Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 14

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Joyce was perplexing to Bertram after that midnight scene with Susan and Dennis. He had expected a painful quarrel on the subject, a denunciation by Joyce of his behaviour, a defence on his part, an argument beginning with generalities and ending with personalities, always dangerous between a young husband and wife, both inclined to passionate temper. But Joyce declined to discuss the matter. She had stayed late in bed next day, and had come down to luncheon with her wrist bound up. He did not understand the cause of that bandage until he enquired and received the answer:

“You nearly broke my wrist over the telephone last night. Perhaps you’re not aware of the violence you used.”

No, he was unaware of it, and made abject apology, horribly ashamed that he should have used physical force to his wife. It was a coster’s way of argument.

“Joyce! I’m immensely sorry and ashamed. But you see my difficulty last night. I had given my word—”

“I refuse to discuss the affair,” said Joyce. “You know my views. If you say another word about it I’ll leave the house.”

That was that. She was not even curious to know whether O’Brien had spent the night in Bertram’s study. Perhaps she had enquired from the maids and had satisfied herself on that point. Yet Bertram was certain that the incident was not regarded as trivial in her mind, and that it had caused something like estrangement between them. She went her own way, deliberately shutting him out of her plans, or, at least, not consulting him, nor giving him a chance of joining her. She was rarely at home to luncheon during the few weeks that followed Susan’s visit, and generally returned only in time to dress for dinner. Even then he had no chance of private conversation, for she invited friends to dine night after night—was it with the deliberate intention of avoiding intimate contact with him?—and afterwards filled her drawing-room with a miscellaneous crowd, or went out with a party to the theatre or the dancing clubs.

Bertram was lonely whether she stayed at home or not. He was beginning to feel lonely in body and soul. Joyce answered him when he spoke to her, but no more than that. She was quite gay at times—nearly always—but it was not into his eyes that she laughed.

Kenneth Murless used the house as his own, “dropped in” for dinner, or after dinner, always civil to Bertram, never disconcerted by Bertram’s sulky manner, always bright and paradoxical, and entertaining to everybody but Joyce’s husband, who hated him—for no reason but that Joyce liked him.

There were other men whom Joyce liked, and who liked to be liked by Joyce. The Reverend Peter Fynde, who came from the church round the corner, was what Bertram called a “parlour cat,” and came purring round to tea, or at nine-thirty, after “Evensong,” with gossipy anecdotes about Lady This and Lady That, and soulful sayings about the “Healing Power of Faith,” the “Beauty of the Unattainable,” and communication with the “Dear Remembered Dead.” At dinner, when the ladies had left the table, he was inclined to tell somewhat Rabelaisian stories, drawn from his experience as an army chaplain. “A human fellow,” was the general verdict about him, “a perfect dear” by the women. Bertram thought him a perfect ass, but did not tell them so.

He had nothing in common with the people who gathered round Joyce. They irritated him. Listening to their conversation, he found their point of view “poisonous,” if not idiotic. It was at least—and he wanted to be fair—hopelessly reactionary. They still had a habit of talking about the people of England as “the mob” or “the masses,” and they spoke about “Labour” as if it were a sinister, evil, destructive monster, and not a class of men, quite human, for the most part rather decent, many of them the real heroes of the war—keen to earn a living wage, desperately anxious not to be forced back to the edge of the poverty line, or over the edge. Millions of Bill Huggetts, and better men than Bill—rather neurotic, always a “grouser”—but not out for blood and terror, or anything beyond food and shelter for a family left on his hands by a poor mad wife.

Labour? Bertram had been going about London getting into touch with some of the men of his old company—“Comrades of the Great War,” as they called themselves, in barely furnished clubs where they gathered at night, because of their craving for the comradeship which had been the best thing in war. They were still restless and unsettled. Some of them were still hardly better than “shell-shocks.” Their minds were groping towards some solution of their present distress—unemployment, high prices, a sense of broken faith with them by the nation they had served. Some of them talked glibly, as Huggett had said, about Bolshevism and Communism. The frightful experiment in Russia—what was the truth of it?—held some lure for them. There were some who believed “it would do London a bit o’ good.”

