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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 So he had written, or in some such way, all night, with spells of
thought when he had laid his head down on his arms, and, even,
had wept a little like a weak boy. She hadn’t answered the letter. It
was “past argument, now!”
His mother worried him by trying to get at his secret. A dozen
times a day she spoke about “dear Joyce,” and he had to fence with
her until about a week after his coming back she broke down his
guard, and he told her everything, or nearly everything. Then he
was put into the absurd position of defending Joyce.
His mother was indignant with her son’s wife, called her a “selfish
creature,” and a “heartless hussy,” and couldn’t understand at all
how any wife could so behave to any husband. It was, she said, “the
moral breakdown caused by the war.” English girls seemed bereft of
their senses, judging from the daily papers, and all the dreadful
divorce cases. Joyce was another example of that. She wanted, like
all the others, nothing but pleasure. Duty never entered her head.
Self-sacrifice for love’s sake was not acknowledged these days. She
was merely an empty-headed creature, with bobbed hair and short
skirts.
“Mother!” said Bertram, “I can’t let you speak of Joyce like that!
She’s not in the least empty-headed. On the contrary, she’s stuffed
full of knowledge and ideas. As for her bobbed hair, it’s the fashion,
and a pretty one.”
Absurd—to be defending Joyce who had given him Hell! Yet he
did so, time and time again, until at last he became angry, and said,
“Let’s give up talking about it, mother, for goodness’ sake! You don’t
understand Joyce’s point of view, or mine. It’s impossible to explain.
I can’t explain it to myself. I only know that it’s a frightful tragedy.”
He hated to talk roughly to his mother. The love she had for all
her children, now departed from her, was concentrated on Bertram
who had come back for a little while. She could hardly bear him out
of her sight, and often, when he went up to his room he heard her
quiet footsteps outside the door. She was listening to his
movements, standing near him, though outside the room. She was
happy, or almost happy if he sat with her, holding her hand, or if she
could watch him from the other side of the fireplace, while he sat
back in a low chair, pretending to read the paper, and thinking,
thinking of Joyce, and his loneliness, and what the devil to do with
his life. Never quite happy, for always in her heart was grief over the
exile of Dorothy in her German home, and anxiety about Susan who
only sent post card messages from Dublin, saying nothing, and
fearfulness on behalf of young Digby in the midst of civil war.
“It’s a dreadful world, Bertram,” she said, once. “As a young wife
I was so happy with all my babies, and never dreamed of all the
horror ahead—war, revolutions, famines, plague, endless strife. If
only Queen Victoria could have gone on living, we might have been
saved all that. She kept things safe by her virtue and wisdom.”
Bertram tried hard not to laugh, yet he laughed aloud at the idea
of the poor old Queen “keeping things safe” in a world that was
making ready for convulsion even in her time, by great natural
moving forces that no mortal could restrain; not King Canute with
the advancing tide, nor Queen Victoria in a changing era.
“Why do you laugh at me?” asked Mrs. Pollard.
He patted her hand.
“You still belong to the Victorian Age!”
“We felt safe in that time,” said his mother. “Now I don’t know
what new terror will happen from day to day. There’s an awful
uncertainty, everywhere.”
“It’s Reality breaking through Illusion,” said Bertram; but his
mother, as he saw, did not understand him, and he did not try to
make her understand. He was pitiful because of the troubles that
had overtaken her in the last phase of her beautiful and faithful life.
Tears came into her eyes when he told her that he was spending
the evening away from home. He had promised to call round again
at Janet Welford’s flat in Battersea Park.
“I know it’s dull here alone with me,” said Mrs. Pollard, “but you
hardly know the comfort it gives me to see you back again, now all
my other dear birds have gone from the nest.”
“Never dull with you, little mother,” he said, bending to kiss her
forehead. “But I like to see my friends at times. I’ll be back before
you go to bed.”
 But he stayed rather late with Janet, and wasn’t back until his
mother had tired of waiting. She heard his step passing her door,
and called out, “Good night, my dear!”
