Shrill laughter of coarse-voiced
girls rang out in the passages. Oaths floated up from the courtyard. The
noise of distant domestic quarrels came vaguely into Huggett’s room,
where he sat in his shirtsleeves, smoking Woodbine cigarettes and
answering Bertram’s questions with a queer, nervous grin.

“’Omes for ’Eroes!” he remarked once when the strange medley of noises
in the Workmen’s Dwellings became more than usually discordant.

The “silver slipper” story upon which Bertram questioned him, excited
his sense of humour.

“Silver my foot!” he said; “white metal at sixpence the gross! A
Bolshevist emblem? Well, if that ain’t the funniest yarn! Strikes me
there’s no more sense in some of them so-called Toffs than in the long
ears of a coster’s moke.”

He had a realistic mind, and was something of a philosopher, like others
Bertram knew, who had risked their lives in the war, and escaped by a
hairsbreadth chance of luck. In their billets behind the line, in
dug-outs, in shell-holes where they had lain wounded, these men, or some
of them, had thought starkly of the meaning of things, had talked with
each other in a kind of short-cut language, incoherent, yet
understanding. Now they thought of the Peace they’d helped to make, and
the life they’d come back to find.

“It’s like this, Major. We’re fed up with lies. The blarsted lies of
newspapers. The muck them politicians say. The rotten stuff some of our
own leaders say. In the old days we used to believe what we was told or
what we read. Now we’ve found out. We’ve been kidded, all along! That’s
made us think. We know a bit of truth ourselves. We know what ’appened
to us. The things we did. The things we’ve seen. We can’t be kidded any
more. That makes a lot of difference!”

“What do the men want?” asked Bertram. “What are they looking for?”

“Not over much,” said Huggett. “There’s some that talk a lot. I did a
bit myself before I found my job again. Communism. Bolshevism. Bunkum.
More kidding! Most others are out for peace—no more bloody war, not at
no cost—decent ’ouse-room—not this dog ’ole for eighteen bob a week—a
bit of pocket money for the fun of things. See?”

Bertram thought he saw. He believed that Huggett knew the truth of
things about the spirit of the men. He marvelled at this fellow’s
commonsense, his soundness of judgment, his sense of humour, his
patience. Those had been the qualities of the men in the war. They were
still there. If all the men were like Huggett, or most of them, England
was safe. The menace was only in the minds of men like Bernard Hall of
_The New World_—intellectually morbid—and in the minds of Joyce’s
crowd, who were obsessed by the bogey of Bolshevism—that strange
foreign growth, so alien to English ideas.

                                 XVIII

“Joyce’s crowd!” To some extent his own crowd. He saw it, not for the
first time, but peculiarly defined in his imagination, and in all its
glory, on the afternoon of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He drove in a “taxi”
with Joyce from their little home in Holland Street to the Wigmore Hall,
and by the time they’d reached Cumberland Place, at the top of the Park,
fell into line with a steady stream of automobiles of highly expensive
kinds.

“The New Poor aren’t so beastly poor yet,” said Bertram, thinking of
Huggett in his squalid rooms with the four squalling brats.

Joyce tapped his hand sharply.

“They’ve saved a little out of the wreckage. Precious little, and we’re
all going ‘broke.’”

Joyce had two reserved seats towards the front of the hall. Bertram saw
that she wore a new hat for the occasion, a little blue thing, with an
osprey plume (Bernard Hall would hate her for that!), and the short
ermine cloak which Lady Ottery had given her for “going away,” when they
were married. She looked splendid in health again, and exquisite to his
eyes as she stood up looking round the hall and smiling to many friends
who waved hands to her, or programmes. The two Russian girls—the
Countess Lydia and her sister—were a few seats behind, and called out
over the heads of other ladies:

“So glad you could come, _chérie_! Your husband too! _Merveilleux!_”

That last sentence was a dig of spite from the Countess Lydia.

“How d’you do, Lady Joyce?” This very gallantly and formally from
General Bellasis, who nodded affably to Joyce’s husband, and said,
“Going strong, Pollard?”

Kenneth Murless sauntered in (his arduous duties at the Foreign Office
didn’t prevent afternoon outings of this kind) looking elegant, as
usual, in morning dress with a white slip beneath his waistcoat, and
immaculate spats. Bertram hated him unendurably.

“Well, Joyce! Is Lady Ottery in good form? Not nervous, I hope?”

“Mother is never nervous,” said Joyce. “It’s not a family failing.”

She held a kind of reception, standing there by her seat, and Bertram
was aware of some extremely pretty girls, and many ugly old ladies. The
old ladies interested him most. God, how ugly they were! Many of them
wore black silk with beads. He thought such costumes had departed with
Queen Victoria. Others were youthfully dressed in the latest style, with
odd little hats and short capes like Joyce’s, and low-necked bodices.
They were fat and old and hard and wrinkled. He did not blame them for
that—poor old darlings!—but only observed them. He knew some of them
by sight. He’d had the honour of shaking hands with some of them—little
old hands with many rings—at various receptions to which Joyce had
dragged him. There were two Dowager Duchesses, like caricatures of
themselves by Bolshevik artists. The Lord alone knew how many
Countesses. The old Régime had rallied up.

The men were in a minority, but those present were full of quality—old
gentlemen whom one sees in profile deep sunk in club chairs,
white-haired, bald, with bags under their eyes, with side-whiskers, with
hawk noses; and middle-aged men who, one day, would be the exact
replicas of the old gentlemen, but now straight-backed, with close-cut
hair, firm mouths, alert eyes.

Bertram recognised Lord Banthorp, Viscount Risborough, the Duke of
Berkshire, old Brookwood of Banstead, Morton of Greystoke, and the new
Earl of Winthorp. He also observed the entry of several Major-Generals
and Brigadiers in “civvies,” as Bill Huggett called his old pre-war
clothes, and not so terrifying as when his machine-gun company had been
reviewed by them before and after battle.

His mother-in-law had certainly drawn “a good house.” It represented the
aristocracy of England in its oldest and crustiest tradition, with only
a thin sprinkling, he guessed, of the newer vintages. The old, ugly
ladies had come out of their hiding-places in Mayfair to support England
in “the hour of danger.” There was something fine about them, in spite
of ugliness, even because of it. He admitted that. He knew their spirit,
indomitable, hard to themselves as to others, resolute in what they
believed to be their duty. They were the grandmothers of modern girlhood
in Joyce’s crowd, those pretty, laughing, dashing-looking girls, and on
the whole, perhaps, of stronger stuff. Well, perhaps not! Joyce and her
crowd had come out well in the war, with some scandalous exceptions. His
eyes wandered about, studying the faces in the hall with something like
a new vision—Christy’s angle of vision, Janet Welford’s.

There were beautiful faces there, neither old nor young, of middle-aged
women, rather sad, rather anxious, rather worn. They were the women who
had suffered the strain of war most in their souls, with long patient
agony. The mothers of fighting men, the wives of others. He could see in
their eyes that they remembered things which he remembered, which others
forget. Among them was the beautiful Lady Martock, in her widow’s weeds.

The Duke of Bramshaw led Lady Ottery to her chair on the platform, and
there was a clapping of hands, and a scuttling to places.

Joyce took her seat, and her face was eager and proud because of this
public tribute to her mother. Her father, who had come in late, with
Alban, sat next to her on her left hand. His face wore his usual vacant
look, with slightly opened mouth.

“Your mother’s marvellous!” he said to Joyce in a loud voice, which she
“hushed” immediately, and after that rebuke, he settled himself
deliberately to sleep. He had heard a good deal at home about the
Religion of Revolution. It was not new to him, and he had acquired the
habit of sleep in the House of Lords and during all speeches.

