Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 10

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Bertram was surprised to meet Joyce’s father in the Charing Cross Road on a day when he thought his elderly relative was at Ottery Park, deep in Domesday Book, or the Manorial system of England, or the Rights of Villeinage, or some other musty historical work in which he seemed to find much interest and drama, in spite of the more exciting events of contemporary life. Bertram wouldn’t have noticed him but for the remarks of two passers-by.

“Do you know that old buffer?”

“No. Who?”

“The Earl of Ottery. You remember? Colonial Secretary before the War. The most reactionary old swine—”

Bertram was intending to take a slogging walk up to the north of London, to avoid one of Joyce’s tea-parties to Kenneth Murless and his crowd—he was not in a mood for Kenneth’s brilliant repartee—but he decided that it might be well to have a word with his father-in-law.

Lord Ottery was staring in at the window of a clothier’s shop in which a number of garments were labelled “Ready to Wear” and “Hardly Soiled.”

He was a heavy, broad-shouldered man, with a ruddy face, rather freckled round the eyes, and a reddish, unkempt beard and moustache. The professional sharper would have “spotted” him as a simple farmer up to London for the day, and an easy prey for the gold-brick story. And the sharper would have been extremely disillusioned.

“What are you doing here, sir?” asked Bertram, touching him on his arm.

Lord Ottery stared at him in a vague way for a moment, as though wondering who the deuce he might be, and then greeted him with fair geniality.

“Oh, it’s you, Bertram. Thought it might be one of those young ex-officers who want to touch one for half a sovereign. Why the devil don’t they enlist in the Black-and-Tans and knock hell out of Ireland? Far more useful than lounging about without a job to do.”

Bertram did not reveal his thoughts on that subject, which were distinctly hostile. He merely repeated his enquiry as to what brought Lord Ottery to town.

His father-in-law chuckled, and said he would reveal a secret which he didn’t want all the world to know. He was doing a little shopping to replenish his wardrobe. He had discovered that instead of paying fabulous prices to his tailor in Air Street, he could get excellent clothes, ready to wear, at exactly one-sixth the price.

He had already bought two lounge suits which fitted him like a glove, except for slight alterations needed in the back and under the arm-pits. He had also found a shop in the Tottenham Court Road where he could buy first-class boots, suitable for country wear, at a saving of two pounds on those he had been in the habit of buying at Croxteth and Trevor’s in Pall Mall.

At one time, as he admitted, he would have shuddered at the idea of wearing ready-made clothes. In the old days, away back in Queen Victoria’s reign, he had been a regular Beau Brummell, and never wore a pair of trousers twice in the same week, or a neck-tie more than once after he bought it, but now things had come to such a pass that economy was the order of the day. Besides, what did it matter? It used to be fashionable—de rigueur, even—for the French émigrés after the Revolution to wear ragged lace ruffles. With super-tax at two shillings in the pound, land tax a frightful burden, and investments paying no dividends, people like himself would be reduced to taking in each other’s washing.

He mustn’t go too far, however, in cutting down his tailor’s bill! The other day an awkward thing had happened to him. He had bought a wonderful second-hand overcoat at a Jew dealer’s in Covent Garden, astrachan collar, silk-lined, a wonderful bargain—twelve pounds, ten shillings. Dunstable would have charged him forty for it, at least. But when he was about to hang it up on his peg in the lobby of the House of Lords, old Banthorp came up and said: “Curse me blind”—everybody knows how the old ruffian swears—“if that isn’t my old overcoat! There’s the very hole I burnt with the stump of a cigar, just above the third button!”

“Of course I had to tell him I had bought it from a Jew dealer, and he laughed so much I thought he would have a stroke. But the real cream of the jest is that he was wearing a ready-made suit himself, as he afterwards admitted. It was he who put me on to that shop in the Charing Cross Road. Lots of us are doing it now.”

Bertram laughed, and enjoyed the joke as much as was possible to a young man who had not yet come down to “cast-offs,” but was unpleasantly in debt to his tailor.

