Speech by Mr. Michael Pollard, K.C.:
Defends Government Policy of Reprisals.”
Bertram crushed the paper in his hands, and dropped it on the seat by his side. It was his father’s field night. He would enjoy himself vastly upholding the “absolute necessity of putting down these murders with the firm hand of British Justice,” appealing to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, denouncing those who would treat with rebels to the Crown and “shake hands with murder.”
Well, it would keep the governor late at the House. That was the only comfort. He would be able to see his mother alone, and avoid a savage altercation with his father, who treated him as a traitor to the British Empire—Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C., who had been three times wounded in the Great War, and loved England with a kind of passion.
“Mother!”
She met him in the hall of the house in Sloane Street, and at the sight of her little figure and sad face, his jangled nerves, so tautly drawn during Joyce’s long ordeal, gave a kind of snap, and when he put his arms round her he dropped his forehead on to her shoulder, and his eyes filled with tears, as in the old days when he came home from school, or left her after the holidays.
“My poor boy!” she said soothingly, “I understand. … I’m sorry about the poor little baby.”
She took him by the hand into her small sitting-room and asked him to tell her all the details of his ordeal.
“Joyce’s ordeal, mother!” he said, but she shook her head, and said, “It’s worse for the men, if they’re sensitive. The agony of waiting—”
There were many things he wanted to tell his mother, this little woman with her thin grey hair, and her worn face and kind brown eyes, to whom, as a boy, he had told all his secrets, confessed all his peccadilloes, and had no worse reproof than “Oh, darling!” She had spoilt him as she had spoilt all of them, Dorothy, Susan, young Digby, and himself, shielding them from their father’s harsh and hasty temper, his Irish impatience, his old-fashioned Protestant intolerance—he was Southern Irish, but Protestant—with any license of youth. She had even told “fibs” to shield them, and they had loved her for it, and traded abominably on her fear of “the governor” and his sudden rages.
She was more afraid of him than they had ever been. Even as small children they had defied his authority. Dorothy had been the greatest rebel, long before her marriage to a Prussian officer whom she had met at Wiesbaden, in 1912, when already there was a whisper of war with Germany—pooh-poohed by Dorothy, as by many others who knew nothing in those days about international politics, and cared less. That was her last rebellion. Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P., had wiped his daughter out of his mind and heart. He hated “the Hun” worse because of her.
And Susan! … She took a pleasure in braving his wrath—“our Ogre,” as she called him. She never tired of maintaining her right to breakfast in bed, which he denounced as “the slummocky instinct of her wild Irish blood.”
“Your blood too, father, and no fault of mine!” was her answer to that particular argument, to which “the governor” would answer, “Thank God the Norman strain is stronger than the Celtic, as far as I’m concerned.” She had ridiculed his Protestant austerity, flouted his parental commands as “Early Victorian tyranny,” and had become a Suffragette with a joyous assertion of “liberty” which meant for her late dances and no questions, rather than Votes for Women, at a time when Michael Pollard, M.P. (not K.C. then) was a violent antagonist of Women’s Rights.
Bertram had taken Susan’s part in these domestic scenes, but Dorothy had been his favourite sister, his best comrade, and her German marriage, and long exile and silence during the years of war had made a gap in his heart.
He spoke of her now.
“Have you heard from Doll lately?”
Mrs. Pollard looked nervously at the door and pulled out some letters from a little bag by her side.
“Your father doesn’t know I hear from her. You know he forbade all intercourse.”
“Rubbish!” said Bertram.
His mother confessed to a sense of guilt in having this secret from her husband, but it was more than she could bear to be cut off for ever from her first-born.
“She writes lovingly. Her marriage—and the War—have made no difference, except that she defends Germany a little.”
Bertram smiled at that, and said, “I suppose it is natural, but it takes a lot of doing, as far as the war’s concerned.” He asked about his other sister.
“What’s Susan’s latest game?”
Mrs. Pollard looked distressed. Again she gave that frightened glance at the door, as though her husband might come in at any moment.
“I’m afraid, Bertram! The child is devoted to the Sinn Fein cause! It’s a passion with her, like Votes for Women used to be. Your father threatens to turn her out of doors if she says another word on the subject. There was a dreadful scene yesterday morning.”
Bertram could imagine it. Susan delighted in dreadful scenes. She was an Irish rose, with many thorns, sharply pointed. No Norman coldness in her blood! None of her mother’s Devonshire softness.
Mrs. Pollard revealed more than an ordinary anxiety.
“I’m afraid Susan will get into trouble. There was a policeman here a few days ago.”
“A policeman? Sounds like melodrama!”
“He wanted Susan to give him the address of a young Irishman named Dennis O’Brien. Susan denied all knowledge of him, but I know she has been corresponding with the boy.”
Bertram said, “My God!” and then begged his mother’s pardon. He hid from her his own reason for alarm. He knew Dennis O’Brien. The boy had been in the machine-gun corps with him, and he had heard news of him from Ireland. It was not news to be talked of lightly. He was up to the neck in Sinn Fein.
“Where’s Susan now?” he asked abruptly.
Mrs. Pollard’s hands fluttered up to her forehead.
“Do I ever know? Modern mothers aren’t taken into their daughters’ confidence. They come and go as they please, and resent all questioning. It wasn’t so in my young days.”
Bertram smiled at the last words. How often he had heard them! How often he and the two girls—rebels three—had laughed at them, years back, as children. His brother Digby, now a “Black and Tan” in Ireland—horrible thought!—had been too young to enjoy the joke.
He lingered on, forgetting Joyce a little, and his dead baby, feeling a boy again with this mother whose love was restful, and all-understanding. They talked of old times, and she wept a little because so much was altering and she felt so much alone, now that Digby, her baby boy, had gone to Ireland in the midst of all that terror.
She made no allusion to Joyce’s share in her loneliness. Joyce did not seem to like her much and kept Bertram away from her more than was quite kind.
Bertram guessed her thoughts.
“When Joyce gets better, we’ll see more of you, mother.”
“That will be nice, dear,” she answered quietly, but not hopefully.
He left her before midnight, and was back again in Holland Street before the Houses of Parliament had finished a long debate on the Irish situation.
He saw by next day’s papers that his father’s speech was reported verbatim, but he didn’t read it.
V
Joyce was slow in