"That's no good as an identification of the party," Tietjens said. "Macmaster gives a party every Friday, not Saturday. He has for years. Mrs. Macmaster goes there every Friday. To act as hostess. She has for years. Miss Wannop goes there every Friday after she has done work for her mother. To support Mrs. Macmaster. . . ."
"She has for years!" Sylvia mocked him. "And you go there every Friday! to croodle over Miss Wannop. Oh, Christopher!"—she adopted a mock pathetic voice—"I never did have much opinion of your taste . . . but notthat! Don't let it be that. Put her back. She's too young for you. . . ."
"All the geniuses in London," Tietjens continued equably, "go to Macmaster's every Friday. He has been trusted with the job of giving away Royal Literary Bounty money: that's why they go. They go: that's why he was given his C.B."
"I should not have thought they counted," Sylvia said.
"Of course they count," Tietjens said. "They write for the Press. They can get anybody anything . . . except themselves!"
"Like you!" Sylvia said; "exactly like you! They're a lot of bribed squits."
"Oh, no," Tietjens said. "It isn't done obviously or discreditably. Don't believe that Macmaster distributes forty-pounders yearly of bounty on condition that he gets advancement. He hasn't, himself, the least idea of how it works, except by his atmosphere."
"I never knew a beastlier atmosphere," Sylvia said. "Itreekedof rabbit's food."
"You're quite mistaken," Tietjens said; "that is the Russian leather of the backs of the specially bound presentation copies in thelargebookcase."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Sylvia said. "Whatarepresentation copies? I should have thought you'd had enough of the beastly Russian smells Kiev stunk of."
Tietjens considered for a moment.
"No! I don't remember it," he said. "Kiev? . . . Oh, it's where we were . . ."
"You put half your mother's money," Sylvia said, "into the Government of Kiev 12½ per cent. City Tramways. . . ."
At that Tietjens certainly winced, a type of wincing that Sylvia hadn't wanted.
"You're not fit to go out to-morrow," she said. "I shall wire to old Campion."
"Mrs. Duchemin," Tietjens said woodenly. "Mrs. Macmaster that is, also used to burn a little incense in the room before the parties. . . . Those Chinese stinks . . . what do they call them? Well, it doesn't matter"; he added that resignedly. Then he went on: "Don't you make any mistake. Mrs. Macmaster is a very superior woman. Enormously efficient! Tremendously respected. I shouldn't advise even you to come up against her, now she's in the saddle."
Mrs. Tietjens said:
"Thatsort of woman!"
Tietjens said:
"I don't say you ever will come up against her. Your spheres differ. But, if you do, don't. . . . I say it because you seem to have got your knife into her."
"I don't like that sort of thing going on under my windows," Sylvia said.
Tietjens said:
"What sort of thing? . . . I was trying to tell you a little about Mrs. Macmaster . . . she's like the woman who was the mistress of the man who burned the other fellow's horrid book. . . . I can't remember the names."
Sylvia said quickly:
"Don't try!" In a slower tone she added: "I don't in the least want to know. . . ."
"Well, she was an Egeria!" Tietjens said. "An inspiration to the distinguished. Mrs. Macmaster is all that. The geniuses swarm round her, and with the really select ones she corresponds. She writes superior letters, about the Higher Morality usually; very delicate in feeling. Scotch naturally. When they go abroad she sends them snatches of London literary happenings; well done, mind you! And then, every now and then, she slips in something she wants Macmaster to have. But with great delicacy. . . . Say it's this C.B. . . . she transfuses into the minds of Genius One, Two and Three the idea of a C.B. for Macmaster. . . . Genius No One lunches with the Deputy Sub-Patronage Secretary, who looks after literary honours and lunches with geniuses to get the gossip. . . ."
"Why," Sylvia said, "did you lend Macmaster all that money?" Sylvia asked. . . .
"Mind you," Tietjens continued his own speech, "it's perfectly proper. That's the way patronageisdistributed in this country; it's the way it should be. The only clean way. Mrs. Duchemin backs Macmaster because he's a first-class fellow for his job. Andsheis an influence over the geniuses because she's a first-class person for hers. . . . She represents the higher, nicer morality for really nice Scots. Before long she will be getting tickets stopped from being sent to people for the Academy soirées. She already does it for the Royal Bounty dinners. A little later, when Macmaster is knighted for bashing the French in the eye, she'll have a tiny share in auguster assemblies. . . . Those people have to asksomebodyfor advice. Well, one day you'll want to present some débutante. And you won't get a ticket. . . ."
"Then I'm glad," Sylvia exclaimed, "that I wrote to Brownie's uncle about the woman. I was a little sorry this morning because, from what Glorvina told me, you're in such a devil of a hole. . . ."