Alban, on his father’s left, wonderfully good-looking, dressed almost as
well as Kenneth Murless, kept awake, but appeared painfully bored. He
too, was aware of his mother’s theory. He avoided it as much as
possible, while agreeing with its general thesis. Out of filial respect
and devotion he had come to-day, at some personal sacrifice in the way
of a game of real tennis at the Bath Club, which was a passion of his.

The Duke of Bramshaw opened with some general observations on the
subject of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He was a thin man, with a long,
mournful face, a sharply curved nose, and a bald head. Caricaturists
made him look like a diseased bird of prey. In the clubs he was
generally known as “the greyhound,” because he made a little hair go a
long way.

In melancholy tones he referred to the honour he had in introducing the
Countess of Ottery, who, indeed, needed no introduction to such an
audience as he saw before him, well aware of her devoted work during the
War, of her great virtue as a wife and mother, of her noble patriotism,
and of her profound scholarship. They were to receive the benefit of her
historical knowledge that afternoon.

He himself had been a student of history, as far as his duties in the
House of Lords would permit, and other services which he had been called
to do for his King and Country, but he confessed that he had been amazed
by the revelations which Lady Ottery had discovered in relation to a
continuous tradition of revolutionary doctrine, of a most subversive,
destructive, and damnable kind—if they would permit him to use so
strong a word—from the time of the Fourteenth Century to the present
day.

Lady Ottery had made it quite clear to him, he felt sure that she would
make it quite clear to the audience—that the revolutionary spirit which
they found in the world around them, not only in Russia, but nearer
home, in their very midst, he regretted to say, was due to the dreadful
propaganda of a secret cult, mainly of German-Jewish origin, which had
for its object the overthrow of civilisation, the downfall of Christian
morality, no less than the destruction of all law and order. The members
of that cult, the Initiated, as they called themselves, were but few,
but they were powerful.

As Lady Ottery would tell them, they belonged to the tradition of Satan
worship, that dark and evil blasphemy of the Middle Ages. It was an
awful thought that men in England belonged to that secret brotherhood.
They were working among the labouring classes of England. They were, he
said so with a frankness which the gravity of the time demanded,
endeavouring to promote at that very hour, a Strike which threatened to
paralyse the life and industry of Great Britain. The Countess of Ottery
was not, therefore, lecturing on an academic theory of history,
unrelated to their present situation.

“In short, my Lords, ladies, and gentlemen, the lecture we are about to
hear is a warning of the menace at our very doors. . . . Lady Ottery—”

With enormous melancholy he bowed to the applause of the ugly old ladies
and the pretty young ones, and resigned his place on the platform to
Bertram’s Mother-in-law.

“For Heaven’s sake!” said Bertram, aloud. Sheer rage was rising in his
brain. What did all this mean? Did these people seriously believe all
that dark and monstrous nonsense suggested by the Duke of Bramshaw? A
sentence of Bill Huggett’s came into his brain. He repeated it to
himself, over and over again, as Lady Ottery began her lecture, and went
on with it.

“There’s no more sense in some of these so-called Toffs than in the long
ears of a coster’s moke.”

And yet the Duke of Bramshaw was not a fool. He had been educated at
Eton and Oxford. He had made many speeches in the House of Lords. He had
held high office during the War. These people were not fools. They were
highly educated. They helped to govern England. Good Heavens! They were,
in their way, among the best types of English aristocracy. It was
impossible for him to believe that such an audience could listen
patiently to such a wild falsification of history and commonsense as
that outlined by the Duke of Bramshaw, and elaborated by his
mother-in-law.

Joyce had said, “Do behave, Bertram!” and he “behaved” while Lady Ottery
read page after page of manuscript in a clear, hard, penetrating voice,
perfectly self-possessed, strikingly handsome, utterly convinced of her
own argument.

Bertram tried not to listen to her, but her words penetrated his brain.

With a kind of insane and dreadful logic she ranged through centuries of
history, connecting the origin of all revolts, uprisings, passionate
outbreaks of peasants—and peoples—from the Black Death to the French
Revolution, from that to the Chartist Riots, from 1848 to the Liberation
of Italy, from the Veto of the House of Lords to the Russian Revolution,
and from Bolshevism in Russia to Trade Union strikes in England—to
small groups of fanatical men and women, belonging, as the Duke had
said, to a secret cult pledged to the overthrow of civilisation and
religion.

She quoted old documents, newly discovered letters, ancient memoirs,
journals, revolutionary pamphlets, political allegories and squibs,
enormous tomes of German philosophers, French atheists, Italian
free-thinkers, Russian anarchists. Her range of research, her immense
industry, was wonderful, and she had hewn her pathway of argument with
remarkable skill and clarity through a jungle of false evidence.

But she had entirely ignored the ordinary impulses of human nature—the
savage instincts of men when they and their women folk are starving
while others are fully fed, the passion of downtrodden peoples for the
liberty of life, the long patience, breaking at last into impatience, of
simple folk oppressed by corrupt and cruel tyrannies, the vision of a
better human life in the minds of those who starve in garrets and
languish over sweated labour, the righteous wrath of those who see their
rulers growing rotten with luxury and vice, the divine rage at the heart
of a people under the scourge of the knout, and the brutality of a
secret police, the silent, ever-growing pressure of the Nobodies of the
world for more joy in life, a wider margin of ease, a greater share of
luck and opportunity, the claims of men who have done good service and
expect a fair reward.

Bertram thought of all the men who had gone marching with him, and
before him, and behind him, up the roads of war in France and Flanders,
the men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales. They had seen the bodies
of their “pals” blown to bits, but had not turned back. They had sat
down with Death, smelt it, heard it scream above their heads, known the
fear of it, seen the close horror of it, day after day, month after
month, year after year, but had not surrendered some faith in them, some
love of their soil, some heritage of the spirit. Were they now likely to
be the victims of a “secret cult,” urging them to overthrow
civilisation? Were they in dark conspiracy, as the dupes of German Jews,
to play Hell and Satan-worship in the country they had saved by the
valour of their souls? They were restless, discontented, bitter. What
wonder, when prices were rising high against them, and wages were going
down, and unemployment was creeping up like a dark tide of misery into
millions of little homes? This lecture of Lady Ottery’s was an outrage
to the men who had fought for England, though she had no idea of that.
It was a perversion of all truth in history. It was putting morbid fears
into the minds of an audience already obsessed by fantastic bogeys. It
would lead to conflict and cruelty.

“Joyce, I can’t bear it. This is mad and monstrous!”

So he whispered to Joyce, and she turned to him angrily, and said, “Be
quiet, Bertram!”

Their movement, and Joyce’s answer, awakened the Earl of Ottery. He
smiled sleepily at Joyce, and said her mother was remarkable.

Presently Bertram rose in his seat, bent again to find his stick on the
floor under some ladies’ muffs, and whispered again to Joyce:

“Sorry, darling! I’m going. I can’t breathe.”

“You’re abominable!” said Joyce, in a low voice, and turned her head
away from him with an angry shake of her bobbed hair.

He strode through an audience that was hostile to his going. Old
Brookwood of Banstead growled audibly as he passed, “Be quiet, sir!”

Outside, groups of chauffeurs were chatting beside their motor cars, and
across Oxford Circus, as he passed through, came a procession of
unemployed with their banners.

“We want work!”

                                  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.

He was absurdly emotional, as all writers with their first creation.
He’d been living with the book. He had staked his hopes on it. It was
his mind-child.

