Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 16

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That lady, Janet—Janet Rockingham Welford, as her name was given in full on the title pages of several novels and below the columns of articles in The New World—was an old friend of Bertram’s. Not old herself, for she was on the vital side of thirty, but they had played together and pulled each other’s hair at a kindergarten in the Cromwell Road, read fairy tales together under the trees in Kensington Gardens, and, years later, had met each other at “parties” in the wonderful remote days before the War—was it a thousand years ago, or in another life. After that they had not met until, surprisingly, one night, in Christy’s rooms.

While Bertram had been in the trenches, Janet had been at Boulogne, with more buttons to her uniform than Bertram could boast, driving ambulances and maimed men from the railway to the “clearing stations,” after a wild three months with a convoy in Belgium, when she was often under fire in Dixmude and Pervyse, more reckless of danger than the Belgian officers and English stretcher-bearers.

Now she was living in a little flat in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea Park, writing audacious fiction (Bertram blushed when reading it), pacifist articles (rather too bitter!), and occasional verse—very mystical—for evening newspapers. She also found time to play the companion and guide to blinded soldiers in Regent’s Park, to act as secretary of a Socialist club, to speak at Labour meetings, to give evenings at home to young men and women of advanced views, and to call on Christy for inspiration, advice, and intellectual refreshment.

She was what she called “decidedly Left but not extreme.” Bertram, after some conversational enquiries and experiences, found her so extreme that he could see no further way “Left” than instant and bloody onslaught against established order. Her political, social and moral views made him feel that his hair was rising on his scalp. She frightened him. She also attracted him by an irresistible gaiety and audacity—by an overflowing good nature and joy of life.

The first time he’d met her in Christy’s rooms, she had come in like a gust of south wind, calling Christy absurd, newly-invented names because he had failed to come to one of her “receptions.”

“You reptilian, hypersensitive Bohunk! You self-absorbed, psychoanalytical Pumpdoodlum!”

Then she had seen Bertram, with an instant recognition met by a slow-dawning remembrance in his mind. Those big, brown eyes, that short, straight nose, that whimsical, biggish mouth—in what former life had he seen this girl, kissed her, if he remembered well, pulled that mass of coiled hair, not coiled so neatly then?—Why, yes, Janet Welford!

She made a dart at him and seized him by a coat lapel.

“Bertram Pollard, by all that’s romantic! My boy lover of Cromwell Road! My dream knight of Kensington! He whom first I kissed, and would gladly do again, but for maidenly modesty and Luke Christy! Lord, how my little heart throbs within this silken bodice!”

Of course he was utterly embarrassed, shy as a schoolboy, red-faced as a cut beetroot.

“Don’t mind me,” said Christy. “Only I ought to warn you that Bertram’s a married man. And his wife’s a real lady.”

“That makes the operation safer and more delicate,” said Janet Welford. “Bertram, for old time’s sake? To catch again the fleeting impress of youth’s delight? How say you?”

She offered him her cheek. The invitation could not be refused without default of chivalry, but he was awkward and restrained in his salute.

Janet Welford rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand and said, “Quelle violence! Qu’il est féroce, cet Anglais, et formidable!”

She sat on the arm of the old leather chair, and put her arm round Christy’s neck and her cheek against his cheek, and called him a beautiful pterodactyl, and a most wise old plesiosaurus.

“Don’t you come vamping me too recklessly,” growled Christy, with mock resentment. “I may be ugly, but I’m human.”

“You’re impregnable in virtue,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “Alas for amorous womanhood in a world of surplus women!”

She sighed deeply, and then pulled Christy’s ears, left the arm of his chair, and sat demurely opposite Bertram.

“Tell me,” she asked, “are you one of Us?”

Bertram enquired in what way, and she explained she meant the Only Way, the Far, Far, Better Way. Was he one of those who had turned their back on an old and wicked world, full of old and wicked men (and women) and marched forward with youth to the New World of equality, brotherhood and universal peace?