"Who's Brownie's uncle?" Tietjens asked. "Lord . . . Lord . . . The banker! I know Brownie's in his uncle's bank."
"Port Scatho!" Sylvia said. "I wish you wouldn't act forgetting people's names. You overdo it."
Tietjens' face went a shade whiter. . . .
"Port Scatho," he said, "is the chairman of the Inn Billeting Committees, of course. And you wrote to him? . . ."
"I'm sorry," Sylvia said. "I mean I'm sorry I said that about your forgetting. . . . I wrote to him and said that as a resident of the Inn I objected to your mistress—he knows the relationship, of course!—creeping in every Friday under a heavy veil and creeping out every Saturday at four in the morning."
"Lord Port Scatho knows about my relationship," Tietjens began.
"He saw her in your arms in the train," Sylvia said. "It upset Brownie so much he offered to shut down your overdraft and return any cheques you had out marked R.D."
"To please you?" Tietjens asked. "Dobankers do that sort of thing? It's a new light on British society. . . ."
"I suppose bankers try to please their women friends, like other men," Sylvia said. "I told him very emphatically it wouldn't please me. . . But . . ." She hesitated: "I wouldn't give him a chance to get back on you. I don't want to interfere in your affairs. But Brownie doesn't like you. . . ."
"He wants you to divorce me and marry him?" Tietjens asked.
"How did you know?" Sylvia asked indifferently. "I let him give me lunch now and then because it's convenient to have him manage my affairs, you being away. . . . But of course he hates you for being in the army. All the men who aren't hate all the men that are. And, of course, when there's a woman between them the men who aren't do all they can to do the others in. When they're bankers they have a pretty good pull. . . ."
"I suppose they have," Tietjens said, vaguely; "of course they would have. . . ."
Sylvia abandoned the blind-cord on which she had been dragging with one hand. In order that light might fall on her face and give more impressiveness to her words, for, in a minute or two, when she felt brave enough, she meant really to let him have her bad news!—she drifted to the fireplace. He followed her round, turning on his chair to give her his face.
She said:
"Look here, it's all the fault of this beastly war, isn't it? Can you deny it? . . . I mean that decent, gentlemanly fellows like Brownie have turned into beastly squits!"
"I suppose it is," Tietjens said dully. "Yes, certainly it is. You're quite right. It's the incidental degeneration of the heroic impulse: if the heroic impulse has too even a strain put on it the incidental degeneration gets the upper hand. That accounts for the Brownies . . . all the Brownies . . . turning squits. . . ."
"Then why do you go on with it?" Sylvia said. "God knows I could wangle you out if you'd back me in the least little way."
Tietjens said:
"Thanks! I prefer to remain in it. . . . How else am I to get a living? . . ."
"You know then," Sylvia exclaimed almost shrilly. "You know that they won't have you back in the office if they can find a way of getting you out. . . ."
"Oh, they'll find that!" Tietjens said. . . . He continued his other speech: "When we go to war with France," he said dully. . . . And Sylvia knew he was only now formulating his settled opinion so as not to have his active brain to give to the discussion. He must be thinking hard of the Wannop girl! With her littleness: her tweed-skirtishness. . . . A provincial miniature of herself, Sylvia Tietjens. . . . If she, then, had been miniature, provincial. . . . But Tietjens' words cut her as if she had been lashed with a dog-whip. "We shall behave more creditably," he had said, "because there will be less heroic impulse about it. We shall . . . half of us . . . be ashamed of ourselves. So there will be much less incidental degeneration."
Sylvia who, by that was listening to him, abandoned the consideration of Miss Wannop and the pretence that obsessed her, of Tietjens talking to the girl, against a background of books at Macmaster's party. She exclaimed:
"Good God! What are you talking about? . . ."
Tietjens went on:
"About our next war with France. . . . We're the natural enemies of the French. We have to make our bread either by robbing them or making catspaws of them. . . ."
Sylvia said:
"We can't! We couldn't . . ."
"We've got to!" Tietjens said. "It's the condition of our existence. We're a practically bankrupt, over-populated, northern country: they're rich southerners, with a falling population. Towards 1930 we shall have to do what Prussia did in 1914. Our conditions will be exactly those of Prussia then. It's the . . . what is it called? . . ."
"But . . ." Sylvia cried out. "You're a Franco-maniac. . . . You're thought to be a French agent. . . . That's what's bitching your career!"
"I am?" Tietjens asked uninterestedly. He added: "Yes, that probablywouldbitch my career. . . ." He went on, with a little more animation and a little more of his mind:
"Ah!thatwill be a war worth seeing. . . . None of their drunken rat-fighting for imbecile boodlers . . ."