Joyce was busy with the papers when he went in and said, “Good morning,
darling!” She murmured a reply of some kind, and turned over another
page of _The Morning Post_, which rustled loudly.

Bertram waited for a little while until she might finish the society
news, or whatever it was that she was reading. She was sitting up in one
of her Japanese silks with a ribbon tied round her hair, and a little
frown on her forehead, like Marjorie Maude in “Peter Pan.” He sat on the
bed by her side and watched her eyes roving over the big printed sheet.
She was reading nothing very important. Her attention was not fixed on
any definite news.

“I’ve brought my book, as far as it’s gone,” said Bertram with
preposterous nervousness. “Care to hear some, Joyce? I want your
opinion.”

Joyce didn’t care to hear any of the book. She had something else in her
mind. It was his hostile demonstration at her Mother’s lecture.

“You behaved abominably yesterday afternoon,” she said, ignoring the
book altogether. “Even father accused you of bad form when you walked
out like that.”

“Oh, Lord!”

He confessed his contrition, said “Let’s forget it, sweetheart!” and
showed her the mass of manuscript he had written.

“I believe I’ve done the trick,” he said, with excitement in his voice.
“I’m certain it’s the real thing. Spare me an hour before lunch and let
me read a bit.”

“It doesn’t interest me in the very slightest degree,” said Joyce.
“Please go out of my room, and let me get up.”

If she had struck him in the face with her clenched fist she couldn’t
have hurt him so much.

He didn’t understand that he’d come at the worst possible time for a
reading of his book, when Joyce was deeply mortified by his contempt of
her mother’s lecture, and more annoyed because of his casual regret and
“let’s forget it!” regarding an incident which seemed far from trivial
to her. It was contempt for her, as well as for her mother.

Bertram’s exasperated comments at the Wigmore Hall were another
revelation of the wide gulf between her ideas and his. He was drawing
further and further away from all the loyalties which she believed were
the essential faith of an English gentleman, one of her class, one of
those who stood for the things which belonged to her family and creed.

She had been irritated from the beginning by that book of his. It was
ridiculous to think that Bertram could write! He had none of the
brilliance of Kenneth Murless, and had shown himself plainly bored by
the conversation of her friends on books and poetry. Even on that
subject he had been hostile to their ideas, and had denounced the work
of people like Stephen McKenna and W. L. George with contemptuous words
as “unreal stuff.”

That book he was writing had been a cause of secret irritation in her
mind. He had preferred it to her company. He had deliberately isolated
himself in its scrawled sheets, instead of joining her little parties,
and making himself agreeable to her crowd. The book had been a barrier
between them. It had made him careless of getting a decent job. It had
caused him to brood over the beastly war while she wanted him to forget
it. He was probing the old wounds again, deliberately intensifying his
morbid outlook on life. She guessed it was filled with his bitter,
democratic, anti-class views, which seemed to her like treachery to
England.

And anyhow, he wanted to read it to her at the very hour when she was
going to have her hair curled by the girl from Truelove’s who was due at
ten o’clock! Really Bertram was exasperating!

Perhaps that was what she had been thinking. Bertram worked it out in
that way afterwards, some time afterwards, when he tried to analyse the
reason for Joyce’s unkindness. Because it was unkind—damnably. It took
all the grit out of him in its immediate effect.

Knocked all the stuffing out of him, as he put it to himself when he
went downstairs again, flung his manuscript on the desk, and said
“Hell!”

He hadn’t argued with her, just said, “Sorry I bothered you!” and then
turned on his heel and went out of his wife’s room. He passed the girl
from Truelove’s on the stairs, and thought bitterly that Joyce was more
interested in her hair than in his book.

                                   XX

It was not to Joyce that he read out his book when it was quite
finished, but to Janet Rockingham Welford, author of “Mixed Marriages,”
“The Surplus Virgins,” and other alarming works. With her usual desire
for information, her habit of asking the most searching and intimate
questions, she had gained his admission some time ago that he was no
longer searching for a “job” because he had found his object in
life—this book on the war, and the gift of words. He didn’t call it a
“gift” to her. He called it his new obsession, and was pleased with her
excitement.

She was vastly excited. She vowed that she had seen “in the blink of an
eyelid” that he had something to tell the world that the world should
know.

“Don’t be timid!” was her advice. She urged him to be brutal, to tell
the truth in its starkness. She hated those little scribblers who still
covered the filth of war with rose-water, concealing its stench. She
wanted Bertram to be cruel to himself and to his readers, not to spare
them a jot.

“Make their nerves jump,” she said. “Take them by the scruff of the neck
and thrust their noses into the horror, and say, ‘Look at this! That’s
what it’s like! And this is what it’s going to be again, to your little
snub-nosed boys, to your annoying but necessary husbands, to your best
beloved, unless you’re jolly careful.’”

Bertram said that was his idea. He’d been honest, anyhow. Not brutal for
literary effect, but true to the things he’d seen.

Janet wasn’t satisfied with that. She wanted him to be true to the
things he’d felt as well as seen. She wanted him to remember his own
agony in the worst hours, to get into his book all the agony of all the
men, blinded, crippled, shell-shocked.

“Make it a masterpiece!” she implored. “Write it to revenge my blinded
men.”

Bertram told her she expected too much, and warned her that he was only
a beginner at the writing game. He needed criticism.

“You’ll get it, little one!” promised Janet Welford. “Read it out to me,
and I’ll make your flesh quail if you haven’t been honest with
yourself.”

That was her invitation, and he accepted it with the sensitive, wistful,
urgent desire of all beginners in the art of Literature not for
criticism—which is terrible to suffer—but for encouragement, interest,
understanding, praise.

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?”

He looked at her searchingly, to see how much truth there might be in
that, but he could not guess the meaning of the whimsical look in her
eyes, nor of the sudden blush that flamed into her cheeks after those
careless words of hers.

After the reading of the last chapter, he asked his usual question: What
did she think? Any good? Or had he wasted his time, and his hopes?

She did not answer for a little while, and then suddenly took both his
hands.

“It’s good! . . . Not all the truth, but all true. . . . A good book,
soldier man, and almost great! Thank God, you’ve written it!”

These words warmed his soul. He was enormously grateful for them. A wave
of emotion swept over him because this praise, so simply spoken, so
generously, by this girl who understood, was a reward for his labour.

He raised her hands to his lips, and kissed them.

“Whatever happens to the book,” he said, “your sympathy and help have
been tremendous to me. How can I pay back?”

She let her hands linger in his, not deliberately, but carelessly. She
laughed at his suggestion of “paying back,” and called him by the absurd
nickname which she had invented for him.

“No fee, Sir Faithful! I’ll be satisfied for service done when you
abandon the Halfway House and come over to the Left Wing!”

“Not likely!” answered Bertram. “I walk in the middle of the road.”

                                  XXI

After that reading of the book, there wasn’t the same excuse for Bertram
to go to Janet’s flat in Battersea. Not the same reason. Yet he went.
The truth was, as he admitted, that he could not keep away because he
craved for the laughter, the audacity of thought, and the free
comradeship which he found with Janet and her friends, and not in his
own house. Decidedly not in his own house in the week or two that
followed Lady Ottery’s lecture and Joyce’s refusal to interest herself
in his work.

Even Edith, the parlourmaid, showed by various little signs of sympathy
meant in a kind spirit, but frightfully embarrassing, that she was aware
of Joyce’s unkindness.

“Aren’t you going with her ladyship to-night, sir?” Or, “Seems a pity
you don’t like cards. Her ladyship is that fond of Bridge!”