Bertram didn’t believe there was much of a real revolutionary spirit among them. They were sick of war and bloodshed, and the “crime wave,” as the newspapers called it, was only the work of a small minority of young men unhinged by the cheapness of life in war, and by war’s brutality. Bertram marvelled rather at the patience, the essential patriotism, the commonsense of the majority of men he met about. Any hankering after the Russian way of revolution was but a vague vision of some system of society which would give men greater equality of luck, and a sense of security.

That was not the opinion of the people in Joyce’s drawing-room. They confessed to fear about the future. It was, perhaps, the presence of two Russian girls of the old régime, and some of the men they brought with them of their own caste and country, which suggested the possibility of revolution in England. They were never tired of telling tales of Bolshevik atrocities, none of them from first-hand evidence, but likely enough, and dreadful in detail. The elder of them, the Countess Gradiva—Lydia, as Joyce called her—had set up a hat shop in Mount Street, Mayfair, where Joyce had met her and made friends. The younger—Paula—played the violin, wonderfully, at recitals and concerts. They were both tall, ugly, elegant girls, speaking half a dozen languages with equal facility and passionate gesture.

“Why doesn’t England send an army and rescue my poor country from its tyrants?” asked Lydia one night of Bertram. “I cannot understand your English policy, your dreadful inactivity.”

Bertram had heard many remarks of the same kind by the Russian girls. They enraged him.

“Why don’t your Russian men do a bit of their own fighting? Why do they lounge about the capitals of Europe, and expect other people to liberate Russia and restore Czardom, and get back their wealth?”

“You’re a Bolshevik, then?” asked Countess Gradiva, staring at him with black, challenging eyes.

“Not in the least,” said Bertram. “But I’m dead against these fatal expeditions in which England has poured out gold she can ill afford—with what result? More bloodshed in Russia. Another disastrous retreat of incompetent generals, more suffering and horror, and harryings of poor Russian peasants. That’s how it seems to me. I may be wrong.”

The Countess Gradiva called out across the drawing-room, which was crowded with Joyce’s friends. She had a high, harsh way of speaking, and a shrill laugh.

“My dear Lady Joyce! Your husband is a naughty bad Bolshevik! He’s saying the most dreadful things, ma chérie!”

“He makes a habit of it,” answered Joyce.

Bertram flushed angrily at her retort, though Joyce had spoken with a smile. He knew by the tone of her voice that she intended to hurt him, and it hurt.

“I tell the truth, occasionally, and that’s dreadful, I admit,” he said to Lydia Gradiva.

“Not the truth about Russia, you wicked man. You do not know our poor Russia!”

“I would go even as far as Russia, to get the truth,” said Bertram. “Does anybody know?”

“You mean I lie to you?”

“There are many lies about,” said Bertram, “but I’m not referring to you, especially.”

She whipped his hand with the end of a long necklace of amber beads, so that they stung him. Then she called him a revolutionary monster, a Jacobin.

“I can see you leading the English mob and hoisting the Red Flag over the House of Commons!”

The English “mob!” There it was again. Always the talk came round to the chance of an English revolution. Those people were afraid—even of England!

It was General Bellasis who revealed a new cause of fear which took hold of the imagination of London society at this time. Bellasis was one of the men who liked to be liked by Joyce. He was still on active service—in Ireland—but seemed to spend his time travelling between Dublin and Whitehall, and always came to Holland Street with flowers for Joyce, theatre tickets for Joyce, and homage in his eyes. He looked more gallant than any hero could be—at all times—in his uniform with many decorations—a tall, lean fellow, with a hard, clean cut face, blue, sailor-looking eyes, and an empty sleeve where his left arm used to be. But he confessed that he was suffering from blue funk (he exaggerated his symptoms) because of an incident that had happened to him in St. James’s Street, outside the club, that very afternoon. A wretched-looking fellow had come up to him, offering to sell some bootlaces. “Thanks, no,” said Bellasis. The man had followed him, whining something about a wife and children, and thrusting the bootlaces under his nose. “I’ve said I don’t want ’em,” said Bellasis, as he related. “Get off with you, my man.” He had not spoken roughly, though he disapproved of begging, especially when every out-of-work was getting a Government dole. But then the man had pulled something out of his pocket and given it to Bellasis, saying, “Well, take that for luck!” Bellasis supposed the company could guess what it was.