"It would drive mother mad!" Sylvia said.
"Oh, no it wouldn't," Tietjens said. "It will stimulate her if she is still alive. . . . Our heroes won't be drunk with wine and lechery: our squits won't stay at home and stab the heroes in the back. Our Minister for Water-closets won't keep two and a half million men in any base in order to get the votes of their women at a General Election—that's been the first evil effects of giving women the vote! With the French holding Ireland and stretching in a solid line from Bristol to Whitehall, we should hang the Minister before he had time to sign the papers. And we should be decently loyal to our Prussian allies and brothers. . . . Our Cabinet won't hate them as they hate the French for being frugal and strong in logic and well-educated and remorselessly practical. Prussians are the sort of fellows you can be hoggish with when you want to. . . ."
Sylvia interjected violently:
"For God's sake stop it. You almost make me believe what you say is true. I tell you mother would go mad. Her greatest friend is the Duchesse Tonnerre Châteaulherault. . . ."
"Well!" Tietjens said. "Your greatest friends are the Med . . . Med . . . the Austrian officers you take chocolates and flowers to. That there was all the row about . . . we're at war withthemand you haven't gone mad!"
"I don't know," Sylvia said. "Sometimes I think I am going mad!" She drooped. Tietjens, his face very strained, was looking at the tablecloth. He muttered: "Med . . . Met . . . Kos . . ." Sylvia said:
"Do you know a poem calledSomewhere? It begins: 'Somewhere or other there must surely be . . .'"
Tietjens said:
"I'm sorry. No! I haven't been able to get up my poetry again."
Sylvia said:
"Don't!" She added: "you've got to be at the War Office at 4.15, haven't you? What's the time now?" She extremely wanted to give him her bad news before he went; she extremely wanted to put off giving it as long as she could. She wanted to reflect on the matter first; she wanted also to keep up a desultory conversation, or he might leave the room. She didn't want to have to say to him: "Wait a minute, I've something to say to you!" for she might not, at that moment, be in the mood. He said it was not yet two. He could give her an hour and a half more.
To keep the conversation going, she said:
"I suppose the Wannop girl is making bandages or being a Waac. Something forceful."
Tietjens said:
"No; she's a pacifist. As pacifist as you. Not so impulsive; but, on the other hand, she has more arguments. I should say she'll be in prison before the war's over. . . ."
"A nice time you must have between the two of us," Sylvia said. The memory of her interview with the great lady nicknamed Glorvina—though it was not at all a good nickname—was coming over her forcibly.
She said:
"I suppose you're always talking it over with her? You see her every day."
She imagined that that might keep him occupied for a minute or two. He said—she caught the sense of it only—and quite indifferently that he had tea with Mrs. Wannop every day. She had moved to a place called Bedford Park, which was near his office: not three minutes' walk. The War Office had put up a lot of huts on some public green in that neighbourhood. He only saw the daughter once a week, at most. They never talked about the war; it was too disagreeable a subject for the young woman. Or rather, too painful. . . . His talk gradually drifted into unfinished sentences. . . .
They played that comedy occasionally, for it is impossible for two people to live in the same house and not have some common meeting ground. So they would each talk: sometimes talking at great length and with politeness, each thinking his or her thoughts till they drifted into silence.
And, since she had acquired the habit of going into retreat—with an Anglican sisterhood in order to annoy Tietjens, who hated converts and considered that the communions should not mix—Sylvia had acquired also the habit of losing herself almost completely in reveries. Thus she was now vaguely conscious that a greyish lump, Tietjens, sat at the head of a whitish expanse: the lunch-table. There were also books . . . actually she was seeing a quite different figure and other books—the books of Glorvina's husband, for the great lady had received Sylvia in that statesman's library.
Glorvina, who was the mother of two of Sylvia's absolutely most intimate friends, had sent for Sylvia. She wished, kindly and even wittily, to remonstrate with Sylvia because of her complete abstention from any patriotic activity. She offered Sylvia the address of a place in the city where she could buy wholesale and ready-made diapers for babies which Sylvia could present to some charity or other as being her own work. Sylvia said she would do nothing of the sort, and Glorvina said she would present the idea to poor Mrs. Pilsenhauser. She—Glorvina—said she spent some time every day thinking out acts of patriotism for the distressed rich with foreign names, accents or antecedents. . . .
Glorvina was a fiftyish lady with a pointed, grey face and a hard aspect; but when she was inclined to be witty or to plead earnestly she had a kind manner. The room in which they were was over a Belgravia back garden. It was lit by a skylight and the shadows from above deepened the lines of her face, accentuating the rather dusty grey of the hair as well as both the hardness and the kind manner. This very much impressed Sylvia, who was used to seeing the lady by artificial light. . . .