Deliberately Joyce involved herself in a series of bridge parties which
ignored Bertram’s claim to companionship and included, every time, it
seemed, Kenneth Murless or General Bellasis, generally in the rooms of
the Countess Lydia in Whitehall Court. Now that his book was finished,
and in Christy’s hands for professional advice about the way to get it
published, Bertram felt loneliness closing about him with a greater
chill. Sometimes he thought Joyce was teasing his jealousy. She talked
of Kenneth in terms of affectionate comradeship, and then glanced at
Bertram to see whether she had piqued him. She confessed that she owed
Kenneth a good deal of money for Bridge debts—“but of course he could
wait.” Kenneth had been in particularly good form that night. His
stories about Lady Speelman’s ball had made everybody laugh. She was
going to the Opera with Kenneth and the Russian girls.

Bertram didn’t disguise his feelings, but he restrained the expression
of his temper. Something had happened in him worse than ill-temper. It
was a coldness that was creeping into his heart, a sense of some
complete and terrible misunderstanding between Joyce and himself, beyond
all petty quarrels.

He had a dreadful apprehension that something in the very quality of his
character was alien, offensive, and intolerable to the fastidious and
delicate mind of his young wife. Perhaps he was of a coarser fibre than
she was. He was afraid the war had brutalised him more than he was aware
of. He had certainly “learnt to swear abominably in Flanders,” like
English soldiers of Smollett’s time, and his nerves had been frayed so
badly that he didn’t always check his tongue in the presence of Joyce.
But it was deeper than that, and worse than that. Joyce seemed to find
him a vulgarian, a common fellow. There were times when her eyes seemed
to say so. . . .

Janet Welford did not make him feel like that. She called him “Sir
Faithful,” and once “did homage to him,” so she pretended, in her jolly
way, as “a very parfit gentil knight.” By that name she introduced him
to her friends, those queer, free-spoken, amazingly audacious girls who
seemed to be the advance guard of Social revolution in England, and
played intellectual games of skittles with the old traditions of English
life.

He sat dumb among them at times because of their wild talk. They were
pretty Bolshevists, who frightened him with their revolutionary ideals.
The Russian experiment had not been revealed yet in all its ghastly
failure, and they spoke lightly of Lenin as “the Master-mind,” and had a
sentimental affection for Trotsky as “the new Napoleon,” and refused to
believe a word of the atrocity stories manufactured, so they said, by
propagandists of the White Armies at Riga and Helsingfors.

Bertram wondered what would happen to his exalted Mother-in-law, if she
were suddenly to be transported from Holme Ottery to that flat in
Battersea Park, and heard such discourse. He wondered what would happen
to himself, if she saw him there, surrounded by these pretty witches.
Not pretty all of them! Janet’s best friend, Katherine Wild, was a
snub-nosed woman, with short hair cut like a man’s, but with courage and
comedy in her grey eyes. She and Janet made the pace in conversation,
egged each other on to new extravagances, made one great jest of life.

It was but verbal flippancy. Bertram remembered Janet’s devotion to the
blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s. From Janet he knew that Katherine
Wild devoted all her life to the starving children of the devastated
countries in Europe, as the organiser of relief. She had been working in
the soup kitchens of Vienna, and knew, as few others, the agony of
Austria. It was the knowledge of life’s tragedy that made her seize at
any of life’s jokes, and make a religion of laughter. Her great hope was
to get into Russia and to extend the work of relief to that country,
which was still blockaded by the rest of Europe because of the menace
and fear of Bolshevism.

“I shan’t have seen the depths of human misery,” she said once, “until
I’ve crossed the frontier into Russia.”

“Do you want to see the depths?” asked Bertram.

“The uttermost depths. Until then my knowledge of life won’t be
complete. You must go there too, Mr. Pollard!”

“Why?” asked Bertram.

She told him that Janet had spoken to her about his book on the war. The
last chapter couldn’t be written until he’d been to Russia. There was
the aftermath of Armageddon. After War, Famine, and after Famine,
Pestilence. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through
Russia, and the noise of their hoofs could be heard in Western Europe,
coming closer, closer. In Russia Europe might read the writing on the
wall.

“It’s the key to the riddle of the New World,” she said. “By what
happens in Russia, and the world’s reaction thereto, we shall know our
fate.”

Strange how he could never escape from talk about Russia! In Joyce’s
crowd he had listened constantly to tales of Red Army atrocities, the
sufferings of the old régime. In this crowd he listened to denunciations
of White Army cruelties, and the sufferings of Russian peasants.

Once he lost his temper, and flared out into violent speech which might
have forfeited him the friendship of Janet Welford, if she had not been
enormously broad-minded, with an all-embracing sense of humour.

With her women friends he could be patient, whatever they said, for they
had a sincerity of idealism which was proved honestly by service in some
human way, with sick children, or suffering men, as nurses, guardians of
the poor, workers in University settlements, guides to blinded soldiers.
But some of Janet’s men friends seemed to him poisonous.

They were members, mostly, of that club, “The Left Wing,” into which she
had desired, vainly, to beguile him. But he saw the types in her rooms,
and didn’t like the look of them. They were egoists, conceited with
their own superior “idealism,” _poseurs_ of rebel philosophy, amateur
Jacobins, without passion or sincerity.

Two of them were young men who had escaped service in the war by going
to prison as Pacifists. No doubt that needed greater moral courage in a
way than surrendering to the general tide of emotion and faith by
getting into khaki. Theoretically he admitted the right, even the
nobility of men who for conscience’ sake, religious belief or spiritual
abhorrence of war—like the Quakers—dared public contumely by refusing
services at such a time. It was contrary to his own convictions, for
though he hated war, and knew its insanity, he believed that when once a
people had become involved, they must stand in defence of their own
country and of their own homes. Still, he understood the reasoning of
men morally and utterly convinced of the Christian command, “Thou shalt
not kill.”

But these young men who came to Janet’s flat had been Pacifists when
their country was threatened, and now were revolutionists, talking very
glibly of Lenin’s right to destroy the enemies of Russian liberty, and
of the glorious prospect of a world revolution for the overthrow of the
Capitalist system.

It was a young man named Lucas Melvin who aroused Bertram’s rage.
Talking in the affected accent of Christchurch, at its worst, and
playing with a silk handkerchief which he had drawn from his shirt cuff,
he proclaimed his belief that Labour was about to overthrow the
Government by “direct action.”

“This coming strike,” he said, “will lead to a general paralysis of
industry. All the Trade Unions will unite for general action. I
anticipate the pleasure of seeing a number of Profiteers and _bourgeois_
hanging on the lamp-posts in Whitehall. _Vive la Révolution Anglaise!_”

This speech was received with laughter and applause, and the company was
surprised when Bertram rose slowly from his low chair by the fireside,
and stood with his back to the mantelpiece, glowering at Lucas Melvin,
as though preparing to knock him down.

“I can’t pass that!” he said.

“Pass what, dear sir?” asked Melvin.

“That damned, insincere, and dangerous nonsense of yours.”

Melvin protested that he didn’t like those coarse words. He also
objected to Bertram’s method of argument. It was neither elegant nor
polite.

“It’s not so coarse as revolution,” said Bertram, bitterly. “It’s more
polite than a revolutionary mob would be, if they caught you with a silk
handkerchief up your sleeve. Don’t you realise that if you and other
young fools who play about with the revolutionary idea were ever to find
yourselves in that state of things, your necks would be wrung first by a
mob that’s not out for elegance? They’d just wipe you out like midges.
Don’t you understand that if England were to go in for revolution, all
Europe would be dragged down with her, and war would be child’s play to
that anarchy and horror?”

“I see you belong to the reactionary set,” said Melvin, with an air of
bravado, but his voice was not quite steady. “Doubtless you uphold the
principles of _The Morning Post_.”

