Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 7

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Joyce was slow in getting about. “Wants cheering up,” said the nurse who still stayed on. “But I can’t allow visitors yet. It’s up to you, Major!”

Bertram did his best to cheer her up, and went in and out of the bedroom bringing flowers, books, illustrated papers, and making bright remarks about the weather and things in general. But he was not a great success. Joyce seemed to be fretting, and was in low spirits. She brightened a little when the nurse manicured her, and when a Truelove’s girl came to curl her “bobbed” hair. She was also amused by the number of callers who came to enquire about her health, sending up messages and so many flowers that Bertram’s gift of bloom looked insignificant. Every time she heard the bell ring she wondered which of her friends it might be—Billy Simpson, Nat Wynne, Peter Fynde—Kenneth Murless—?

“Has Kenneth called yet?” she asked Bertram, and when he said, “Half a dozen times, I should say!” she looked at him in an amused, challenging way, and said, “Nice Boy! I think nurse must let me ask him to tea.”

Bertram restrained a sudden pang of jealousy. He mustn’t get back to that absurdity. After a short silence which Joyce understood, he suggested meekly that it might be as well to see members of the family first—her mother, for instance, and his, and Susie, his sister. They would be rather hurt if others were let in while they were kept out.

Joyce made a comical grimace.

“What a boy you are for the conventions! Of course I must see Mother—though I don’t see why I should see mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. It would be far more fun to have Kenneth, and some of my own set. A rowdy little tea-party to celebrate my return to Society!”

“Lord! Don’t return to that sort of thing,” said Bertram hurriedly.

“What sort of thing?” asked Joyce, coldly.

He avoided a direct answer.

“Let’s be quiet for a bit. You and me. I want to think things out. I must get some kind of work—”

“My tea-parties won’t prevent you,” said Joyce.

She sat up in bed, and her cheeks flushed.

“Don’t let’s get back to the old arguments, Bertram. I give you a free hand. I’m not jealous of any of your friends—though I think that Socialist creature, Christy, has an evil influence on you. I insist on having my own friends, and meeting them when and how I like. If you don’t trust me, it’s an insult to my sense of honour.”

“My dear Kid!”

Bertram spoke with profound humility and compunction. Of course he trusted her. There was no harm whatever in anything she did. He knew perfectly well that her comradeship with Kenneth Murless was straight and clean and sweet—although he hated it because of his jealous love of her, hated all the people who surrounded her and edged him out of that absolute monopoly for which he craved.

“I shall ask Kenneth to tea to-morrow,” said Joyce in a determined way, “and, then, any of the crowd who want to see me. I’m tired of this sick-room business. Never again, I hope, after this experience!”

“Ask any one you like,” said Bertram. He bent over to kiss her, but she turned away from him fretfully.

For a moment he stood looking down on her, hurt by her quick movement to avoid his caress, and by the words she had spoken, but filled with tenderness because of his love for her. He stood like that in silence, when there was a tap at the door, and the nurse came in with Joyce’s mother, Lady Ottery, who went quickly to the bedside and embraced her daughter.

“My poor darling!”

“Oh, mother,” said Joyce, “my poor little baby!”

It was the first time Bertram had heard her mention the baby, and it touched him poignantly.

Lady Ottery said, “If only I’d been with you!” and Bertram wished in his heart that Joyce had permitted that, but she had resisted all his persuasion to have her mother with her.

“Mother is too dominant in time of sickness,” she had said. “Besides, it’s not fair to her, after the War, with Rudy and Hal both killed. If anything happened to me, she would die.”

That was like Joyce. If she had to suffer, she would suffer alone and not drag others in. But Bertram wondered if Lady Ottery would have died “if anything had happened” to Joyce. He thought not.