She said, however:
"You don't suggest, Glorvina, that I'm the distressed rich with a foreign name!"
The great lady had said:
"My dear Sylvia; it isn't so much you as your husband. Your last exploit with the Esterhazys and Metternichs has pretty well done forhim. You forget that the present powers that be are not logical. . . ."
Sylvia remembered that she had sprung up from her leather saddle-back chair, exclaiming:
"You mean to say that those unspeakable swine think thatI'm. . ."
Glorvina said patiently:
"My dear Sylvia, I've already said it's not you. It's your husband that suffers. He appears to be too good a fellow to suffer. Mr. Waterhouse says so. I don't know him myself, well."
Sylvia remembered that she had said:
"And who in the world is Mr. Waterhouse?" and, hearing that Mr. Waterhouse was a late Liberal Minister, had lost interest. She couldn't, indeed, remember any of the further words of her hostess, as words. The sense of them had too much overwhelmed her. . . .
She stood now, looking at Tietjens and only occasionally seeing him, her mind completely occupied with the effort to recapture Glorvina's own words in the desire for exactness. Usually she remembered conversations pretty well; but on this occasion her mad fury, her feeling of nausea, the pain of her own nails in her palms, an unrecoverable sequence of emotions had overwhelmed her.
She looked at Tietjens now with a sort of gloating curiosity. How was it possible that the most honourable man she knew should be so overwhelmed by foul and baseless rumours? It made you suspect that honour had, in itself, a quality of the evil eye. . . .
Tietjens, his face pallid, was fingering a piece of toast. He muttered:
"Met . . . Met . . . It's Met . . ." He wiped his brow with a table-napkin, looked at it with a start, threw it on the floor and pulled out a handkerchief. . . . He muttered: "Mett . . . Metter . . ." His face illuminated itself like the face of a child listening at a shell.
Sylvia screamed with a passion of hatred:
"For God's sake sayMetternich. . . you're driving me mad!"
When she looked at him again his face had cleared and he was walking quickly to the telephone in the corner of the room. He asked her to excuse him and gave a number at Ealing. He said after a moment:
"Mrs. Wannop? Oh! My wife has just reminded me that Metternich was the evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. . . ." He said: "Yes! Yes!", and listened. After a time he said: "Oh, you could put it stronger than that. You could put it that the Tory determination to ruin Napoleon at all costs was one of those pieces of party imbecility that, etc. . . . Yes; Castlereagh. And of course Wellington. . . . I'm very sorry I must ring off. . . . Yes; to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo. . . . No; Ishan'tbe seeing her again. . . . No; she's made a mistake. . . . Yes; give her my love . . . good-bye." He was reversing the earpiece to hang it up, but a high-pitched series of yelps from the instrument forced it back to his ear: "Oh!War babies!" he exclaimed. "I've already sent the statistics off to you! No! thereisn'ta marked increase of the illegitimacy rate, except in patches. The rate's appallingly high in the lowlands of Scotland; but it alwaysisappallingly high there . . ." He laughed and said good-naturedly: "Oh, you're an old journalist: you won't let fifty quid go for that . . ." He was breaking off. But: "Or," he suddenly exclaimed, "here's another idea for you. The rate's about the same, probably because of this: half the fellows who go out to France are reckless because it's the last chance, as they see it. But the other half are made twice as conscientious. A decent Tommie thinks twice about leaving his girl in trouble just before he's killed. . . . The divorce statistics are up, of course, because people will chance making new starts within the law. . . . Thanks . . . thanks . . ." He hung up the earpiece. . . .
Listening to that conversation had extraordinarily cleared Sylvia's mind. She said, almost sorrowfully:
"I suppose that that's why you don't seduce that girl." And she knew—she had known at once from the suddenly changed inflection of Tietjens' voice when he had said "a decent Tommie thinks twice before leaving his girl in trouble"!—that Tietjens himself had thought twice.
She looked at him now almost incredulously, but with great coolness. Whyshouldn'the, she asked herself, give himself a little pleasure with his girl before going to almost certain death. . . . She felt a real, sharp pain at her heart. . . . A poor wretch in such a devil of a hole. . . .
She had moved to a chair close beside the fireplace and now sat looking at him, leaning interestedly forward, as if at a garden party she had been finding—par impossible!—a pastoral play not so badly produced. Tietjens was a fabulous monster. . . .
He was a fabulous monster not because he was honourable and virtuous. She had known several very honourable and very virtuous men. If she had never known an honourable or virtuous woman except among her French or Austrian friends, that was, no doubt, because virtuous and honourable women did not amuse her or because, except just for the French and Austrians, they were not Roman Catholics. . . . But the honourable and virtuous men she had known had usually prospered and been respected. They weren't the great fortunes, but they were well-offish: well spoken of: of the country gentleman type . . . Tietjens. . . .