“I try to see things with commonsense,” said Bertram, “not like a child,
ignorant of realities. I’ve seen war. I don’t want to see revolution. I
imagine it’s worse.”

It was Janet who poured oil on the troubled waters.

“Sir Faithful,” she said, “verily you speak the words of truth and
wisdom. This child has been well rated. But of your mercy, remember that
this is a bower of fair ladies, and not a tilting-ground for angry
knights.”

“Sorry!” he said, and his rage died down. Lucas Melvin retired hurt, and
soon the others went, leaving him last, and alone with Janet.

“I behaved like a ‘muddied oaf,’” he said. “Do you forgive me?”

She forgave him so well that she sat on the floor by his side with her
hands clasping her knees, talking about the queer complexities of life,
the muddle in human nature, the mixed motives of men and women.
Presently she told him that he had better go home. It was unfair to his
wife to stay so late.

“Joyce won’t be back yet,” he said, “and I hate going home to a lonely
house.”

She looked up into his face searchingly.

“I’m afraid your married life is not all it should be. Whose fault?”

“Mine,” he said.

She told him that if he weren’t so beastly timid, she would get down to
the secret of the trouble.

“I’d like to help,” she said.

“You’re helping,” he told her, and then something seemed to warn him
that this was not playing the game by Joyce, and that he was losing hold
of the loyalties to which his soul was pledged. Janet was helping him
too much. In a little while he might not be able to live without her
help, her sympathy, her understanding, her comradeship. A sudden
movement he made, drawing back from her a little, surprised her.

“What’s the matter, Faithful?”

“I’d better go. After all, it’s getting late.”

But it was only ten o’clock, and not too late for a visit from Christy.
The maid had let him into the hall, and they hadn’t heard him enter, and
were not aware of him until he came into the room.

“Hullo!” he said. “Where’s all the party?”

“Faithful broke it up, with violence.”

Janet rose from her seat on the floor by Bertram’s side and held her
hand out to Christy like a Princess. He kissed it with warmth, and said,
“The Ugly Beast pays homage to Divine Beauty.”

“The handsome Megatherium to the beautiful Pterodactyl!” said Janet.

They were acting in the usual way, but Bertram was aware of some state
of tension in the room. Christy was not quite at his ease, nor Janet
quite natural.

“Going so soon?” asked Christy, as Bertram went towards the door.

“I’ve been trying to go for half an hour.”

“Then stay not on the order of your going, but go!”

Christy laughed at the old quotation spoken by Janet, but Bertram saw a
queer look in his eyes, of shyness or distress. Was old Christy jealous
of him, because of his comradeship with Janet?

Ridiculous!

                                  XXII

Christy’s criticism of Bertram’s book was not devastating. He suggested
merely the elimination of certain passages which seemed to him libellous
against a certain General, and said simply, “You can’t afford a law
suit,” when Bertram protested violently that he intended to libel the
old scoundrel, but hadn’t been half strong enough in his character study
of a blood-thirsty Junker, ruthless of men’s lives. His praise was
limited to a few words, but magnificent to a man who knew him as Bertram
did.

“You can write. You know the right words.”

That was good enough from Christy, hard critic, and honest as death. He
asked Bertram to let him send the book to Heatherdew, the literary
agent, and his friend. He would find a publisher, if any man could, and
take a personal interest in it, as a hater of war.

Bertram wanted to know how many weeks he would have to wait before the
book appeared, and what payment he was likely to get, an impatience
which amused Christy, who had more experience.

“It can’t be out till the autumn, at earliest.”

“Not till the autumn! Good Heavens!”

“It’s not accepted yet, old man. Hang on to patience.”

He conveyed a suggestion to Bertram from Bernard Hall of _The New
World_. Why not write an article, dealing generally with the threatened
strike? Hall suggested a title: “The Mind of the Men,” on the lines of
Bertram’s talk about the Comrades of the Great War and their point of
view. What Bill Huggett had told him, and so on. It would be a valuable
contribution, with knowledge at first hand, not easy to get.

“I’ll have a shot,” said Bertram. “Do you think the strike is likely?”

“Inevitable, I’m told. Nat Verney knows.”

For some time Christy discussed the possibilities of trouble. The
Government seemed to be asking for it. It was true about calling out the
Army Reserves. They also proposed to recruit the Middle Classes for
self-defence. That would divide England into the Haves and the
Have-nots. A short-sighted policy at such a time, when all such
clear-cut distinctions ought to be avoided. Big Business, with the
Government in league with it, was out to smash organised Labour. The
plan was to defeat it in sections, first the miners, then the railway
men, then the engineers, then the other great trades. It was to be a
general campaign to bring down wages to pre-war rates. A sound policy,
if prices came down to the same level, but there was about as much
chance of that as of friendship between France and Germany!

“Low wages and sweated labour! That’s the watch-word now. No ‘Homes for
Heroes,’ and other fine cries which went very well in war-time.”

Bertram thought it was unfair to the men.

“It’s a damned outrage!” said Christy.

For some time the two friends were silent. They knew each other well
enough for long silences. Christy’s cheap clock on the mantelpiece
ticked with a little staccato tattoo. They did not trouble to switch on
the light, but sat smoking in low chairs on each side of the fire-grate
in which a few coals burned in a heap of white ash. Christy drew hard at
his pipe now and then, and a little red glow lit up his long, lean face
with its deep sunken eyes and bulging forehead. Down below, in Adelphi
Terrace, or its neighbourhood, some ex-soldier was playing a one-string
fiddle, not badly, but with long-drawn melancholy. Cavalleria
Rusticana—they all played that. Down the Thames, beyond the Tower
Bridge, no doubt, a steamer was sounding its siren. The Batavia boat,
off to Holland, or a river tug moving. The murmur of London, the voice
of its enormous life and traffic, made the windows throb, and above its
low-toned rhythm, the horns of motor-taxis bleated incessantly.

Christy stirred, and poked the dying fire with his boot.

“I’d like to see how this strike works out. I want to be in England if
there’s any real trouble. But I’m off again.”

“Already!”

Bertram was distressed. He hung on to Christy’s comradeship. Here, in
these rooms, was a sanctuary into which he could take refuge from the
worries of life, or at least could ease them, by unloading his pack
awhile, and sorting it out with old Christy. It was not so much
Christy’s words which helped him, but his presence. They’d been together
in dirty places during the war. They had sat in the same mud-holes,
listening to shells overhead, and expecting death together. They knew
each other’s courage and fears. Christy had wept once, when his _moral_
had broken for a while. He had just cried like a child when the sergeant
was blown to bits, not because of any love for the sergeant, but because
of the beastliness and unending misery of it all. Bertram had been on
the verge of shell-shock once. He was afraid of being afraid. Supposing
he let down the men, played the coward, or something? Christy had
strengthened him then. They knew each other—in weakness as well as in
strength. He hated to think of Christy going away again so soon.

“Where now?” he asked.

“Berlin for a start. Then—perhaps Moscow. I’ve asked for permits.”

“Moscow!”

Christy grinned, and confessed it sounded like asking for the tiger’s
cage to be opened. But he wanted to get into Russia, and _The New World_
had asked him to go. It was impossible to find out the truth of what was
happening there. Everything one read was a manufactured lie. He wanted
to know the truth. He would be restless until he found out. Was there
anything at all to be said for the Russian experiment—Communism? It was
no good talking about Bolshevik atrocities. They weren’t Communism. He
wasn’t sure of them, anyhow, but if they’d happened, they belonged to
the realm of that murder mania which overtakes people in times of war
and revolution. He wanted to see how the system worked, whether it was
any solution of Capitalist civilisation. It was absurd to pretend that
Western civilisation was the last word in human wisdom and scientific
organisation. The profiteer was in himself a denial of that! Perhaps,
with all their blunderings and cruelties, Lenin and his crowd had caught
hold of some sound idea. Perhaps it was the beginning of a new era in
social history. He wanted to see for himself, to know. He had no
preconceived ideas. He was out for the truth, whatever it might be.