 XXX
Janet Welford—“Janet Rockingham Welford” of fiction fame—was
a source of comfort to Bertram at this time. She had a courage
regarding life, a natural and unaffected buoyancy of character,
whatever might happen in a world of tragedy, which shook him out
of his morbid brooding while he was in her company. She carried
over the audacity of her war-time spirit, when for a while she had
driven an ambulance into the Belgian zone of fire, to that after-war
period when most men and women felt drained of vitality, and
suffered miserable reaction.
It was, perhaps, her daily service to the blinded men of St.
Dunstan’s which kept her soul tuned to the old key of “carry on!”
which had inspired masses of people during the years of conflict so
that they forgot, or put on one side, their own griefs and cares,
because of the great sufferings of others, and the common need of
sacrifice.
That was her explanation.
“My blinded boys keep me healthy and vital and brave,” she
smiled. “How the devil can I indulge in the megrims, sit down and
sob over my woes of thwarted passion, gloom over the possible
downfall of civilisation, or six shillings in the pound for income tax,
when those blind boys have to be kept merry and bright to save
them from despair and suicide? They just knock one’s egotism stone
dead.”
“It’s splendid of you!” said Bertram.
Janet wouldn’t allow any kind of splendour to herself.
“Punk! It’s only another form of selfishness. They’re my soul-
cure. If I didn’t laugh for their sakes, make up the most ridiculous
and risky stories, to get a smile out of them, coerce myself to look
on the bright side of life, so that I can reflect some sunshine into
their sightless eyes, I should probably suffer from sex-complexes or
other forms of beastliness. I serve them to save myself. That’s what
I tell them, and they think it an excellent joke. ‘Have we done you
good this morning, Miss?’ they ask, and I say, ‘You’re my Salvation
Army, my lads!’ and that keeps us laughing round Regent’s Park.”
Bertram wondered sometimes whether Janet’s philosophy was
not founded on tremendous pessimism rather than on unbounded
optimism. A queer thought! Yet he had seen that kind of psychology
working out to the same result, in France and Flanders, among the
civilian folk.
French girls who had seen their little homesteads go up in fire
under the enemy’s guns, peasants who had lost everything in the
world, except life, by the invasion of the “Boche,” women who had
lost fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, acquired an astonishing
serenity, even a gaiety of mind. Nothing seemed to matter to them
now. Death itself was a “bagatelle.”
He had seen girls laughing as though at some fantastic joke,
when they poked about the ruins of their cottages and found bits of
old furniture, the wheel of a baby’s perambulator, the relic of some
old familiar thing. It seemed to give life a different sense of
proportion, annihilating its vanities, its greeds, its fears, its illusions.
They were down to the bed-rock of frightful realities, and nothing
worse could happen to them, and they were all “in the basket”
together. Their fate was no worse, and perhaps a little better, than
that of their neighbours.
So, in a way, it was with Janet. At least, he sometimes thought
so. Her father, and then her young brother, had been killed in the
war. Her mother had died of the anguish of these shocks. She
herself had spent the years of war nursing mutilated men. It gave
her that strange serenity of vision which for a time had come to
many of those most stricken by war, though afterwards, when peace
came, they collapsed.
She hadn’t collapsed. It seemed simply silly to Janet that English
people should worry because trade was bad, and get alarmed about
the prospect of social revolution, or excite themselves about the
downfall of exchanges. She stared forward to the future with
audacious vision, and demanded not a hark back to the old
standards of comfort and tradition, but root and branch changes,
bold experiments in social legislation, tremendous endeavours
towards the building of a new world.
Anyhow, she was not afraid. Not of Bolshevism, not of poverty,
not of any new tragedy that might emerge out of the chaos of a
Europe convulsed by the effects of war.
“It’s all frightfully interesting,” she said, “and, anyhow, worry
won’t stop the working out of Fate. Why be afraid of Fate? We shall
all be dead quite soon. Let’s play the game out, and see it through,
and pass the ball on to the next players, when we’ve had our
innings.”
“That sounds good,” said Bertram, “but it doesn’t cure the heart-
ache of a woman left alone because her man was killed in the war,
or give any comfort to an unemployed man, hanging about Labour
Exchanges in search of jobs that aren’t there. Your philosophy of
devil-may-care won’t stop another bout of massacre in Europe if the
Old Gang are allowed to play the fool again, or save the next
generation of boys from being blown to bits in lousy trenches. We
must worry. It’s our duty to worry and find a scientific way of escape
from all this madness.”