She arranged her thoughts. To get one point settled in her mind, she asked:
"What really happened to you in France? What is really the matter with your memory? Or your brain, is it?"
He said carefully:
"It's half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale. Without a proper blood supply. . . . So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone."
She said:
"Butyou! . . . without a brain! . . ." As this was not a question he did not answer.
His going at once to the telephone, as soon as he was in the possession of the name "Metternich," had at last convinced her that he had not been, for the last four months, acting hypochondriacal or merely lying to obtain sympathy or extended sick leave. Amongst Sylvia's friends a wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival of lying, lechery, drink and howling that this affair was, to pretend to a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous. At any rate if a man passed his time at garden parties—or, as for the last months Tietjens had done, passed his time in a tin hut amongst dust heaps, going to tea every afternoon in order to help Mrs. Wannop with her newspaper articles—when men were so engaged they were, at least, not trying to kill each other.
She said now:
"Do you mind telling me what actually happened to you?"
He said:
"I don't know that I can very well. . . . Something burst—or 'exploded' is probably the right word—near me, in the dark. I expect you'd rather not hear about it? . . ."
"I want to!" Sylvia said.
He said:
"The point about it is that Idon'tknow what happened and I don't remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life dead. . . . What I remember is being in a C.C.S. and not being able to remember my own name."
"Youmeanthat?" Sylvia asked. "It's not just a way of talking?"
"No, it's not just a way of talking," Tietjens answered. "I lay in bed in the C.C.S. . . . Your friends were dropping bombs on it."
"You might not call them my friends," Sylvia said.
Tietjens said:
"I beg your pardon. One gets into a loose way of speaking. The poor bloody Huns then were dropping bombs from aeroplanes on the hospital huts. . . . I'm not suggesting they knew it was a C.C.S.; it was, no doubt, just carelessness. . . ."
"You needn't spare the Germans for me!" Sylvia said. "You needn't spare any man who has killed another man."
"I was, then, dreadfully worried," Tietjens went on. "I was composing a preface for a book on Arminianism. . . ."
"You haven't written a book!" Sylvia exclaimed eagerly, because she thought that if Tietjens took to writing a book there might be a way of his earning a living. Many people had told her that he ought to write a book.
"No, I hadn't written a book," Tietjens said, "and I didn't know what Arminianism was. . . ."
"You know perfectly well what the Arminian heresy is," Sylvia said sharply; "you explained it all to me years ago."
"Yes," Tietjens exclaimed. "Years ago I could have, but I couldn't then. I could now, but I was a little worried about it then. It's a little awkward to write a preface about a subject of which you know nothing. But it didn't seem to me to be discreditable in an army sense. . . . Still it worried me dreadfully not to know my own name. I lay and worried and worried and thought how discreditable it would appear if a nurse came along and asked me and I didn't know. Of course my name was on a luggage label tied to my collar; but I'd forgotten they did that to casualties. . . . Then a lot of people carried pieces of a nurse down the hut: the Germans' bombs had done that of course. They were still dropping about the place."
"But good heavens," Sylvia cried out, "do you mean they carried a dead nurse past you? . . ."
"The poor dear wasn't dead," Tietjens said. "I wish she had been. Her name was Beatrice Carmichael . . . the first name I learned after my collapse. She's dead now of course. . . . That seemed to wake up a fellow on the other side of the room with a lot of blood coming through the bandages on his head. . . . He rolled out of his bed and, without a word, walked across the hut and began to strangle me. . . ."
"But this isn't believable," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry, but I can't believe it. . . . You were an officer: theycouldn'thave carried a wounded nurse under your nose. They must have known your sister Caroline was a nurse and was killed. . . ."
"Carrie!" Tietjens said, "was drowned on a hospital ship. I thank God I didn't have to connect the other girl with her. . . . But you don't suppose that in addition to one's name, rank, unit, and date of admission they'd put that I'd lost a sister and two brothers in action and a father—of a broken heart I daresay. . . ."
"But you only lost one brother," Sylvia said. "I went into mourning for him and your sister. . . ."
"No, two," Tietjens said; "but the fellow who was strangling me was what I wanted to tell you about. He let out a number of ear-piercing shrieks and lots of orderlies came and pulled him off me and sat all over him. Then he began to shout 'Faith'! He shouted: 'Faith! . . . Faith! . . . Faith! . . .' at intervals of two seconds, as far as I could tell by my pulse, until four in the morning, when he died. . . . I don't know whether it was a religious exhortation or a woman's name, but I disliked him a good deal because he started my tortures, such as they were. . . . There had been a girl I knew called Faith. Oh, not a love affair: the daughter of my father's head gardener, a Scotsman. The point is that every time he said Faith I asked myself 'Faith . . . Faith what?' I couldn't remember the name of my father's head gardener."