He had been with her when the news of Hal’s death had come from the War Office. That was a year after Rudolf’s. Ottery had handed his wife the telegram without a word. He had been hit hard, and breathed heavily, plucking his reddish beard and staring at a distant tree with watery eyes. It was a July afternoon, and they were all standing in the gardens of Holme Ottery, watching the girls playing tennis on the lawns below the terrace. Bertram had come up to get a drink. He remembered now the look on Lady Ottery’s face, her thin, sharp-featured, powerful face. Only for a moment did her lips and her eyelids quiver. Then she smiled at her husband, a strange, proud smile, and said, “For England’s sake! …” After that, when she moved towards her husband and took his hand, she said: “Poor Hal has done his bit! Rudy will be glad to see him.”

Bertram had marvelled at her courage, her hardness, her love of England, so great that she was ready to give all her sons for its safe-guarding. He remembered telling Christy that, when he went back from leave, and he remembered the rage with which he heard Christy denounce Lady Ottery’s point of view and sacrificial patriotism.

“Its hellish!” he said. “We’ll never stop War as long as women like that think their noblest duty is to breed sons for the shambles; as long as they rejoice in the death of their well-beloved for England’s sake, or Germany’s. It’s making a religion of the foulest stupidity in human life. It’s upholding the tradition of war—right or wrong—as the supreme test of virtue in a noble caste, and its blood sacrifice as a necessary, inevitable and sacred duty. How are we going to get peace in the world with that spirit in women?”

So he had argued on, until Bertram had told him roughly to “shut up, for God’s sake!”

Lady Ottery had turned her house into a hospital during the War, and for three years or more had nursed badly wounded men, never shrinking from sights of blood or death, doing dirty and disgusting work, though never before the war had she soiled her hands, except in the garden, among flowers, or come in touch with the coarse and tragic aspects of life. That was the spirit of patrician women in England, however delicate and sheltered. It was the spirit of an old tradition. Joyce had it still, though in many small ways she had broken with tradition, and belonged to a new world of womanhood, careless of conventions, free of speech, in revolt against the old code of manners.

Mother and daughter! Bertram watched them as they talked together. How immensely different, yet how alike! Lady Ottery, with her rather awe-inspiring dignity, plainly, almost dowdily, dressed. Joyce, with absurd little bows on her night-dress, excited, thrusting off the bedclothes, stretching out for a cigarette, saying “Damn” when she dropped the match, laughing when her mother fastened up a little button which revealed too much, announcing her intention of having a tea-party for her “best boy,” careless of shocking this old-fashioned mother. Yet, Bertram thought, with the same steel, the same hardihood underneath her softness, and the same family tradition.

Lady Ottery directed her attention to Bertram for a moment, having previously ignored him. She disliked him, as he knew, disappointed with her daughter’s marriage to a penniless young officer, and suspicious of his political views after one or two heated conversations. This afternoon, however, she was unusually gracious, and remarked that he looked worried.

Joyce told her that he was always worrying. He was suffering from some soul complex, which she could not fathom—an uneasy conscience, or a craving for the Higher Life.

“Too much sick-room, I expect! Husbands always get the worst of this sort of thing. Ottery fretted unreasonably.”

She alluded to a lecture she was going to deliver in London, “The Religion of Revolution,” and trusted (that was her word) that Bertram would go to hear it. It would explain the cause of social unrest and might clear up some of his little difficulties.

Bertram took the ticket she gave him, and suppressed an inclination to groan or laugh. He could not imagine his “difficulties” being dissolved by anything that his mother-in-law might have to say.

“I expect I’m suffering from the strain of peace,” he said with a smile, when Lady Ottery fixed him with her lorgnette and said he looked “hipped.”

“London’s enough to depress a laughing hyena! But I’ll take a walk in it while you and Joyce have a private chat. I expect she’s heaps to tell you.”

Joyce said she had nothing to tell. She wanted her mother to give her the latest social news, the inside of the political situation, and the state of the world generally. Was the Prime Minister still licking the hands of Labour? Had Evelyn got her divorce yet?