“I don’t call that worrying,” she answered. “I call that thinking
straight and acting with courage. That’s our point of view in the ‘Left
Wing.’ ”
“Oh, Lord!” said Bertram, “Your parlour Bolsheviks think all
crooked, and have no more courage than lop-eared rabbits.”
Janet laughed without a trace of annoyance.
“Some of them are disgusting little egoists,” she admitted. “But,
anyhow, they’re educating themselves, and frightening the
Reactionaries. I like to see the Enemy getting scared.”
She used the word “enemy” to represent the Tory crowd—Joyce’s
crowd—more especially the Countess of Ottery’s audience at the
Wigmore Hall.
These political conversations ranged over wide fields of
discussion, and Bertram seemed to amuse Janet by his efforts to
moderate her extreme views. She became more violent to tease him
into argument, and when he called her a Jacobin, who would knit
below the scaffold when heads were falling, she retaliated by calling
him a Girondin who would try to make revolutions with rose-water.
All this talk seemed to have relation to things happening, or likely
to happen, away beyond Battersea Park, through the length and
breadth of England.
The Coal Strike had begun. The railways had cut down their
service of trains to a bare minimum. Factories were closing down in
all the industrial towns. Millions of men were idle and living on strike
pay. The Army Reserve had been called out, the Middle Classes were
being recruited under the scheme of General Bellasis, and the Miners
were in daily conference with the Engineers and Transport Workers,
who were discussing the question of a general strike. If the “Triple
Alliance” voted for that, not a wheel would turn in England, and civil
strife would certainly break out, unless something like a miracle
intervened.
So far no violence had happened. The miners had come up from
the pits, and were whitewashing their cottages. They had made a
fatal mistake already, alienating public opinion, which, until then had
been steadily in favour of their side of the argument. The Pump men
had been withdrawn from the pits, and some of the mines were
already being flooded.
“A logical act,” said Janet. “The Pump men received their lock-out
notices with the others. The mine-owners must take the
responsibility.”
“Rotten tactics and bad morality,” said Bertram. “The men ought
to safeguard their own means of life.”
So they argued, as all other men and women in England then, in
every household where opinions differed on one side or the other,
and where there was a sense of imminent disaster to the old
foundations of civil life.
But of more intimate and poignant interest to Bertram was
Janet’s frank talk about his private disaster—the failure of his
marriage. She had asked blunt questions about his relations with
Joyce, amazingly indiscreet and fearless questions, and after fencing
with them awhile, he had told her the truth of things, with reticence
and reservations, and a sense of loyalty to Joyce, so that he put
down most of the cause of failure to his own stupidity and lack of
patience.
Janet listened, cross-examined, probed his mental wound, with
the skill and ruthlessness of a psychoanalyst.
“Very interesting!” she remarked, more than once, like a doctor
diagnosing a difficult case.
“The inevitable clash of opposed temperaments,” was another
remark of hers, delivered with an air of superior wisdom, and an
amusement which she did not try to conceal.
“You’re not very sympathetic!” complained Bertram. “Not very
helpful. What’s my way out of this mess?”
Janet said, “Forget it. Shove it away into your subconsciousness,
and go on as though it didn’t exist. You’ll find that it all straightens
out.”
She gave him the benefit of her diagnosis.
“It’s a case of sex-repression on your side, and of fear-complex
on your wife’s side. Yours is a simple case. Perfectly ordinary.
Nothing to worry about. Your wife’s case is more complicated.”
In response to Bertram’s plea for enlightenment, and his heated
protest that he was worrying, most damnably, Janet elaborated a
thesis regarding Joyce.
Bertram’s wife, she said, was the victim of an early environment
which had caused abnormality. She’d been sheltered since babyhood
from all contact with the realities of life. She was never allowed to
speak with “common people” on equal terms. They’d pulled their
forelocks to “the little lady” when she had passed in her
perambulator. They’d curtsied at the lodge gates every time she
went in and out. She was made to believe that she was superior to
the rest of the world, with the exception of other people like herself,
who lived in other houses like Holme Ottery.