Sylvia, who was thinking of other things, asked:
"Whatwasthe name?"
Tietjens answered:
"I don't know, I don't know to this day. . . . The point is that when I knew that I didn't knowthatname, I was as ignorant, asuninstructed, as a new-born babe and much more worried about it. . . . The Koran says—I've got as far as K in my reading of the Encyclopædia Britannica every afternoon at Mrs. Wannop's—'The strong man when smitten is smitten in his pride!' . . . Of course I got King's Regs, and the M.M.L. and Infantry Field Training and all the A.C.I.s to date by heart very quickly. And that's all a British officer is really encouraged to know. . . ."
"Oh, Christopher!" Sylvia said. "Youread that Encyclopædia; it's pitiful. You used to despise it so."
"That's what's meant by 'smitten in his pride,'" Tietjens said. "Of course what I read or hear now I remember. . . . But I haven't got to M, much less V. That was why I was worried about Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. Itryto remember things on my own, but I haven't yet done so. You see it's as if a certain area of my brain had been wiped white. Occasionally one name suggests another. You noticed, when I got Metternich it suggested Castlereagh and Wellington—and even other names. . . . But that's what the Department of Statistics will get me on. When they fire me out. The real reason will be that I've served. But they'll pretend it's because I've no more general knowledge than is to be found in the Encyclopædia: or two-thirds or more or less—according to the duration of the war. . . . Or, of course, the real reason will be that I won't fake statistics to dish the French with. They asked me to, the other day, as a holiday task. And when I refused you should have seen their faces."
"Have youreally," Sylvia asked, "lost two brothers in action?"
"Yes," Tietjens answered. "Curly and Longshanks. You never saw them because they were always in India. And they weren't noticeable. . . ."
"Two!" Sylvia said. "I only wrote to your father about one called Edward. And your sister Caroline. In the same letter. . . ."
"Carrie wasn't noticeable either," Tietjens said. "She did Charity Organisation Society work. . . . But I remember: you didn't like her. She was the born old maid. . . ."
"Christopher!" Sylvia asked, "do you still think your mother died of a broken heart because I left you?"
Tietjens said:
"Good God; no. I never thought so and I don't think so. Iknowshe didn't."
"Then!" Sylvia exclaimed, "she died of a broken heart because I came back. . . . It's no good protesting that you don't think so. I remember your face when you opened the telegram at Lobscheid. Miss Wannop forwarded it from Rye. I remember the postmark. She was born to do me ill. The moment you got it I could see you thinking that you must conceal from me that you thought it was because of me she died. I could see you wondering if it wouldn't be practicable to conceal from me that she was dead. You couldn't, of course, do that because, you remember, we were to have gone to Wiesbaden and show ourselves; and we couldn't do that because we should have to be in mourning. So you took me to Russia to get out of taking me to the funeral."
"I took you to Russia," Tietjens said. "I remember it all now—because I had an order from Sir Robert Ingleby to assist the British Consul-General in preparing a Blue Book statistical table of the Government of Kiev. . . . It appeared to be the most industrially promising region in the world in those days. It isn't now, naturally. I shall never see back a penny of the money I put into it. I thought I was clever in those days. . . . And of course, yes, the money was my mother's settlement. It comes back . . . yes, of course. . . ."
"Did you," Sylvia asked, "get out of taking me to your mother's funeral because you thought I should defile your mother's corpse by my presence? Or because you were afraid that in the presence of your mother's body you wouldn't be able to conceal from me that you thought I killed her? . . . Don't deny it. And don't get out of it by saying that you can't remember those days. You're remembering now: that I killed your mother: that Miss Wannop sent the telegram—why don't you score it against her that she sent the news? . . . Or, good God, why don't you score it against yourself, as the wrath of the Almighty, that your mother was dying while you and that girl were croodling over each other? . . . At Rye! Whilst I was at Lobscheid. . . ."
Tietjens wiped his brow with his handkerchief.
"Well, let's drop that," Sylvia said. "God knows I've no right to put a spoke in that girl's wheel or in yours. If you love each other you've a right to happiness and I daresay she'll make you happy. I can't divorce you, being a Catholic; but I won't make it difficult for you other ways, and self-contained people like you and her will manage somehow. You'll have learned the way from Macmaster and his mistress. . . . But, oh, Christopher Tietjens, have you ever considered how foully you've usedme!"
Tietjens looked at her attentively, as if with magpie anguish.
