Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 8

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London had a lowering influence at this time on Bertram Pollard, and filled him with such intensity of gloom that he began to hate the place which as a boy he had loved with romantic sentiment as the city of endless adventure where life’s drama was rich and full.

He remembered but vaguely the tall brick house in Merrion Square, Dublin, where he had lived in his early boyhood, until his father had brought all the family to England. From their house in Sloane Street, during holidays from St. Paul’s School, he had gone exploring the mean streets and slum quarters of London, lounging about the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, peering into old churches, strolling around the markets in Covent Garden and Smithfield, listening to the cheap-jacks in Leather Lane, venturing into the Italian quarter at Hatton Garden with a sense of adventure, going as far afield as the London docks and the back streets of Stepney and Bermondsey, where he looked out for types of men who belonged to the novels of Jacobs and Conrad.

Then, in his first year at Oxford, he’d come down to London for “binges” on boat-race night, when there were wild rags at the music halls and tumultuous encounters of undergraduates in Piccadilly Circus, rather drunken, but joyous, dinners in Soho restaurants.

There had been no second year for him at Oxford, because of the war which changed everything, but as a machine-gun officer London still pulled at his heart-strings with a tremendous tug, and made him desperate for the seven days’ leave which came so rarely.

“Good-bye, Piccadilly, good-bye, Leicester Square—” The silly old words yelled by crowds of men in khaki going to the mud and fire of Flanders for the first time—the second-timers didn’t sing it so lustily, unless they had been drinking—always stirred his old sentiment for London. He repeated the words as he lay in his dug-out at night, twelve hundred yards from the Boche line out from Mailly Mailly on the Somme—his first pitch—and old Christy, who lay beside him chaffed him because more than once he spoke the word “London” in his sleep.

London! He used to whisper that word with a kind of ecstasy when he came out of Charing Cross station from the boat train which brought swarms of leave men in those old days of darkness and air-raids and mass emotion. The taxi drive through Piccadilly to his father’s house was a journey of enchantment. Back again! London! What luck! Because it might be for the last time, every minute of it was precious, every dimly lighted lamp was a beacon of delight; the smell of the streets, the rushing swirl of taxis, the beat of rain on the empurpled pavements, the damp and fog of a winter’s night, the wet crowds outside the theatres, the dear damned dismalness of London, drugged him, made his senses drunk with gladness.

The old town had been good in those days. Now when he went out into its streets, while Joyce was ill, he found no comfort in it. Perhaps that was his fault. Perhaps it was he that had changed, not London. … It was the world that had changed, and all men in it, and England that had seemed unchanging. As Bertram wandered about the streets, diving down some of the old highways, walking into the outer suburbs to tire out a brain that did not sleep enough at nights, he found that pessimism closed about him. He couldn’t avoid it, for its gloom was in every face he passed, on every newspaper placard, in every group of men at every street corner, in long processions of out-of-works whom he met in mean streets.

These processions of unemployed men, all ex-service, hurt him horribly. They carried banners with the proclamation, “We want Work, not Charity.” They were men whom he’d seen marching up the Albert-Bapaume road and the Arras-Lens road, and the Ypres-Menin road, when England and the world had needed them. They were the heroes who were fighting in a war to end war, the boys in the trenches for whom nothing was too good. Now they were shabby and down at heel, some of them in the old khaki with buttons and shoulder-straps torn off, all of them downcast and wretched-looking. “Not charity!” they said, but they had scouts out, shaking collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by, in an aggressive, almost hostile way.

Bertram could never pass one of these boxes without putting a few coppers inside, until one day he remembered that it was his wife’s money, not his own, that he was giving away. The thought made him flush in the street, and walk on with a quicker, restless pace as far as Upper Tooting. It was absurd for him to give to the unemployed. He was one of them, with less chance of work.

At many street corners there were groups of seedy-looking men of all ages, lounging aimlessly outside buildings on which the words “Labour Exchange” were painted. Bertram had only a vague idea about the service done by a Labour Exchange. The fantastic thought came to him that it would be a good idea to put his own name down for any job that might suit a man like himself, pretty good at handling men, or at any kind of organising work. That was a good word, “organising”—and he would use it to the fellow who ran the Labour Exchange.