The rest of mankind, to her child mind, was entirely taken up
with the duty and honour and delight of providing a pleasant life to
those born in the higher sphere—mowing the lawns, grooming the
horses, clipping the hedges, polishing the floors, waiting at table,
bowing silently when rebuked however unjustly, utterly dependent
upon Lady Joyce Bellairs and her exalted family. She’d had no
notion, as a child, that outside the parkland of Holme Ottery the
world had moved on. The portraits of her ancestors in their silks and
laces seemed to prove that her world, and theirs, had always been
the same, and always would be, sheltered, protected, served,
admired.
Then the war had come, breaking through the quietude of Holme
Ottery, but not, for a while, smashing the old illusions. Joyce’s father
had still played the great game of ruling the county as Lord
Lieutenant. Alban had played the diplomatic game in the Foreign
Office. Joyce’s friends had been officers, saluted by all men as they
passed, holding authority even more firmly than of old.
It was only after the war that Joyce had been frightened.
She saw that Holme Ottery and all that it meant was threatened,
that stupendous taxation was killing the old way of life for people
like herself, destroying their sense of security, their power, their
pleasaunces. And she had become aware of other perils; the bogey
of Bolshevism, social “unrest,” a new insolence of men back from the
war, no longer quick to pull their forelocks when the lady passed, but
talking bitterly about their “rights,” their claim to work, and a living
wage.
Joyce Bellairs was afraid of brutal forces threatening all that she
had loved as a child, all that she had believed as a child. Her
behaviour to Bertram was on account of that. It was a fear-complex.
She loved him, but the very strength of her love made her brutal to
him when he seemed to ally himself with the powers that made her
afraid.
“It sounds all right,” said Bertram, listening a little impatiently,
“but it’s all wrong! Joyce doesn’t understand fear. She has more than
the courage of men.”
“Physical courage, yes. Not mental courage.”
“Besides,” said Bertram, “that doesn’t solve my problem. How am
I going to live a single life, apart from Joyce, who is still my wife?
How am I going to persuade her to withdraw that word ‘traitor’?”
“Give her time, and don’t worry,” was Janet’s answer to his
conundrum. “A little separation will do you both good. Heavens alive!
The constant companionship of marriage would be a strain on two
archangels. I couldn’t bear it.”
“You’ve borne my company patiently for three evenings a week,”
said Bertram.
“Yes, but not for three breakfasts! It’s breakfast that’s the test of
love. Most people break over it, like boiled eggs.”
Bertram wasn’t sure how far Janet’s talk was sincere, how much
she believed in her own absurdities. Perhaps she was behaving to
him as she did to her blinded men, talking “any old thing”—to get a
laugh out of them, to “keep their pecker up.”
He accused her of that once, and she blushed a little, as though
found guilty.
He made her blush another time, when he spoke of Christy’s love
for her.
“I suppose you know Christy worships you?”
She veiled her eyes with her long brown lashes, and said, “Yes, I
know. . . . Poor dear old Plesiosaurus!”
“Why don’t you fix it up with him?”
A little smile played about her lips.
“ ‘He’s never asked me, sir, she said.’ And, besides, I haven’t told
you that I requite his gloomy passion!”
“He’s one of the best in the world,” said Bertram.
She agreed, but said that the best were almost as difficult as the
worst when it came to board and breakfast with them.
“Aren’t you human?” asked Bertram, half jestingly, half in
earnest. “Don’t you need love, and the passion of life?”
She talked so frankly to him that he could speak like that.
That doubt about her humanity amused her exceedingly.
“Man!” she cried, “I’m a living Cleopatra without her Antony! If I
were to ease up an instant on blinded men, political meetings, ‘Left
Wing’ committees, audacious novels, and all manner of work,
goodness knows what I should do in the way of amorous adventure.
I go in for what the psychoanalysts call the sublimation of sex.”
“What the deuce is that?” asked Bertram.
“Transferring the emotion to intellectual aims. Producing books
instead of babies. Reforming society instead of yearning for a kiss.
Keeping busy on foolish, futile things, instead of wasting one’s
energy in amorous dalliance. That’s my advice to you, young fellow!