"If," Sylvia went on with her denunciation, "you had once in our lives said to me: 'You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it . . . .' If you'd only once said something like it . . . about the child! About Perowne! . . . you might have done something to bring us together. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"That's, of course, true!"
"I know," Sylvia said, "you can't help it. . . . But when, in your famous county family pride—though a youngest son!—you say to yourself: And I daresay if . . . Oh, Christ! . . . you're shot in the trenches you'll say it . . . oh, between the saddle and the ground! that you never did a dishonourable action. . . . And, mind you, I believe that no other man save one has ever had more right to say it than you. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"You believe that!"
"As I hope to stand before my Redeemer," Sylvia said, "I believe it. . . . But, in the name of the Almighty, how could any woman live beside you . . . and be for ever forgiven? Or no: not forgiven: ignored! . . . Well, be proud when you die because of your honour. But, God, you be humble about . . . your errors in judgment.Youknow what it is to ride a horse for miles with too tight a curb-chain and its tongue cut almost in half. . . . You remember the groom your father had who had the trick of turning the hunters out like that. . . . And you horse-whipped him, and you've told me you've almost cried ever so often afterwards for thinking of that mare's mouth. . . . Well! Think ofthismare's mouth sometimes! You've ridden me like that for seven years. . . ."
She stopped and then went on again:
"Don't you know, Christopher Tietjens, that there is only one man from whom a woman could take 'Neither I condemn thee' and not hate him more than she hates the fiend! . . ."
Tietjens so looked at her that he contrived to hold her attention.
"I'd like you to let me ask you," he said, "how I could throw stones at you? I have never disapproved of your actions."
Her hands dropped dispiritedly to her sides.
"Oh, Christopher," she said, "don't carry on that old play acting. I shall never see you again, very likely, to speak to; You'll sleep with the Wannop girl to-night: you're going out to be killed to-morrow.Let'sbe straight for the next ten minutes or so. And give me your attention. The Wannop girl can spare that much if she's to have all the rest. . . ."
She could see that he was giving her his whole mind.
"As you said just now," he exclaimed slowly, "as I hope to meet my Redeemer I believe you to be a good woman. One that never did a dishonourable thing."
She recoiled a little in her chair.
"Then!" she said, "you're the wicked man I've always made believe to think you, though I didn't."
Tietjens said:
"No! . . . Let me try to put it to you as I see it."
She exclaimed:
"No! . . . I've been a wicked woman. I have ruined you. I am not going to listen to you."
He said:
"I daresay you have ruined me. That's nothing to me. I am completely indifferent."
She cried out:
"Oh! Oh! . . . Oh!" on a note of agony.
Tietjens said doggedly:
"I don't care. I can't help it. Those are—thoseshouldbe—the conditions of life amongst decent people. When our next war comes I hope it will be fought out under those conditions. Let us, for God's sake, talk of the gallant enemy. Always. We havegotto plunder the French or millions of our people must starve: they havegotto resist us successfully or be wiped out. . . . It's the same with you and me. . . ."
She exclaimed:
"You mean to say that you don't think I was wicked when I . . . when I trepanned is what mother calls it? . . ."
He said loudly:
"No! . . . You had been let in for it by some brute. I have always held that a woman who has been let down by one man has the right—has the duty for the sake of her child—to let down a man. It becomes woman against man: against one man. I happened to be that one man: it was the will of God. But you were within your rights. I will never go back on that. Nothing will make me, ever!"
She said:
"And the others! And Perowne. . . . I know you'll say that anyone is justified in doing anything as long as they are open enough about it. . . . But it killed your mother. Do you disapprove of my having killed your mother? Or you consider that I have corrupted the child. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"I don't. . . . I want to speak to you about that."
She exclaimed:
"Youdon't. . . ."
He said calmly:
"You know I don't . . . while I was certain that I was going to be here to keep him straight and an Anglican I fought your influence over him. I'm obliged to you for having brought up of yourself the considerations that I may be killed and that I am ruined. I am. I could not raise a hundred pounds between now and to-morrow. I am, therefore, obviously not the man to have sole charge of the heir of Groby."
Sylvia was saying:
"Every penny I have is at your disposal. . . ." when the maid, Hullo Central, marched up to her master and placed a card in his hand. He said:
"Tell him to wait five minutes in the drawing-room."
Sylvia said:
"Who is it?"
Tietjens answered:
"A man . . . Let's get this settled. I've never thought you corrupted the boy. You tried to teach him to tell white lies. On perfectly straight Papist lines. I have no objection to Papists and no objection to white lies for Papists. You told him once to put a frog in Marchant's bath. I've no objection to a boy's putting a frog in his nurse's bath, as such. But Marchant is an old woman, and the heir to Groby should respect old women always and old family servants in particular. . . . It hasn't, perhaps, struck you that the boy is heir to Groby. . . ."