It was in High Street, Marylebone, and he said “Sorry,” as he elbowed a group of men hanging round the swing doors. One of them, after a glance at him, pulled himself up, as in the old days of soldiering, when an officer passed, but another lad snarled at him, and said, “No officer swank now. We’ve finished with that,” and the sentiment seemed to please the crowd, as Bertram judged by the laugh that followed.

He was kept waiting in a bare room without chairs, while a boy scout took one of his old cards, “Major Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.,” into an inner room.

A tall man, dressed in pre-war clothes which had been smart when new and still had style, though frayed about the cuffs and button-holes, stood with his back to the fireplace, and nodded to Bertram when he came in.

“Bloody weather!” he said.

“Not good,” said Bertram.

“About as good as our delightful government!” said the man, ex-officer certainly, gentleman undoubtedly. He twisted up a black, and obviously dyed, moustache, with a fierce gesture.

“What’s the government been doing now?” asked Bertram, by way of making himself civil.

“Still continuing to destroy the Empire, that’s all,” was the answer, delivered with a quiet ferocity. “Look at India, seething with revolt and delivered over to a Jewish conspiracy. The only man who dealt with things with a firm hand, condemned, dismissed, and disgraced. Look at Ireland. Anarchy and murder! What’s the Government doing there? Surrendering to traitors who ought to be shot like dogs. Look at England—public money being poured out like water, Government offices squandering millions, the Government cringing to Trade-Unionists and Bolsheviks. Look at Germany! By God, sir, Germany will win the war yet! The Hidden Hand is still at work among our politicians. Where are the fruits of victory? The Government is allowing the Hun to escape the price of defeat. It’s a damned conspiracy, sir!”

“It’s all very difficult,” said Bertram.

He had heard this very conversation before. Almost in the same words his own father had made a grand indictment of the Government and all its works. Queer that this shabby fellow, “down on his luck,” as the men used to say, should be talking in the same strain as his high and dry reactionary father, whose sentiments when repeated by Bertram to Christy made that son of the people pour forth ironical blasphemies.

His new acquaintance began to tell of his own woes. After honourable service to his country, he had been reduced to living in a common lodging-house, seeking work in a Labour Exchange. A horrible humiliation!

“Why?” asked Bertram. “I take it that a Labour Exchange is to exchange labour? A pretty useful thing.”

The man with a dyed moustache stared at him blankly.

“I hope you don’t think I’m a damned labourer?” he asked, aggressively.

“I wish I were!” said Bertram. “Anything rather than lounging.”

He was saved further argument by the boy scout, who called his name and opened the inner door.

The Labour Exchange secretary rose as he entered the office, and said, “Take a seat, won’t you, Major?”

Bertram saw that he was in the presence of a man about his own age, twenty-five, and a pleasant-looking fellow, typical of the “temporary officers” who had poured out in their thousands to France.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?” said the secretary, offering a box of cheap Virginia cigarettes.

Bertram explained that he was looking out for a good job of any kind, and was disconcerted when the Labour Exchange man laughed, dropped the “sir” hurriedly, and said, “No good coming here, old man! Surely you’re not so hard put to it as all that?”

“That’s just what I am,” said Bertram, “devilish hard put to it.”

“What can you do?”

Bertram mentioned the blessed word “organising,” but again the secretary smiled and shook his head. Then he asked a series of questions, like a machine-gun opening rapid fire.

“Do you write a decent hand? No? Can you type? No? Any good at figures? No? Shorthand? No? Knowledge of engineering? book-keeping, surveying—any business, trade, or profession? No?”

“I was at St. Paul’s School,” said Bertram, “and one year at Oxford. I’m a jolly good gunner, and I was brought up as a gentleman. Hasn’t England any place for my sort?”

He was resentful of the smiling ironical look of the man interrogating him.

“Not any kind of place at all, old man”—Bertram wished he wouldn’t “old man” him so much—“unless you have a social pull. That’s still some good for jobs in Government offices and that kind of thing, but it’s getting less valuable as time goes on. Without it, fellows like you—and me—haven’t a dog’s chance. How do you think I got this job when I became demobbed?”