Cut out the emotional stuff for a time. Forget Joyce and marriage,
and all this morbid love-agony. Life’s bigger than that. It’s only a
little messy side of life. We make too much fuss about it, exaggerate
the importance of the damn thing by always thinking and writing
and talking about it. Go and make a revolution somewhere, or lead
an expedition to find the living Megatherium, or write a book to
‘bust’ the falsity of things, or cut down trees in Canada, or convert
cannibals to Christianity, or Christians to a decent code of honour, or
make some plan for a higher civilisation, or some plan for destroying
the civilisation we have—any good, straight, clean, manly job that’s
not mixed up with the eternal soppy and sickly question of love and
Louisa. Give it a miss, O Knight of the Rueful Countenance.”
Bertram shook his head.
“Human nature is human nature. It doesn’t give one any peace
that way. It keeps on nagging.”
“Don’t let it nag. Crush the little devil down. Say, ‘Avaunt, you
vampire!’ Look at me! A Cleopatra, yet beyond reproach, as Cæsar’s
wife!”
She cheered him. There was something in her point of view. He
must put the problem of Joyce out of his mind and heart as far as
possible. Get busy! Well, he was writing some more articles for The
New World. They helped him to forget.
And yet this girl, Janet, so gay, so kind, so wise, even in spite of
her extravagance of thought and speech, was beginning to trouble
him in the very way he wished to avoid, in the very way she derided
and denounced.
She troubled him one night when she said suddenly, “A pity, Sir
Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I understand you
better. We think more on the same line. And you were my first
Dream Knight, in the days when you kissed me in Kensington
Gardens.”
It was just like her to come out with a startling thing like that, in
a matter-of-fact way, as though it were nothing out of the ordinary,
and undisturbing. He was strangely disturbed, and hardly knew what
to say.
“Too late now!” was all he could say, and then laughed uneasily.
She troubled him again by the way she used to sit on a little low
stool by his side when they were alone together in the evening or
even when Katherine Wild was with them, leaning her head against
his knees. He liked it very much because it was so comradely and
sisterly, but he was human and separated from his wife, and not a
disembodied spirit.
He was troubled more than all one night when he was leaving
her and she put her face up to be kissed and said, “A chaste salute,
Sir Faithful? Why not?”
He kissed her, and it was good in his loneliness. And yet not good
in his conscience. For he had faith and loyalty, to Joyce who was his
wife, though unkind to him, and to Christy who was his friend, and
the lover of this girl.
As he went back to his mother’s house in Sloane Street, he spoke
aloud the old catchword which was his usual comment on life:
“It’s all very difficult!”
 XXXI
A thunderbolt struck the house in Sloane Street at half past eight
one morning. It came, as other bolts had fallen upon men’s and
women’s hearts during the time of the Great War, in a little pink
envelope. This one was addressed to Bertram Pollard, and it came
from Dublin.

Dennis condemned to death execution Wednesday.

Implore father’s influence. Susan.

Bertram was sitting at breakfast opposite her father, who was

reading The Morning Post as usual at this meal. His mother was
pouring out coffee, and was aware instantly of his sudden indrawing
of breath.
“Oh, Bertram!” she said, in a low voice. “Is it bad news?”
She slopped some coffee from the pot over the edge of a cup.
He was tempted to lie to her and say “Nothing much! A business
matter,” but before the words left his lips he knew that honesty was
best. She had seen his look of dismay, if he prevaricated, she would
guess that the news was worse than this, though this was bad.
“It’s not good,” he said. “It’s about Susan’s husband.”
“That young scoundrel!” said his father, glancing over the top of
his paper; “what infamy is he mixed up in now?”
Bertram read out the telegram, and saw his mother’s face change
to a new tone of pallor, and the look of anguish in her eyes for
Susan.
“ ‘Implore father’s influence.’ ” These words caused his father to
drop The Morning Post in which he was reading a terrific indictment
of Sinn Fein with a sense of fierce enjoyment.
“I wouldn’t use a hairsbreadth of influence to save my own son
from the hangman’s rope, if he were a Sinn Fein murderer.”
 “He’s your own daughter’s husband,” said Bertram. “The
relationship is fairly close.”
“Too close,” said Michael Pollard. “Susan dishonoured her name
by that secret and shameful marriage. I’ll never forgive her. I’ve
already given orders that her name will not be mentioned in my
presence.”
He picked up the paper again, and pretended to read, very
calmly. But his hands trembled, so that the paper rustled.