“I’m afraid you’ll go Bolshevik!” said Bertram. “If you do, our
friendship ends.”

He spoke the last words lightly, but not without sincerity and fear.

“I’ll let you know,” said Christy. “A post card will do. ‘I’ve gone
Bolshy.’”

He laughed at the thought of the postcard travelling from Moscow with
its awful message to the outer world. Probably the censor would seize
it. It would be burnt at the end of a pair of tongs, lest it should
spread sedition. Bertram’s world would never know. At some future date
he might hear of his former friend leading a Red Army against Poland, or
sitting with a long white beard, like Karl Marx, in the Kremlin, ruling
Russia.

It was some minutes later when Bertram asked a question sharply:

“Have you told Janet Welford?”

Christy poked the fire, and put it out, with great deliberation.

“No.”

“Christy, old man,” said Bertram presently, “is there anything between
you and Janet—I mean in the way of love and that sort of thing?”

Christy laughed, and rose to look at himself in the glass, and laughed
again.

“With this ugly mug? Does the Neanderthal Man indulge in amorous
dalliance with beautiful women of the Georgian era? What a horrible
thought!”

“She loves you this side idolatry,” said Bertram.

Christy suddenly flamed out in anger, and it was the first time Bertram
had ever seen him lose control.

“Damn you, Pollard! Why can’t you leave that subject alone? What right
have you to talk of Janet at all? She used to come here often before you
spent all your evenings in her rooms.”

Bertram was astounded and overwhelmed by this sudden outburst. So
Christy _was_ jealous of him! Christy—of all men in the world!—whom he
would no more hurt than cut off his own right hand!

He went over to him, and grabbed his shoulder.

“Why, you silly old ass! Do you think I wanted to barge in between you
and Janet? What about Joyce, and my loyalty to her?”

Christy’s gust of rage died down as quickly as it had risen, and he was
pale and ashamed.

“Sorry, Pollard! Fact is, you touched the wrong nerve. I love that girl
Janet like an infatuated Romeo. She sets my frog’s blood on fire. That’s
one reason I’m off to Moscow. Running away!”

“Why run?” asked Bertram. “Why not tell her?”

Christy gave another whimsical look at his face in the mirror over the
mantelpiece.

“Not in that mug, laddie! Besides—now we’re talking—I’ve got a wife,
too, don’t you see, although I don’t live with her? And anyhow, this
damned old world of ours don’t lend itself to love-making just now. It’s
falling into ruin, and I’m busy watching it. The human equation doesn’t
seem to matter, and the ghosts of dead boys, who were robbed of life
before their time, mock at my senile passion. I ought to know better at
my time of life. I’ll be forty-five in Moscow!”

He made only one other reference to the subject. It was when Bertram
left his rooms that night.

“Referring back,” he said, “I might say a parting word, laddie. If
you’re not cut out for disloyalty—and it needs a special
temperament—cut and run when loyalty’s over-strained. It’s the safest
way. . . . And Moscow is an interesting place.”

They gripped hands and wished each other luck. Luck to the book. Luck to
the adventure.

“Dashed funny thing—life,” said Christy, leaning over the staircase as
Bertram went down.

“It’s all very difficult!”

They both laughed. They had spoken the same words a thousand times in
France.

All very difficult! Yes. Bertram, going home, wondered whether Janet
Welford had more than a whimsical affection for Christy. How old Christy
had fired up! He never suspected him of passion—and at forty-five! Time
for the fires to burn out. . . . He also wondered whether Joyce
understood the meaning of love. Something would have to be done to make
her understand, or his life, and hers, would be utterly spoilt.

                                 XXIII

Bertram had just read his first newspaper article, entitled “The Mind of
the Men”—Bernard Hall’s title—in that week’s issue of _The New World_,
when he heard his name called from the next room by Joyce. There was a
note of emotion in the sound of that call, and he went to her quickly,
wondering if she had hurt herself.

She was standing by the side of her writing desk, holding an illustrated
paper—_Country Life_—with a look of amazement and alarm.

“What’s the matter, Joyce?”

She pointed to a photograph, and said, “It can’t be true!” He saw at a
glance that it was a view of Holme Ottery from the west wing, with its
stone, ivy-covered terraces, and broad flight of steps leading down to
the tennis lawn and rose-garden. It was just there, coming up from the
tennis court, that he had heard of Rudy’s death, when Ottery had handed
the telegram to his wife, fingering his red beard and staring across the
grounds with watery eyes. There was the Venus with her broken nose, and
the copy of the Goose Boy of Pompeii.

“Holme Ottery,” said Bertram. “Why not?”

It was always being photographed for the magazines.

Joyce pointed to some words above the picture, and said, “Can’t you
see?”

The words were—“Historic House for Sale.”

Holme Ottery for sale? No, impossible! It had been in the Bellairs
family for four hundred years or more. It was a part of English history.
Its beauty, its tradition, its ghosts, its very soil, belonged to the
spirit of the family that had played some part, not insignificant, in
the making of England—as soldiers, courtiers, statesmen. It was Alban
Bellairs, Earl of Ottery, who had been one of Elizabeth’s favourites
before he died with Essex on the scaffold. Rupert Bellairs, fifth Earl,
had been an exile in Holland with Charles II., and afterwards Master of
the Horse at Whitehall. Joyce Bellairs, the great-great-grandmother of
this Joyce, was the famous beauty to whom Steele wrote some of his
sonnets. Holme Ottery was in the history books. It meant all that and
more to this girl, his wife. Every fibre of her body belonged to that
heritage. The tradition of her house was the corner-stone of her own
spirit. In pride and faith she was a Bellairs of Ottery, this girl whom
he—a young officer “without a bean”—had married when War had broken
down for a time the strongest thing in English life, which was caste.

“Some mistake—” he said.

Joyce was weeping passionately. He had never seen her weep before, and
it hurt him poignantly. He put his arms about her, trying to say words
of comfort, but she shook herself away from him, and paced up and down
the room like an angry boy. It was anger which dried her tears.

“Father’s done this without saying a word to me! Even Mother hasn’t
written! It’s treachery to the whole family. I won’t allow it.”

Bertram was silent. He remembered what his father-in-law had said to him
outside the House of Lords—something about Holme Ottery bleeding him to
death.

“Do you think Alban knows?” he asked.

As the eldest son, Bellairs must have been consulted, must have given
his consent to sell.

“Alban is weak as water! Father may have talked him over. I’ll go down
this very day, and let ’em know what _I_ have to say on the subject!”

Later she rang the bell, and told Edith to pack her bag.

“I’ll come with you,” said Bertram.

Joyce didn’t seem to think there was any need for him to come.

“It’s a family affair,” she said, coldly.

A family affair? Oh, yes, he was outside the family. Merely the
insignificant husband of a Bellairs. His voice would have no weight in
the family councils. He was just a damned outsider, tolerated as an
unfortunate _mésalliance_—Joyce’s mistake. Perhaps Joyce guessed a
little at those thoughts of his, as he stood silent, with flushed face,
raging inwardly at the humiliation which her words made him feel.

“I didn’t want to drag you into a family row,” she said. “But you’d
better come, after all.”

