Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 6

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Joyce was sleeping—“as sound as a bell,” said the nurse. Bertram had finished his dinner alone, hating his loneliness, and the deliberately cheerful way in which he had to answer the chatty remarks of Edith, the maid, who waited on him with a sense of drama in the house, and a desire to express comradeship. In his heart, though he liked the girl, he wished her at the devil, because of his fretted nerves, and refused a second serve of fruit jelly with an impatience which he tried to disguise by a “Thank you very much, Edith. Nothing more—for goodness’ sake!” Then he went into his study, shut the door, and tried to settle down at his desk to some writing. He had no concentration of mind. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece annoyed him desperately. It had been playing tattoos in his brain during those hours when its fast little ticking seemed to be hurrying Joyce’s life away. Well, she was all right now, thank God, unless the nurse and doctor were lying to him. He went over to the mantelpiece, took up Joyce’s photograph, and kissed it. He would try to be less irritable and get a grip on that absurd temper of his. Then he swore softly because the telephone bell rang again. That was about the tenth time in the last hour. Joyce’s friends desired to know how she was getting on. Why the deuce didn’t they have the decency to leave him alone, and to leave the telephone alone, at such a time?

“Is that Mr. Pollard? Oh, forgive me, but can you tell me how dear Joyce is getting on?”

That was the usual way of putting it. His answers were brief. “Quite well, thanks!” then a slam down with the receiver. He wasn’t going to give them any details.

A man’s voice had spoken to him on the ’phone. “That you, Bertram? … Oh, I’m Kenneth Murless. How’s Joyce?”

What right had Kenneth to ask such a question at such a time? It was like his impertinence! … And yet, somehow, because of Joyce, who liked Kenneth, he felt constrained to give a civil answer.

“Getting on well.”

“Give her my love, old man,” said Kenneth’s voice on the wire; “say I’m frightfully sorry about her loss.”

His love! Bertram’s face flushed deeply as he stood by the plaguey instrument. That was going a bit too far!

“I’m afraid she’s not well enough to get anybody’s love just yet,” he said icily.

“All my sympathy to you, old man,” answered Kenneth.

This time Bertram had slammed down the receiver. He had no desire whatever for Kenneth’s sympathy. He wished the fellow would get his Grecian nose down to his job at the Foreign Office and keep it there. Otherwise it might be in danger of getting broken one day.

That last ring he had answered took the frown off his forehead after he had listened to the first words over the wire.

“Oh, is that you, mother? Yes, Joyce seems out of danger now. … Come round? … Well, is the governor at the House to-night? … The Irish debate? Oh, yes, I forgot that monstrous farce. All right. I’ll come, then.”

He remembered there were other tragedies in life besides his own, more death than that of his still-born child when he bought an evening paper at the Underground station in the High Street, Kensington, on his way to his father’s house in Sloane Street.

“Six deaths in Dublin to-day. Serious Ambush. More reprisals.”

Those were the headings on the front page, and he felt sick at the words, and wouldn’t read the details. The same thing as usual. British officers fired at and killed by boys in civilian clothes. Young Irishmen dragged out of their beds and shot in cold blood by “unknown men, said to be in uniform.” Irish homes burnt by the military. Raids, bomb outrages, searches—the usual daily record of anarchy in Ireland which was becoming intolerable in his soul because of his divided allegiance as half an Irishman and half an Englishman, half a democrat and half a Tory, half a Protestant and half a Catholic, at least, he hoped, a Christian. He opened the paper as he sat in the district train, and saw his father’s name on the centre page:

“Great 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.