“Things seem to be getting pretty bad,” he remarked.

Lord Ottery stopped in the middle of Trafalgar Square and pointed his stick towards the clock tower of Westminster.

“The trouble is there,” he said. “Those fellows in the House of Commons have sold themselves to the devil. They’re not thinking of their country, but of how to keep their jobs and their votes. Promise the people anything—the Kaiser’s head, German gold, doles for unemployed, perpetual peace, luxury for all, and no need to work. I’m afraid of the future. The Empire is getting into the hands of the Jews. Look at India! The Government is pandering to mob-law. Look at the Trade Unions! Whitehall is swarming with place-men, and England is governed by a corrupt bureaucracy. Other Empires have passed. If we don’t face realities, rule with a strong hand, cut out corruption, get the people back to work, and stamp out the spirit of revolution among the masses, we shall lose our old place in the world. I shan’t live to see it, thank God. You may.”

Bertram glanced sideways at him as he passed sturdily down Whitehall, touching his broad-brimmed, badly brushed, silk hat to passers-by who saluted him. It seemed to Bertram that his father-in-law was a type of old England that was passing. The war had thrown up new men, more liberal in ideas, perhaps, at least less bound to old traditions, of nimbler mind, quicker to adapt themselves to new conditions; not so rooted in the soil of England, not so faithful to the old code of honour, not lifted above political temptation like those men of the old nobility, not so stupid and conservative, but not so strong and straight in their sense of duty, however wrong. They had served England well in the past.

“I’m a weakling to this man,” thought Bertram. “I’m pulled two ways, by old tradition and by new ideals. I haven’t the faith of either. I’m a rebel against the old caste, but doubtful of democracy. I hedge. I’m a blighted hedger. But he stands fast on his own side of the hedge, and will stand there, squarely, until something breaks through and finishes his type for ever. How soon will it be before something breaks through?”

Ottery seemed to answer his thoughts.

“Our day is done. I mean the day of the old quality of England. A little man in there, speaking the language of Billingsgate and Limehouse”—he pointed again to Big Ben—“began the invasion of our rights, led the great attack. The War and its costs have finished us. Profiteers are buying up the old estates. We can’t afford ’em. We’ve been hit too hard by taxes and death duties. Look at Holme Ottery. Why, it’s bleeding me to death, though I’m letting it go to rack and ruin.”

He sighed heavily, and changed the conversation.

“How’s Joyce?”

Bertram gave a good account of her, making no reference to anxieties in his own heart, private, secret things which disturbed him horribly—some change that had come over her after the death of the baby, a dislike of his caresses, a feverish desire for pleasure, a kind of hostility towards him because of certain ideas of his about silly political questions—Ireland!—and the rights of workingmen to a living wage. What absurd cause of quarrel between husband and wife! But, for the moment, anything seemed to serve as a cause of jangle between him and Joyce. It was her health, poor kid, and his aimlessness in life.

He suddenly blurted out his desire for a “job” to Lord Ottery.

“I’m one of those ex-officers you spoke about, sir! I must get a decent billet of some kind, for Joyce’s sake. Can you put me in the way of anything?”

Lord Ottery stared at him vaguely, as though he were a long way off. He always put on that look when asked for anything.

“Eh? Put you in the way of anything? Why don’t you join the Black-and-Tans? Knock hell out of those Irish blackguards!”

Bertram laughed, awkwardly.

“I’m sick of war. Besides, it doesn’t mean much pay. Not enough to help Joyce with her house in Holland Street. I want to keep my end up.”

Lord Ottery halted at the entrance to the House of Lords, touching his old hat to the policeman at the gate who saluted smartly.

“Why not go into business?” he said, as though “Business” were an open gate, easy to enter. “People are doing it now, I’m told.”

He nodded to Bertram and then ambled into the courtyard of the Palace of Westminster.

“A social pull!” thought Bertram. “The old ruffian wouldn’t lift a little finger for me!”