“Haven’t an idea,” said Bertram.

“Why, my pater is Chief Clerk of Marylebone. Social pull, my boy! Nothing else. There are thousands of young officers, ex-airmen, ex-everything, who’ll have to emigrate, or starve to death. There’s no alternative. … Well, there’s one!”

“What’s that?”

“Join the Auxiliary Force in Ireland. ‘Black and Tans,’ as they call them. Does the idea appeal to you?”

“Not in the least,” said Bertram.

The Labour Exchange secretary laughed, and touched his bell for the boy scout.

“I don’t blame you neither. A rotten game! Good day and good luck.”

Bertram had winced over that “neither.” He had been taught to speak pretty well, but though he would not say “I don’t blame you neither,” he hadn’t learnt enough, it seemed, either at St. Paul’s or Balliol, to get any kind of job in England.

“Not without a social pull,” said the Labour Exchange fellow. As a matter of fact, he had a social pull. His father was Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P.—with a considerable pull on the Tory crowd. His father-in-law was the Earl of Ottery, related by cousinship to most of the old blood in England. His brother-in-law, Alban, was in the Foreign Office with Kenneth Murless and other friends of Joyce, his wife. But none of them had offered him anything, or suggested anything, or gone a yard out of the way to help him.

Joyce’s people had no use for him. He didn’t belong to their caste, though they tolerated him coldly, for Joyce’s sake. He didn’t speak their language, as it were. He didn’t look at things from their point of view. He was an “outsider.” How could he bring himself to ask them for a job? The supercilious Alban, for instance? He could not even go to his own father, with whom he was hardly on speaking terms, because of a hopeless divergence of views on the subject of Ireland. “Join the Black-and-Tans, like Digby,” would be his father’s most genial suggestion, just like this secretary of the Labour Exchange.

Yet for Joyce’s sake he would have to humble himself and ask some of his exalted relatives to put him in charge of some department for wasting the tax-payer’s money. A financial crisis was bearing down on him with the enormous and imminent pressure of the Germans in March of 1918 against the British line. He had come to the end of the money he had put by out of his pay during the war—the very last pound of it. Henceforth it was Joyce who would do the paying until he grabbed at a job, or begged for one.

“I’m getting dishonest,” thought Bertram, as he walked through High Street, Marylebone, observing the mournful look of the people he passed, and turning his eyes away from a blinded man playing a piano organ.

“Old Christy’s intensive education in idealism is wearing off. Lord, if only I could do something worth doing—lift the world a little out of its mess—make it safer for the kids coming along—prevent more blinded men playing piano organs as payment for heroism! … Was it worth while, their sacrifice?”

The question that came into his brain seemed to him like a kind of blasphemy—a treachery to his own code, and to all the crowd who had fought for England. If that sacrifice had not been worth while, and so many men had died for false beliefs and hopes, then nothing in the world was right, and all that men were taught in faith was just a lie. Christy had said it was a lie, the whole make-up of civilisation, the code of his sort of people, patriotism itself. They had argued over that, almost savagely, and he had told Christy to shut up or clear out.

Yet how explain those newspaper placards which stared him in the face from newspaper shops in the Marylebone Road?

More Unemployed Riots.

Crime Wave Spreads.

No Houses for Heroes.

Is Europe Doomed?

Reprisals in Ireland.

France Insults England.

Not easy to keep cheerful, to retain a fair and sturdy optimism, to see the blessing of the victory, even after the slaughter of the world’s best youth, when those facts were on the placards, between High Street, Marylebone and the lower end of Baker Street!

Yet Bertram Pollard, ex-officer and unemployed, did not despair. He felt something “inside him,” as he used to say in his childhood, which promised some kind of revelation of all this mystery. He seemed to be waiting for a light that would make things clear to him in his own life, and in life. He was certain, beneath his deep uncertainty, that he would find some job to do, some job worth doing. God, or the great powers, or his own instincts, would give him a chance, a new impulse, some decent object in life. After all, he was only twenty-five, with health and strength and desire to find the right place.

Impossible that he should be useless and unused!