It was Christy who murmured with a grin:

“Pollard’s groping towards the light.”

“Let me take him by the hand,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “I’ll lead him into such a blaze of light that his young soul will be dazzled. He will see the vision of the glory of light and the bright coloured garments of radiant humanity. … Will you come, my friend?”

“Is it far to walk?” asked Bertram, “or must I take a ’bus?”

She told him that it was no further than the Charing Cross Road, over a bookshop, on Tuesday and Friday evenings, at the club meetings of the “Left Wing.” She was secretary, and would make him a probationary member. Fee, two shillings and sixpence. Including coffee.

She made other enquiries as to his political and philosophical mentality, and found him doubtful. She diagnosed him as a case of psychic suppression, with a political complex. His instincts, she thought, were healthy, but his opinions idiotic. If he would leave himself entirely in her hands, with placid faith, she would undertake to root up his inherited and developed prejudices, and turn him out a fresh young soul of the Left Wing, eager for exalted flight.

“Your marriage, Bertram dear?” she enquired presently; “are you fretting at the yoke, or have you acquired that technique which makes it possible for two human beings to dwell under the same roof-tree, day after day, even week after week, without agony of boredom and a nerve strain beyond endurance? Tell me frankly. I can help you.”

Bertram flushed to the roots of his hair, said “Hang it all!” and then laughed heartily. Janet Rockingham Welford was really the most remarkable specimen of modern young womanhood that he had yet met.

She seemed glad to amuse him.

“That laugh will do you good,” she informed him. “You’ve been worrying about things. You’ve secret fears. I expect your dreams ought to be regulated. Laughter is the great remedy of fear. I know that from my blind men.”

“Are you ever serious?” asked Bertram.

“I never leave laughter far behind,” she answered.

And that was true, as he found, not in Christy’s rooms but in hers, to which he went rather often, after that first meeting, and in little restaurants around St. John’s Wood or in the “Zoo,” where he met her after her work with the blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s.

She was serious sometimes, passionately serious about the state of civilisation, the hatred between nations, the nation’s forgetfulness of boys who had been stricken in the War, and the objects for which they had fought, the indifference of the lucky classes to the growing poverty, the increasing despair of ex-soldiers, crippled men, nerve-broken women, the cruelty of the world to starving Russia—oh, yes, she admitted the secret spell of Bolshevism!—the brutality of England to Ireland, the refusal of the United States to enter the League of Nations, the trickery, the wickedness, the corruption of European Governments who poked up the worst passions of the crowd, and lied to them, and played the old game of international rivalry so that the world was being staged for another war.

She dropped her fantastic way of speech in talking of these things, and scared Bertram by the violence of her language, and by the red flame of her spirit, reckless of all restraint, impatient of delay, eager for “direct action” to cure the evils which she saw and loathed.

But laughter came quick upon her passion. She laughed wholeheartedly at Bertram’s fears, his loyalty to old traditions, his hatred of violence, his moderate views, his moralities. She called him a Queen Victorian Englishman, an 1880 Jingo, a trimmer, a hedger, a Girondin, a disciple of Samuel Smiles, a John Halifax, Gentleman, a Tory Democrat, and in a moment of exasperation, a Poor Damned Soul.

He caught a glimpse of her now and then, pacing rapidly round Regent’s Park with a blinded soldier on each arm. They laughed continually as she talked to them. They looked happy. They chatted brightly, and they turned their faces to her sometimes as though seeing the way in which the wind blew a brown tress across her rose-flushed cheek, and the brightness of her eyes.

Bertram had hated to see those blinded soldiers, groping their way about the Park, tapping the kerb-stone with their sticks, standing, and listening intently, as the taxi-cabs swirled by, afraid, melancholy, stricken. The sight of them made him curse the war again, and go back to his book, to write more bitterly of its anguish.

But Janet Rockingham Welford was at her best with those blinded men, and he had no argument with her in that part of her work, though in all else.

He went often to her rooms.