The Middle of the Road. Philip Gibbs

      VI

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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