“My dear!” said Mrs. Pollard; “for our dear Susan’s sake, I implore
you, as she implores you. I’ve been a faithful wife to you. I beg you
now to use any power you have in a plea of mercy for that
misguided boy.”
She had risen from her chair, and Bertram saw that she was
more excited than he had ever seen her. She had a tragic look, and
age had crept into her face suddenly, so that she seemed an old, old
lady, very frail and broken.
His father lowered his paper again, and he too was startled, it
seemed to Bertram, by his wife’s look and speech.
“My darling,” he said, “trouble falls heavily upon your poor soul,
because of our children’s folly. But I can do nothing in this matter,
even if I would. If the fellow has been condemned by court-martial,
it’s clear that he’s guilty of murder. He must suffer the punishment of
murderers. No power of mine can save him.”
“You can have an enquiry made. At least postpone this dreadful
sentence! Michael, if you have any love for me, in my old age, and
my weakness—”
She faltered forward to him, and would have fallen if Bertram
had not sprung towards her and held her close.
“Mother! Courage!”
“My poor Susan!” she cried. “My dear little daughter!”
Mr. Pollard rose, pale now, like his wife, visibly distressed.
“I’ll see if there’s anything to be done,” he said. “I’ll make
enquiry. Hush, Mother! Hush, now!”
She put her hand on his shoulder and wept miserably, and said,
“For God’s sake, dear. I can’t bear it! This is the worst that’s
happened yet.”
 Bertram took her to the sitting-room, and left her there later,
when she seemed more composed, though still trembling. He went
to his father’s study, and entered without knocking, and saw his
father standing with his hands behind his back, staring at the floor
with a heavy frown.
“Father,” he said, “something’s got to be done about this. You
must get to work quickly. It’s not long till Wednesday.”
Michael Pollard stared at his son with anger and suspicion.
“How much do you know about this?” he asked. “Did Susan tell
you how many murders her precious husband has committed? How
many of your fellow officers he has shot in cold blood?”
“I know nothing,” said Bertram. “Don’t talk to me, father, as if I
were an accomplice of Dennis O’Brien.”
“You’re sympathetic with Sinn Fein,” said his father. “You
sheltered this very man in your own house, I’m told.”
Bertram wondered how he knew as much as that, but didn’t ask.
“He was with me an hour or two. Susan brought him. But that’s
nothing to the point. For mother’s sake you must do what’s possible,
and quickly, sir!”
“There’s nothing possible,” said Mr. Pollard. “I know all about the
case already. This man O’Brien has been found guilty of leading an
ambush against British officers, two of whom were killed. He was
captured on the spot, a week ago, tried yesterday, and condemned.
I have the full report.”
So he knew before the telegram came! He had not thought it
worth while to tell Bertram before or to guard his wife against the
shock of the news.
Bertram begged him to put in a plea for mercy. It wouldn’t be
ignored, because of his name and service to the Government. It
might save O’Brien’s life, at least, and Susan’s life-long misery.
Michael Pollard’s face hardened.
“I speak to you more frankly, Bertram, than to your poor mother.
For her sake I’ve already done as much as I can in honour. I’ve
enquired into the proofs of guilt, into the Court Martial procedure.
There’s no doubt of guilt, no flaw in the conduct of the trial. The
Chief Secretary has favoured me with a private consultation. I told
him, as I tell you, that I wish for no mercy on behalf of an Irish rebel
who has fired on forces of the Crown, and killed men in British
uniform.”
Bertram groaned, and quoted, not lightly, but in anguish, the old
Shakespearean line,
“The quality of mercy is not strained.”
“Sinn Fein has no mercy,” said his father. “It’s ruthless and bloody
and cruel.”
“Need we meet cruelty by cruelty?” asked Bertram. “Wouldn’t
chivalry gain more for us?”
“Never!” answered his father harshly. “The Irish Catholics don’t
understand the meaning of chivalry. These Sinn Feiners would stab a
man in the back who held out his hand in friendship and
forgiveness.”