It was in his mind to say that he would be damned if he went, that he
had no intention of being patronised by the supercilious Alban, his
detestable brother-in-law, or bullied by Lady Ottery, his exalted
Mother-in-law. But the sight of Joyce’s tear-stained face restrained
him. The news that Holme Ottery was up for sale was a blow at her heart,
as he could see by her unusual pallor. He would be a cad to quarrel with
her now, and thrust his own personality forward in the family tragedy.

When she went upstairs, he turned over the pages of _Country Life_.
Holme Ottery was not the only house for sale, as well he knew. Page
after page was filled with the usual announcements of “Noble Estates,”
“Fine Old Country Mansions,” “Historic Residences.” Some of them
belonged to people he knew, as he had seen many times before.

He remembered other words spoken by Lord Ottery. “Our day is done,” he’d
said. “The War and its costs have finished us.”

These advertisements were only one more proof of the change that was
happening in England, where the Old Order was gassing, giving place
to—what?

It was no new revelation to him. He’d seen the boards up outside many
old houses. Some of his own friends had abandoned their old places and
come to live in the Albany, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, the Kensingtons,
and other districts not immensely far from Mayfair, but outside its
former sanctuary, now delivered over to the New Rich. They were not
distressingly poor. They were carrying on rather well! But they’d lost
the family roof-trees, the quiet parklands, something of their state in
England. Profiteers, American millionaires, Jews, were taking over some
of the old houses, though many remained unsold. . . . This news about
Holme Ottery for sale brought sharply home to Bertram that silent,
social, bloodless revolution which was happening in England. Well, it
didn’t matter very much to him. It mattered very much to Joyce.

She was silent going down in the train to Sussex, and seemed to have a
chill. He wrapped his overcoat about her in the corner of the
first-class carriage where she sat smoking cigarettes through a long
amber tube. She wore her country clothes of rough tweed, and looked, he
thought, “patrician” to her polished finger-tips. But amazingly young,
and child-like, in a white Tam-o’-shanter, with a gleam of gold where
her bobbed hair curled above her neck. He would have liked to kiss her
neck, so delicate and white, so inviting, as she bent her head over the
morning paper. He sat close to her for a while, and put his arm about
her waist, which she suffered impatiently, until she asked him to give
her elbow room and not to get into one of his “soppy moods.”

That sent him to the other side of the carriage, moodily, and he sat
staring out of the train at the passing meadows, all silver and gold and
green, on this day of Eastertide. The sunlight of an April sky chased
across the thatched roofs of little old cottages, touched their tall
twisted chimneys, gleamed on church spires, chased the shadows in
feathery woods. Little old England! So snug, and ancient, and sheltered,
and peaceful. He’d only learnt to love England properly when he was out
of it, fighting for it,—with only a thin chance of getting back to it.
Ireland was his father’s country, his own birthplace. England was his
mother’s land, and it was England, not Ireland to which his soul gave
allegiance.

Lying in the earth of France, he had thought back to England, yearned
for it. Not only and always for London, its mighty heart, which he’d
loved, but for the smell of fields like this, for the sight again—once
again—of an old village like one of those, with a square church tower,
and walled gardens, and orchards white, as now, with blossom. He had
tried to get something of that into his book—the inarticulate,
half-conscious love of England which had come to country boys, Cockneys,
young louts in khaki, so that some instinct in them, some strain of
blood, some heritage of spirit, had steeled them to stand fast in the
dirty ditches of death, whatever their fear.

Perhaps in a few days the safety of England would be threatened again by
social conflict. As the train crawled slowly through Robertsbridge, he
saw the newspaper placards, “Strike Certain. Notices Issued.” Bad, that.
Perhaps the railways might close down. They’d have to motor back from
Holme Ottery. Christy had just got away in time. He wondered if his
article on “The Mind of the Men” would attract any kind of notice. It
might do some good. He’d been fair to the men, tried to make people
understand their point of view, their reasonable claim for a living
wage.

Joyce spoke for the first time from her corner.

“I’m going to give father hell. He ought to have consulted me.”

Bertram suggested that perhaps his father-in-law had wanted to save her
from the worry of it, while she was unwell.

“Nonsense!” she said, impatiently. “It was just cowardice. He hadn’t the
pluck to tell me.”

Probably Joyce was right. So Bertram thought when they met Lord Ottery,
beyond the lodge gates, strolling towards them, with a little white dog
at his heels. He’d come to meet his daughter in answer to a telegram she
had sent from Victoria station.

“Well, Joyce!” he said, holding out his hairy cheek for her to kiss.
“Glad to see you looking so strong again.”

He was obviously ill at ease. He pretended not to be aware that Joyce
had failed to kiss him, and that her answer of “Well, father!” to his
“Well, Joyce,” was decidedly hostile and challenging.

“Your Mother’s not very bobbish this morning,” he said. “Sick headache,
or something of the sort.”

“I’m not surprised,” answered Joyce, with a little sarcastic laugh which
plainly suggested that Lord Ottery was the cause of her mother’s
ill-health. She walked with a long, swinging stride up the avenue of
elms which led towards the old house, so that her father lagged a little
behind her.

He remarked that the crops were coming along well, in spite of the dry
weather. He also expressed annoyance because the villagers had been
breaking down some of the fences on the south side of the park.

“The spirit of Bolshevism,” he said. “All those young fellows back from
the war are socialists and lawbreakers. I can’t understand it. They
weren’t like that after the South African War.”

Joyce continued walking in silence. Bertram, stealing a glance at her,
saw that there was a bright spot of colour on each cheek—danger
signals. It was when she reached the lawns outside the house, and saw
its old grey walls and mullion windows close to the terrace, and the
sloping banks with their clipped hedges, that she turned on her father
and revealed her anger and her anguish.

“Father! I can’t believe it’s true! You couldn’t bring yourself to do
it!”

“Do what, my dear?”

Lord Ottery put on his vacant look, and opened his mouth a little, like
a stupid rustic.

“Put the house up for sale!”

“Oh, the house! Oh, Lord! Who told you that? _Have_ they put it up for
sale? I’ve seen nothing about it in the Press.”

Joyce clutched her father’s arm, and shook him a little.

“Father! Tell me the truth. You’re not going to sell Holme Ottery?”

“Sell it, my dear? Who would buy it? It’s most unlikely that any one in
the world would buy it. It costs a fearful lot of money to keep up. Look
at it now—going to rack and ruin. A white elephant, Joyce. What with
income tax, land tax, death duties, price of labour—”

“Have you put it up for sale?”

Joyce stamped her foot, and her blue eyes looked piercingly into her
father’s grey ones. His were less courageous. He looked sheepishly at
Bertram, of whose presence he had previously taken no notice at all.

“My dear Joyce,” he said, “I wish you wouldn’t be so imperious! I’m an
old man now. I’m getting devilish hard-pressed in my old age, and I have
the right to a little domestic peace.”

“Father, have you put it up for sale?”

He hesitated, shifted a little from one foot to the other, and poked up
a stone in the path with his thick cudgel.

“Well, my dear, I suggested to those damn fellows, Huxted and Wells,
that they might get an offer some time.”

It was the confession that Holme Ottery had been put up for sale. Joyce
accepted it as such.

“It’s a treachery!” she cried; “a treachery to Alban and all of us. We
won’t allow it. We ought to starve rather than let the house go. All our
history is there. It’s what we mean and are. Without that we’re
nothing.”

“It will be a great sacrifice, my dear,” said the tenth Earl of Ottery.
He, too, looked up at the old house which his forefathers had built, in
which they had lived and died and played their part in English history.
There was a little mist before his eyes.

“A great sacrifice!” he said in a broken way.