Kenneth Murless guessed right, first time.

“The silver slipper!”

“Yes,” said General Bellasis, “the silver slipper! And I can tell you, I don’t like it!”

The Reverend Peter Fynde claimed that he had been given one at Ranelagh, three weeks before. Exactly in the same way. He had refused an importunate beggar and received the slipper “for luck.”

Kenneth Murless took precedence of Fynde, in point of time. It was two months at least since he had been given the slipper. That was outside the Carlton. A typical incident. A paper boy had tried to make him buy his last copy of The Pall Mall Gazette. Murless had seen it already, read every line of it. The boy had persisted until Murless had told him to run away or he would get a box on the ears. “Take this for luck!” said the boy. So he had the sign of the slipper.

“Has everybody gone mad?” asked Bertram. “The silver slipper! The sign of the slipper! What on earth are you all talking about?”

It was Murless who explained, in his best diplomatic style, after expressing surprise that Bertram should not have heard of the sinister thing. It appeared that in the time of the French Revolution, secret agents of the Free masons and Jacobin clubs presented silver slippers to people whom they particularly disliked. It was not a good thing to get one. Most of those who did perished on the guillotine. “C’est l’histoire qui se répète, mon vieux!” Kenneth Murless spoke lightly, with a smile, but there was a hint of fear in his voice, and in the room silence for a moment, after he had spoken.

Bertram laughed loudly and harshly.

“Of all the old wives’ tales! And you highly educated and extremely modern people believe such stuff as that!”

Joyce lit a cigarette, and puffed out a little wreath of smoke, daintily.

“I hate to tell you I’ve had the silver slipper! But if the worst comes to the worst, I hope I’ll go scornfully to death!”

Bertram looked at her, and though he did not believe the ridiculous explanation of the silver slipper, he could not resist a tribute of admiration in his eyes. Joyce had more pluck than any man in the crowd. If the impossible happened, she would go “scornfully to death!” With patrician pride. She read his thoughts, and a wave of colour rose to her forehead, and for a moment her eyes softened to him. Then she turned away, with a word about the boredom of the subject.

“Why not some Ouija board?” she asked. “Peter, you’re a wonder with the spirit world!”

It was the Reverend Peter Fynde who took the centre of the room. He hoped that if they experimented a little it would be with reverence. He deprecated the frivolous way in which some people approached the world beyond the veil, as so many were doing it in society now.

Bertram groaned.

“I call it blasphemy. To me, there’s something horrible and indecent in this attempt to ‘call up’ the dead.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said Joyce. “The other day we were in touch with Hal and Dudy. They spoke as they used to—the old home slang. One could not doubt.”

“It was all being drawn from your subconscious mind, Joyce. But I object to the whole business. It’s unhealthy. It’s rotten and decadent.”

“You needn’t stay,” said Joyce.

Bertram did not stay. After his altercation with the Reverend Peter, he went out to see some of his own friends, whose ideas he liked better than those of Joyce’s crowd, whose point of view was more like his own than Joyce’s.

Alas, for that! Alas, for many things. How was it going to work out between him and Joyce? Were they drifting apart? Were they going to add one more to all those broken marriages which had become an epidemic in English life, after the War? No, by God, not that! It was only the inevitable strain of early marriage. They would have to readjust themselves a little. More patience on his side. More understanding on hers. Tolerance. Give and take. Politics barred. Religion barred. A sense of humour. Success. Yes, if his book succeeded and he could establish a literary career, paying his Scot and lot, it would make a deal of difference. Joyce would be proud of him, and the book would help her to understand his point of view. Thank Heaven for the book! It kept him busy. It gave him an object in life. It was the expression of the truth that was in him. It was a cure for loneliness. … Oh, the curse of loneliness!