Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 17

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Not a word of news had come from Susan or Dennis O’Brien, and Bertram’s anxiety had been allayed for a time because of the argument he used to his mother, and to his own sense of uneasiness—that no news is good news.

His mother was fretting miserably. It seemed to age her, and he noticed that she was weak in health, and no longer had that placid resignation to the worries of life which had made her so comforting as a mother to unruly but devoted children.

A greyness had crept beneath her skin, so white and transparent in the old days. She seemed to have lost her interest in the little duties of domestic life which had filled her time in all the days and years of Bertram’s remembrance, and it came as a shock to him, greater than any other sign of distress in her, that on his last visit some withered flowers remained unchanged in the vase on her table, and her writing desk was disorderly with many letters and household bills hopelessly mixed up, as he remarked when she tried to find a letter from his brother Digby. She had made a religion of “tidiness.” Susan’s rampageous carelessness had been a source of constant annoyance to her sense of order. This litter in her desk, and those unchanged flowers, were signs that something had broken in her spirit, and Bertram was shocked by that, and by the grey sadness of the little woman who had given him life, as she sat, with restless hands in her lap, and a kind of hidden fear in her eyes.

She was afraid because Susan hadn’t written one word to her about her secret marriage or her present whereabouts. That marriage, which Bertram had revealed, was like a blow to her. She had prayed that Susan might marry a “nice” man, so that she would settle down and have babies, and be happy. She’d even asked God to let her live until she had that sense of security in Susan’s happiness—her wild, beautiful, reckless Susan. But now this secret wedding with a young man who was in conflict with the law, and had done dangerous and dreadful things, was worse than anything she had feared.

“What does the governor think?” asked Bertram.

Mrs. Pollard’s eyelids quivered as she looked at her son.

“Your father thinks it’s all my fault.”

“He would!” said Bertram, bitterly.

“First Dorothy. Now Susan. One married to a German, the other to an Irish rebel! It makes him feel like King Lear, he says. He forbids me to mention his daughters.”

“What a man!” cried Bertram. “What colossal intolerance!”

His mother reproved him, timidly.

“Your father’s a good man, my dear. You must be patient with his point of view. Those dreadful politics—”

Bertram raged inwardly against his father, with a storm of anger at the unyielding, deep-dug, inhuman prejudice of his attitude to life, but for his mother’s sake he swallowed the bitter words that rose in him. He tried to comfort her by reminding her of news she’d received from young Digby. The boy was coming back from Dublin on leave. He might have heard something about Susan and Dennis. Anyhow, it would be good to see him. He had been very lucky.

But his mother shook her head, and refused to be comforted.

“Digby is my chief anxiety. I lie awake at night thinking of him in the midst of all those raids and searches and murderous attacks. I can hardly forgive your father for letting him join the Black and Tans, as they call them. He’s so young. Such a child!”

Bertram growled that it was a disgrace to the family, anyhow. The Black and Tans were dragging England’s reputation in the mud. They were no better than hooligans. The scum of the Army that had fought for Liberty.

Again his mother reproved him. They were doing their duty In upholding law and order, she said, and Bertram laughed bitterly, thinking of what old Christy would say to that, and Janet Welford. But how could he argue with his mother, so wan-looking, so melancholy? She had withered like the flowers in her vase. He had been tempted to tell her about his own troubles, to ask her advice about Joyce, who was so “distant” from him now, so unresponsive to his love. … But he could not burden his little mother with more family tragedies. He rose and kissed her forehead, and said, “It’s all very difficult!” It was his old familiar jest.

She smiled at him, and seemed to brighten.

“You’ve always been good and true,” she told him. “How’s dear Joyce?”

“Splendid,” he told her, and then left her, to get some news of Susan, if he could, by way of Dennis O’Brien’s sisters.

He’d been reminded of those girls by Janet Welford, to whom he had told the story of Susan and Dennis. Janet knew everybody, it seemed to Bertram, and he was not surprised when she said, “Dennis O’Brien? Of course! And his three sisters in Maid of Honour Row. Don’t you remember how they learned dancing with us in the old days at the Kensington Academy?”

Yes, he remembered now, three little girls with pigtails down their backs and an Irish way of speech, and a habit of dropping rosaries out of their pockets when they danced. They were Irish Catholics, and he and Janet, alone together in her rooms, had discovered them at the old address in the telephone directory, under the name of their father, Sir Montague O’Brien.

No news is good news, as Bertram found when he went to the O’Briens’ house. They had received news of their brother Dennis, and it was bad. He guessed that at once, when the maid showed him into one of the rooms of their house in Maid of Honour Row, a little Queen Anne house with panelled walls and a powder closet, where once the waiting ladies of a Stuart Queen had lived, not far from the old red-brick palace in Kensington Gardens.