“You’re Irish of the Irish!” said Bertram. “Your Irish blood is in my
veins. We of all people should understand the passion of our race for
liberty, their remembrance of old crimes against their faith and land,
their frightful heritage of memory. I loathe this guerrilla warfare, but
I understand its motives and impulses. In their spirit it’s as much a
fight for liberty as that of any people who strive to free themselves
from a foreign yoke. O’Brien’s deed was not real murder, at least in
his soul and conscience, because it was an act of war—armed men
against armed men, and ours with no right in Ireland, except that of
ancient conquest. Surely there’s a difference. Surely as an Irishman,
you see there’s no moral baseness in what O’Brien did? Except the
madness of argument by blood and force for an ideal of liberty
which might be gained by other means.”
“Every word you say convinces me that you’re on the side of the
rebels,” said Michael Pollard. “You’re a traitor in my own household.
I’ll be glad when you leave my house before I have to turn you out.”
It was the second time that Bertram had been called traitor. Once
it was his wife who called him that. Now it was his father. He went
white to the lips at the sound of it, and that last sentence of his
father’s put passion into his brain.
 “Did God make you without humanity?” he asked. “Is it for
nothing that you’ve lost the love of all your children and now risk the
love of the woman who bore them, and is stricken by your
harshness in her old age?”
Michael Pollard’s face became ashen in colour at these words
from his son. He took a step forward, and then raised his hand
sharply.
“Silence, sir! I have one son who is a comfort to me, and to his
mother. Digby does his duty and is loyal. I find no loyalty in you. I
don’t wish to hear more of your rebellious insolence.”
“Then you refuse to raise a little finger to help Susan in her grief,
or mother in her agony?” asked Bertram.
His father turned from him.
“Leave my room!”
Bertram left the room, and that night crossed over to Ireland
from Holyhead. In his mind was the thought of three other people
stricken by this tragedy—those three sisters of Dennis O’Brien, who
would be weeping for him now, and praying still to God, who didn’t
answer their prayers. The youngest of them—Jane—had said,
“What’ll I do if Dennis is taken from us?” She’d had a foreboding of
his fate, perhaps a knowledge of his guilt.
Guilt it was. Bertram sickened at the thought of that guerrilla
warfare which he had tried to defend to his father, but couldn’t
defend in his heart because of loyalty to England and hatred of
cruelty. It was all madness and murder, though with some spiritual
value behind it, and not ignoble passion. Those young men, mostly
boys, who fought for Irish liberty, were willing to die for Ireland,
went to their death on the scaffold like martyrs. Yet they adopted
methods of war which were Red Indian in their savagery. On the
other side, the British Government had abandoned all sanity, all
statesmanship, all decency. By a series of stupidities, falsities,
betrayal of pledges, they had maddened Irish manhood into this
state of rebellion—at least had reopened old wounds, and revived
old passions. Now they could find no other policy than that of
coercion, meeting Terror by Counter-Terror, trying to break the spirit
of the Irish people by raids, searches, shootings, burnings. God!
What a horror, after the Great War! And what a mental agony for a
man like himself, hating the methods of both sides, seeing the point
of view from both sides, divided in sympathy, trying to keep to the
middle of the road, between the two extremes. Once again he was
called traitor, and felt the word like a wound in his heart. Traitor,
though he was loyal to the truth as far as he could see it. Traitor,
though he had pledged his soul to loyalty!
 XXXII
It was a rough passage from Holyhead, and he felt sick in the
smoking saloon, crowded with officers of the Royal Scots, among
whom, silent and absorbed in thought or prayer, sat two Irish
priests. There was a battalion of soldiers on board—mostly boys of
nineteen or so—and most of them were horribly sick as they lay
among their kit and rifles. They cursed Ireland, the War Office, Lloyd
George, and other powers which had ordained this night passage
across the Irish Channel and the “bloody job” at the end of it.
Bertram spoke a few words to one of the officers, a captain with
a row of decorations. He had been on service in Ireland before, and
was going back from leave.
“What’s it like over there?” asked Bertram.
“Like nothing on earth,” said the officer. “Worse than France,
barring barrage-fire. One never knows when one is going to be
sniped, or blown up by a bomb thrown from a side street. Not a
gentleman’s job! A rotten dirty business.”
“What’s going to be the end of it?”
The young officer shrugged his shoulders.
“They’ll go on with this guerrilla game for centuries, unless we
wipe out the whole lot. Another Cromwell show! Of course, I’m not
supposed to hold opinions, but speaking privately, I’d give them
anything less than a Republic, clear out British troops, and let them
stew in their own juice. They’d fight like Hell among themselves.
