second part of his speech had been clearly dishonest. It was not Joyce’s head-ache he was worrying about—she seemed to have forgotten that—but his own jealousy, his hatred of this public possession of Joyce’s room.
Of course she hadn’t taken his explosion meekly.
“My dear Bertram,” she’d said, in her pretty mocking way, “if you don’t feel like a gentleman this afternoon, go and walk till you do. Anyhow, don’t interrupt Kenneth’s amusing story!”
Kenneth and the rest had laughed heartily. Bertram’s desire for them to “clear out” seemed to them a delicious joke. It was he who cleared out, and later came back, when they’d gone, in a rattled temper, to say things to Joyce for which now he could have bitten out his tongue. She hadn’t quarrelled. She’d been cool and smiling and sarcastic.
“My dear Bertram, surely you don’t think marriage has given you the prerogative of tyranny? That’s gone out of date. My love for you doesn’t give you the right to insult my friends. Why you should get jealous and fussed because I receive them in my bedroom—look at all these bedclothes and this heavy quilt!—I can’t understand. I never heard anything so narrow-minded, so suburban! In any case, don’t be disloyal to form. Our crowd doesn’t behave like that.”
“Our crowd!” Bertram had said bitterly. “I wish the whole crowd would go and drown themselves. I want you alone, to myself. You let these blighters into your bedroom, let them kiss your hand, but if I show any kind of emotion for you, you shrink from me. When I want to kiss you, as I always want to, you say I’m too ‘beastly emotional’!”
“You must admit you are, Bertram!” Joyce had said. “I can’t stand too much of it. It bores me. I prefer intelligent conversation, comradeship, laughter. What’s wrong with that?”
“Marriage means more than that,” he’d said gloomily, and then had made abject apologies for his sulkiness, and had gone down on both knees by her bedside, so that she had forgiven him, and tousled his hair with playful fingers. But there had been other quarrels of the kind, worse than that.
He was “nervy,” he knew that. The War had left him all on edge. He was irritable with small things, the loss of a collar-stud, the slackness of a servant, the continual tinkle of the telephone bell—Joyce’s friends suggesting some new “stunt.” Some secret warfare was going on inside his brain, loosening his hold on old beliefs, and disturbing old checks and balances of mind, old loyalties of tradition. If he’d had some work to do, it would have been easier, but England had two million unemployed, and thousands of ex-officers like himself were wearing their boots out to find a living wage.
Joyce had been horribly distressed when she knew that a child was coming. All the tenderness which had overwhelmed him at that news failed to reconcile her to the idea, though she hid some fear that was in her. It was the inactivity forced upon her at the end which hurt her most; that and her loss of beauty for a time. “No more dances!” she had cried. “No more flying stunts at Hendon. Oh, Bertram, what a colossal bore!”
He had been angry with her again (and now cursed himself for that temper) because she’d insisted upon still retaining her crowd of friends about her to the last. She’d made no secret of her condition, even to Kenneth Murless, and Bertram had resented that candour with painful jealousy, shrinking from the thought that any one but himself should be in possession of their sacred secret.
“It’s frightful!” he’d said. “It’s like exposing yourself in the market-place.”
“You’re ridiculous!” Joyce had answered. “Anybody would think you’d been brought up at—Peckham. In the early Victorian era. Do you think people don’t know?”
“Yes—but to talk about it to Kenneth Murless! That decadent waster!”
“A good friend of mine, whom I met long before I knew you.” So Joyce had said, calmly and cruelly.
He had been violently angry. … How could he ever forgive himself for such brutality now that Joyce lay upstairs, between life and death! Lord! … Lord! …
The supreme moment of fear came when for more than the twentieth time he listened at the door of his study, and heard again the horrible silence upstairs, following those still more dreadful sounds of the activity of strangers busy with his wife. Did this silence mean death? He asked the question between two frightful heart-beats. Then the door opened at the top of the landing and there was the rustle again of the nurse’s starched dress coming downstairs. Bertram went into his room and faced round as the woman came in after a tap at the door. It was the verdict of life or death.
“Is she all right?” he asked, failing to steady his voice.
The nurse seemed to be pitiful of his agony. His white face and haggard eyes were like those of many men she’d seen at such a time.
“Your wife’s all right,” she said; “no danger now!” She hesitated a moment, and then added nervously:
“The baby was still-born. I’m sorry.”
She left the room again, and didn’t see Bertram Pollard go to the mantelpiece and put his face down on his arms.
II
The child was a boy. It had perfect features, like a miniature Joyce, but after a glance and a whimpering cry, she wouldn’t look at it again. Bertram knelt by his wife’s bedside, trying to hide the wetness of his eyes. She put her thin fingers through his hair and caressed him, but after a short time said, “You worry me, rather,” so that the nurse signalled to him to go away.
Bertram had felt an immense sense of relief at the sight of Joyce lying at peace after her ordeal. She was faintly flushed, and had all her beauty back, with a youthful, almost boyish look, touched by the character of her “bobbed” hair.
He turned at the door and glanced back at her, and when she opened her eyes again he kissed his hand to her with all his heart in that gesture of love, but she shut her eyes without response.
During his first reaction to the knowledge that Joyce was safe he had not worried over the death of the baby, except for Joyce’s sake. It was only later that he began to think of the child. Something of himself lay dead in that cradle in the dressing-room to which it had been carried by the nurse. If it had lived—
His imagination wandered through the years ahead. There would have been a companion for him, a little pal. He would have taught the boy to ride, to play games, to face up to life, to be a gentleman. Not a snob! No, he would have taught him to be tolerant, and “democratic” in old Christy’s way, with understanding of folk in the mean streets of life. He could have told that son of his something of the men he had commanded in the war, those Cockney fellows who had been all nerves and all pluck with a wonderful sense of humour. His son! … Young Bertram! … How fine that would have been! Life would have been less lonely—and, Lord! how lonely it had been with Joyce upstairs, and a nurse in the house, and the two maids whispering about the passages while he sat alone in his “study” with nothing in the world to study except his introspective thoughts! …
That night he went on tip-toe to the dressing-room, turned up the electric light, and drew back the coverlet from the face of the still-born child. His son! What a queer mite! Like a wax doll, with something of Joyce’s look, and something, perhaps, of his own. He kissed the tiny dead face, and then drew back sharply because of its coldness. Not that he was afraid of death. He had seen many men die, and dead. But this little thing was Joyce’s babe. That was piteous! After all her suffering! Oh, God! … Was it for the best? Had God been kind? There was something in life now which seemed to spoil things. Some trouble seemed to be brewing for further tragedy. That was what old Christy thought. The old foundations were slipping away. The War had shaken them too much. The next generation might have to go through worse things than their fathers. Fathers who had been