The three O’Brien girls suited the house, and the panelled room, painted white, with little chintz curtains in the casement windows, and gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, and miniatures of Irish gentry in old-fashioned dress.

The girls whom he remembered with pigtails, had their dark hair coiled high, and their frocks were cut low at the neck, showing their full white throats, not unlike the portrait of a Georgian lady over their mantelpiece. Bertram remembered their names now, long forgotten, as he thought, though tucked away in his subconscious storehouse of old memories—Rose and Betty and Jane, in order of age.

A young priest was with them, and Bertram, as he entered the room, saw at a glance that they’d been praying on their knees, for they had risen hastily at the maid’s tap on the door. The young priest held his beads. They had been reciting the rosary, as Catholics do, for the dying or dead. The girls had red eyes, and tried to hide the sign of tears when Bertram announced himself as “a kind of brother-in-law” and asked for news of his sister Susan.

A letter lay open on the table, and Rose O’Brien, the eldest sister, handed it to him without a word, while another gush of tears came into her eyes. It was in Susan’s handwriting and was but a short message. Dennis had been arrested near Dublin, and taken to Mountjoy Prison. She was in hiding with friends they knew. It would not be safe for her to write any more. She sent her love, and ended her letter with the words, “God save Ireland—and my dear Dennis!”

There was silence in the room while Bertram read the letter. So Susan had crossed to Ireland with the boy, as he had guessed. Dennis had been taken to Mountjoy Prison. On what charge?

He asked the girls that.

“What has Dennis done?”

None of them answered. It seemed to Bertram that they weren’t sure of trusting him.

It was the young priest who answered.

“Does it matter to the Black and Tans what an Irishman has done, or not done? It’s only surprising that they didn’t kill poor Dennis at sight. It’s a Reign of Terror, without law, without justice, without mercy.”

“On both sides,” said Bertram, sharply. “I see no distinction in murder—Sinn Fein or Black and Tan.”

The priest laughed uneasily, but into his large dark eyes leapt a little flame of passion.

“Sinn Fein does no murder. It fights in self-defence for the liberty of Ireland, and executes spies and murderers—the British soldiery and their bloody rabble, the Black and Tans.”

Bertram groaned with a kind of anguish. He had used the same arguments with Joyce, with Kenneth Murless, with all that crowd. But when the priest spoke them his mind refused to admit this one-sided view, this assertion that Ireland had no guilt.

“It’s all madness,” he said. “Madness and murder. Insane anarchy. Black-hearted crime. How can you defend it as a Catholic priest—even as a Christian?”

The priest shrugged his shoulders.

“You’re an Englishman. How can you understand the Irish point of view? The divine passion of a people fighting for freedom against ruthless oppression? It’s not in your mentality.”

“I’m half Irish,” said Bertram, bitterly, “and sometimes I wish, by God, that I hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in my veins! But because I’m half English as well as half Irish, I say that England cannot surrender to Irish gun-men. You’re fighting with the wrong weapons in a dirty way.”

Rose O’Brien had whispered to the priest, and he answered as though he had gained new understanding.

“I don’t argue about Ireland with a son of Michael Pollard, K.C.”

It was a shrewd blow, and Bertram was silent under the thrust of it. He turned from the priest to the three girls.

“Your brother’s wife is my sister,” he said. “What’s to be done?”

Rose O’Brien answered him.

“There’s nothing to do but pray.”

Betty O’Brien saw something else to do.

“I’ll go to Dublin to-night. If the dirty Black and Tans touch me with a little finger—I’ll lay a whip across their faces. I’m Irish, body and soul.”

“Hush, Betty, for the love of God!” said Rose, and Jane, the youngest, said, “Be quiet, darling!”

It was Jane who showed Bertram out of the house, after he had written a line to Susan, in case Betty saw her.

The girl touched his arm, and whispered to him:

“I’m not Sinn Fein, like Rose and Betty. I’m sure our Lord wouldn’t like it. But I’m Dennis’s sister, and he’s the noblest boy I know. Dear God! what will I do if they take him from us?”

She leant up against the door-post and wept bitterly but very quietly.

“They’ll send him to prison for a time,” said Bertram; “it’s not so terrible.”

He kissed her hand, to make her understand his sympathy.

“God help Ireland—and England!” he said, and then lifted his hat and walked away. If he had been wholly Irish, he would have been Sinn Fein too. His passion would have flamed out for Irish liberty. But he was the son of an English mother, and loved England first and best. Why was he always pulled two ways? Why did this infernal tug-of-war go on in his heart and brain, between the extremes of thought? Most men walked on one side or the other, on their own side of life’s hedge. He tried to keep to the middle of the road, and both sides flung stones at him.