“I’ll talk to Mother about this!” said Joyce, savagely.

Lord Ottery smiled at her, and patted her hand.

“Yes, go and talk it out with your Mother. She’s in her room reading
_The Times_.”

Joyce ran up the terrace steps, without waiting for Bertram, and the two
men watched her slim, boyish figure disappear through the doorway of the
west turret.

“Women like talking,” said Ottery. “It doesn’t alter things, though.
Talking never did.”

He thrust his fingers through his red beard, and then put his hand
through Bertram’s arm, leaning on him a little heavily. It was the first
time he had ever done so, and Bertram thought it was a sign of weakness.

“No amount of talk will bring back England to its old state,” said Lord
Ottery, gravely. “Only hard work and good will, and honest government,
and wise leadership, can help towards that. The war has robbed us of our
old prosperity. We’re going to be poor. We must steel ourselves to
poverty.”

He whistled to his little white dog.

“Hi, Clincher!”

Then he asked Bertram whether he was an authority on the Black Death. He
found that subject wonderfully interesting. It threw a great deal of
light on the wage-system in the Middle Ages.

                                  XXIV

Joyce spent the rest of the morning in her Mother’s room, and Bertram
was left to amuse himself alone. It was not very amusing. He was aware
of a sense of isolation, not for the first time, in this distinguished
household. Lord Ottery, after some minutes of almost intimate
conversation, and that episode of holding on to Bertram’s arm, became
absent-minded, and then, as though dismissing a footman, gave Bertram to
understand that he wished to be left alone in the library, while he
pursued his studies on The Black Death.

Bertram strolled round the stables, where most of the stalls were empty,
though Ottery still kept a few hacks, and Alban had his hunter,
“Lightning.”

He passed a few words with the grooms, and found himself reminiscing on
the war. One of them had been with “his lordship,” meaning Alban,
Viscount Bellairs, in the Grenadier Guards, and had been hit on the same
day of July ’16 in the attack on Morval and Lesbœufs. Afterwards, for
the second time, at Fontaine Notre Dame, below Bourlon Wood, in November
of ’17. Remembered the great Tank attack in November ’20? Lord, yes!
Major Pollard was there with his machine guns? Fancy that! . . . Well,
it seemed a long time ago, and like a dream.

“Care to go through it all again?” asked Bertram.

The two men laughed, appreciating some hidden joke, not to be put into
words.

Something was said about the strike.

“Them Labour chaps ought to be mowed down by machine guns,” said one of
the men. “Dirty tykes!”

He was amazed when Bertram said he thought they had some justice on
their side. It struck him “all of a heap.” They were all bloody
Bolsheviks, begging his pardon.

Bertram himself was astonished at this point of view of men who had
fought in the War and were of the same class as those in the world of
“labour” they denounced. As he sauntered away, after a few light
remarks, he supposed they were survivals of English feudalism. Their
outlook was limited to the horizon of this old house. They belonged to
the Family. They were for the maintenance of the Old Order which paid
their wages, gave them perquisites, belonged to their tradition of
service. The War hadn’t changed their mentality much. Strange!

He strolled round to the lake, and found Alban sitting on the end of the
punt, smoking a cigarette and reading the _Sporting Times_, with his
back to the wind. He was in an old heather-green jacket and grey,
moss-stained trousers, with a cap at the back of his head, and looked
better like that, to Bertram’s yes, than in his town clothes, with white
spats and all.

“Good morning!” said Bertram, with more geniality than he quite felt,
not having much affection for his brother-in-law.

Alban glanced over the top of the _Sporting Times_, and allowed himself
to show a faint surprise.

“Hullo! Come down with Joyce?”

Assured on this point, he became absorbed again in his pink paper.

Bertram waited a little while for the condescension of another remark.
Not obtaining that favour, he strolled away again, cursing inwardly at
the incivility of his brother-in-law.

“A damned cad!” he said to himself. “An insufferable snob!”

And yet, as he had to admit to his sense of fairness, there was no
reason why Alban should have engaged in chatty conversation. He himself
resented fellows who were always “yapping.” Alban wanted to read the
_Sporting Times_. There was heaps of room in the park for Bertram.

“It’s the Irish strain in me,” thought Bertram. “I’m always suspecting
uncivil treatment when none is meant. It’s the ‘persecution’ mania. I’ll
have to check it.”

Yet, in spite of all these arguments, his moodiness was increased at the
luncheon table because of the almost complete ignoring of his presence
by Joyce and her family. Not a word was said about the sale of the
house—servants being present—and there was some general gossip, mostly
by Alban and Lady Ottery, of a social and political kind. The Prime
Minister had gone to Chequers Court for Easter, with his usual gang. The
War Office had drawn up a complete programme in case the strike led to
any rioting. General Bellasis was organising a Home Defence Corps. All
ex-officers would be asked to join.

“Doesn’t it seem unnecessary?” asked Bertram.

Alban looked at him coldly, as he might have stared at a junior
subaltern of the Guards Mess, after an impertinent remark.

“Extremely necessary,” he answered.

Lord Ottery put in a remark.

“Bellasis is coming down for the week-end, he tells me. We shall hear
all about it.”

Bertram glanced at Joyce, and wondered whether she had suggested this
visit. He detested Bellasis. Joyce seemed to be aware of his look, for
she flushed, ever so slightly, though she did not meet his eyes. She had
been crying again, he thought. Most unusual for Joyce. He felt very
sorry for her. Sitting there at the old dining-table, under the portrait
of Rupert Bellairs, fifth Earl, by Lely, it was impossible to believe
that Holme Ottery was up for sale.

How like Joyce was to that fellow! He hadn’t noticed it before. Although
Charles II’s favourite had a plump pink face, softened by long ringlets,
he had the same kind of eyes and nose as Joyce’s, with the same glint of
steel in the eyes. She sat next to her Mother, crumbling her bread and
looking thoroughly “vexed.” He had seen her in such moods of late, at
his own breakfast table, when she came down to breakfast.

Lady Ottery had given Bertram a wintery smile, and permitted him to kiss
her cheek. He felt as though he had kissed one of the marble pillars in
St. Paul’s Cathedral.

“A sharp frost last night,” she said, and as this statement didn’t call
for much of an answer, she seemed to forget his presence, and engaged
Alban in an argument on the subject of Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs, newly
published, of which she disapproved strongly.

“An outrage!” was her opinion, and she also believed they would be used
as propaganda by radicals who desired to destroy society, and delighted
in all such revelations of corruption in high places.

“It seems to me an extremely witty, harmless, and entertaining book,
Mother,” said Alban. “My only regret is that it contains such little
scandal. Think of all the things she might have written!”

“If we must have scandals, let us keep them to ourselves, my dear,” said
Lady Ottery, firmly. “In my young days we hushed up anything that might
prejudice our position in the public mind.”

“Most dishonest!” said Alban lightly.

“What do you think, Ottery?” asked Bertram’s mother-in-law.

“Entirely as you do, my dear,” said Lord Ottery, somewhat vaguely,
having been thinking, perhaps, of The Black Death.

Bertram expressed an opinion upon Mrs. Asquith’s portraits of “The
Souls.” He thought it would be quoted centuries hence as a picture of
English life in the ’eighties. His opinion did not seem to impress his
wife’s family or Joyce. There was no reply to his remark, and Alban
switched off the conversation to the character of his new terrier—a
cunning little devil with a hell of a lot of pluck.

“Doing anything special this afternoon, Joyce?” asked Bertram, towards
the end of this meal which had been a silent one for him.

“I’m talking business with Alban,” said Joyce, in a most determined
voice, as though announcing an ultimatum to Alban himself.