for The Times—Joyce’s friends would want to know—and then, for hours, sat brooding until he fell asleep, and was only wakened by the “Lor’, sir!” of the parlourmaid, Edith, who came in to tidy his room. She was very sorry for him, and said so in her chatty way.
III
It was the nurse who told him how to arrange for the child’s burial, and he went round to an undertaker’s in Church Street, Kensington, jostled by smart women, very bright at their morning’s shopping so that he hated them. The undertaker’s clerk was respectful but surprised when Bertram explained his errand.
“It’s not usual, sir, to have a funeral for a still-born infant.”
“What then?” asked Bertram.
The man coughed.
“As a rule we just fetch them away.”
“Damn it!” said Bertram, with astonishing violence, “I want you to arrange a funeral.”
He arranged for an oak coffin with a brass plate, on which the name “Bertram Pollard” was to be inscribed.
Before the little coffin was closed, Bertram carried it into Joyce’s room, according to a wish she had whispered to the nurse. It was like a toy coffin with a doll inside. Joyce’s eyes filled with tears but she turned her head away and did not speak a word.
“My dear! My dear!” said Bertram. Although he had walked with death so long he was distressed beyond all words by this little corpse. His own name on the coffin startled him when he first saw it. It seemed symbolical of something that had died in himself, his spirit of youth; his hope.
“If I were you, I’d get about a bit and see your friends,” said the nurse, as they sat together in the carriage with the coffin on Bertram’s knee.
She was a nice human soul, who had been a nurse in the War and had learnt pity for men.
“Most of my real pals are killed,” said Bertram.
The nurse laughed, not heartlessly but to cheer him up.
“See those who are still alive. It’s no use brooding. Carry on!”
It was the old rallying word of the War. It had some effect on Bertram even now. He straightened up.
“I wish I could get a job, nurse!”
“We want another nice little war,” she answered.
He looked at her sideways.
“Do you mean that?”
She smiled back at him.
“You know you’ve thought so, sometimes! So have I. War’s hell, of course. But there was something about it—”
“It’s the impulse that’s gone,” said Bertram. “There doesn’t seem to be any kind of purpose—”
“Love, life, work,” said the nurse.
Bertram said, “Yes. Yes, of course!” and then, “I can’t get the hang of things, quite. I’m just floundering, aimless. And anyhow, there’s no work for my type. I was all right with machine guns. They’re not wanted now.”
“Men are wanted, and always will be,” said the nurse. “Proper men, like you.”
That cheered him. He said no more until the tiny coffin was lowered into the earth and the nurse and he were on their way back.
“Nurse,” he said, “I’ll get a job if I die for it.”
“Get a job and live for it,” answered the nurse. “Here’s luck!”
IV
Joyce was sleeping—“as sound as a bell,” said the nurse. Bertram had finished his dinner alone, hating his loneliness, and the deliberately cheerful way in which he had to answer the chatty remarks of Edith, the maid, who waited on him with a sense of drama in the house, and a desire to express comradeship. In his heart, though he liked the girl, he wished her at the devil, because of his fretted nerves, and refused a second serve of fruit jelly with an impatience which he tried to disguise by a “Thank you very much, Edith. Nothing more—for goodness’ sake!” Then he went into his study, shut the door, and tried to settle down at his desk to some writing. He had no concentration of mind. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece annoyed him desperately. It had been playing tattoos in his brain during those hours when its fast little ticking seemed to be hurrying Joyce’s life away. Well, she was all right now, thank God, unless the nurse and doctor were lying to him. He went over to the mantelpiece, took up Joyce’s photograph, and kissed it. He would try to be less irritable and get a grip on that absurd temper of his. Then he swore softly because the telephone bell rang again. That was about the tenth time in the last hour. Joyce’s friends desired to know how she was getting on. Why the deuce didn’t they have the decency to leave him alone, and to leave the telephone alone, at such a time?
“Is that Mr. Pollard? Oh, forgive me, but can you tell me how dear Joyce is getting on?”
That was the usual way of putting it. His answers were brief. “Quite well, thanks!” then a slam down with the receiver. He wasn’t going to give them any details.
A man’s voice had spoken to him on the ’phone. “That you, Bertram? … Oh, I’m Kenneth Murless. How’s Joyce?”
What right had Kenneth to ask such a question at such a time? It was like his impertinence! … And yet, somehow, because of Joyce, who liked Kenneth, he felt constrained to give a civil answer.
“Getting on well.”
“Give her my love, old man,” said Kenneth’s voice on the wire; “say I’m frightfully sorry about her loss.”
His love! Bertram’s face flushed deeply as he stood by the plaguey instrument. That was going a bit too far!
“I’m afraid she’s not well enough to get anybody’s love just yet,” he said icily.
“All my sympathy to you, old man,” answered Kenneth.
This time Bertram had slammed down the receiver. He had no desire whatever for Kenneth’s sympathy. He wished the fellow would get his Grecian nose down to his job at the Foreign Office and keep it there. Otherwise it might be in danger of getting broken one day.
That last ring he had answered took the frown off his forehead after he had listened to the first words over the wire.
“Oh, is that you, mother? Yes, Joyce seems out of danger now. … Come round? … Well, is the governor at the House to-night? … The Irish debate? Oh, yes, I forgot that monstrous farce. All right. I’ll come, then.”
He remembered there were other tragedies in life besides his own, more death than that of his still-born child when he bought an evening paper at the Underground station in the High Street, Kensington, on his way to his father’s house in Sloane Street.
“Six deaths in Dublin to-day. Serious Ambush. More reprisals.”
Those were the headings on the front page, and he felt sick at the words, and wouldn’t read the details. The same thing as usual. British officers fired at and killed by boys in civilian clothes. Young Irishmen dragged out of their beds and shot in cold blood by “unknown men, said to be in uniform.” Irish homes burnt by the military. Raids, bomb outrages, searches—the usual daily record of anarchy in Ireland which was becoming intolerable in his soul because of his divided allegiance as half an Irishman and half an Englishman, half a democrat and half a