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,