That would make less Irish in the world, and save a lot of trouble.
What’s your view?”
Bertram’s view was much the same, with regard to “clearing out,”
though he believed they wouldn’t go in for civil war among
themselves if they had Dominion Home Rule.
“You don’t know them,” said the Captain of Royal Scots.
“I’m half Irish,” Bertram told him, and the officer said, “Oh!”
suspiciously, and after that was silent and moved away.
 The railway journey to North Wall was uneventful. The line was
guarded by troops, and there were many soldiers in the train,
wearing steel hats and full fighting kit. Boys again, sullen-looking,
and with shifty, nervous eyes.
Then Dublin.
Bertram walked through the streets like a revenant. Dublin
belonged to a former life. He had forgotten it for a thousand years—
or was it only sixteen? He found his way to Merrion Square, and
stood outside his father’s old home—Number 23—and gazed up at
its windows through dirty lace curtains.
Inside one of those rooms he had first seen the light of day. Half-
forgotten incidents of his childhood came back to him, vividly, with
astonishing sharpness of detail. He remembered putting his head
once through those railings and not being able to get it out again.
That was when he was four years old, or thereabouts. Good
Heavens! There were two of the railings bent, where his Irish nurse
had pressed them apart with a cry of “Holy Mother of God!” Betty
was her name. He remembered now. And there was the ring and
wrought iron lion’s head of the door-knocker which he had just been
able to reach on tip-toe, later in that early life of his.
He remembered “the Move”—the frightful excitement of it—
when, at nine years of age, he had left this house with all the family,
for England. He had wept bitterly at leaving, especially when his
broken rocking-horse had been cast on to the scrap heap, with other
wreckage of nursery life. He could remember the mangy tuft of hair
on that wooden beast, and the smell of red paint which had once
represented a saddle. He had kissed its wooden nose, and howled
when it was taken from him for ever.
Betty had frightened him about England. “The English will skin
you alive if you make a noise in their London town. . . . The English
know nothing but hate for the Irish. . . . The English are a bad-
tempered set of spalpeens, and there’s no truth in them at all.”
Dublin! . . . It was strange to be here among his own people, a
foreigner among them. He had the English way of speech, the
English way of mind. Some of them, especially the young men,
scowled at him as he passed down Sackville Street. They knew him
as English by the cut of his clothes, by the look in his eyes. They
didn’t see the Irish strain of blood in him.
He looked at their faces as they pushed by. What was wrong with
them? They were people haunted by some hidden fear. There was
fear in their eyes. They kept glancing about them, uneasily,
watchfully. Some men were nailing boards outside a shop window,
and one of the planks fell on to the pavement with a slight crash.
Instantly a group of people gathered round a shop window scattered
and ran into neighbouring doorways. The men with the boards
laughed. One of them called out, “No danger at all, at all!”—and in a
moment or two men and women emerged from shelter, smiled at
each other, and went their way again, with that nervous glance to
left and right.
Haunted! Yes, that was the word. Many of the women had
haggard eyes, drawn, pallid faces, little lines of pain about their
mouths. They looked as though they had lost their sleep for nights
or weeks. Their nerves were tattered. It was easy to see that by
their sudden shrinking from any little noise, like the crack of a
jarvey’s whip, or a boy’s shrill whistle.
They greeted each other like women Bertram had seen in French
villages after mornings of great battle when the wounded had gone
streaming by.
“Dear God!” said one woman to another as he passed.
“Mother of Mercy!” said another.
There was no mystery about it. Here, in Sackville Street were
outward and visible signs of conflict, old and recent; the ruins of the
Post Office and public buildings bombarded during the Rebellion of
Easter Week in ’16, and new bulletmarks on the walls of shops, and
through plate-glass windows. Many shops were barricaded. Others
were shut up and barred. Women did their shopping through narrow
entrances of stacked timber. It was a city of Civil War.
Worse than Civil War, thought Bertram, for here there was no
knowing who was friend and who enemy. Any of these young
Irishmen strolling by might have a bomb in his pocket, and hurl it at
any man he had marked down, rightly or wrongly, as a spy, a
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