Sylvia said:
"If . . . if your second brother is killed. . . . But your eldest brother . . ."
"He," Tietjens said, "has got a French woman near Euston station. He's lived with her for over fifteen years, of afternoons, when there were no race meetings. She'll never let him marry and she's past the child-bearing stage. So there's no one else. . . ."
Sylvia said:
"You mean that I may bring the child up as a Catholic."
Tietjens said:
"ARomanCatholic. . . . You'll teach him, please, to use that term before myself if I ever see him again. . . ."
Sylvia said:
"Oh, I thank God that he has softened your heart. This will take the curse off this house."
Tietjens shook his head:
"I think not," he said, "off you, perhaps. Off Groby very likely. It was, perhaps, time that there should be a Papist owner of Groby again. You've read Spelden on sacrilege about Groby? . . ."
She said:
"Yes! The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, was pretty bad to the Papist owners. . . ."
"He was a tough Dutchman," Tietjens said, "but let us get on! There's enough time, but not too much. . . . I've got this man to see."
"Who is he?" Sylvia asked.
Tietjens was collecting his thoughts.
"My dear!" he said. "You'll permit me to call you 'my dear'? We're old enemies enough and we're talking about the future of our child."
Sylvia said:
"You said 'our' child, not 'the' child. . . ."
Tietjens said with a great deal of concern:
"You will forgive me for bringing it up. You might prefer to think he was Drake's child. He can't be. It would be outside the course of nature. . . . I'm as poor as I am because . . . forgive me . . . I've spent a great deal of money on tracing the movements of you and Drake before our marriage. And if it's a relief to you to know . . ."
"Itis," Sylvia said. "I . . . I've always been too beastly shy to put the matter before a specialist, or even before mother. . . . And we women are so ignorant. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"I know . . . I know you were too shy even to think about it yourself, hard." He went into months and days; then he continued: "But it would have made no difference: a child born in wedlock is by law the father's, and if a man who's a gentleman suffers the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences: the woman and the child must come before the man, be he who he may. And worse-begotten children than ours have inherited statelier names. And I loved the little beggar with all my heart and with all my soul from the first minute I saw him. That may be the secret clue, or it may be sheer sentimentality. . . . So I fought your influence because it was Papist, while I was a whole man. But I'm not a whole man any more, and the evil eye that is on me might transfer itself to him."
He stopped and said:
"For I must to the greenwood go. Alone a banished man. . . . But have him well protected against the evil eye. . . ."
"Oh, Christopher," she said, "it's true I've not been a bad woman to the child. And I never will be. And I will keep Marchant with him till she dies. You'll tell her not to interfere with his religious instruction, and she won't. . . ."
Tietjens said with a friendly weariness:
"That's right . . . and you'll have Father . . . Father . . . the priest that was with us for a fortnight before he was born to give him his teachings. He was the best man I ever met and one of the most intelligent. It's been a great comfort to me to think of the boy as in his hands. . . ."
Sylvia stood up, her eyes blazing out of a pallid face of stone:
"Father Consett," she said, "was hung on the day they shot Casement. They dare not put it into the papers because he was a priest and all the witnesses Ulster witnesses. . . . And yet I may not say this is an accursed war."
Tietjens shook his head with the slow heaviness of an aged man.
"You may for me . . ." he said. "You might ring the bell, will you? Don't go away. . . ."
He sat with the blue gloom of that enclosed space all over him, lumped heavily in his chair.
"Spelden on sacrilege," he said, "may be right after all. You'd say so from the Tietjenses. There's not been a Tietjens since the first Lord Justice cheated the Papist Loundeses out of Groby, but died of a broken neck or of a broken heart: for all the fifteen thousand acres of good farming-land and iron land, and for all the heather on the top of it. . . . What's the quotation: 'Be ye something as something and something and ye shall not escape. . . .' What is it?"
"Calumny!" Sylvia said. She spoke with intense bitterness. . . . "Chaste as ice and cold as . . . as you are. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Yes! Yes. . . . And mind you none of the Tietjens were ever soft. Not one! They had reason for their broken hearts. . . . Take my poor father. . . ."
Sylvia said:
"Don't!"
"Both my brothers were killed in Indian regiments on the same day and not a mile apart. And my sister in the same week: out at sea, not so far from them. . . . Unnoticeable people. But one can be fond of unnoticeable people. . . ."
Hullo Central was at the door. Tietjens told her to ask Lord Port Scatho to step down. . . .
"You must, of course, know these details," Tietjens said, "as the mother to my father's heir. . . . My father got the three notifications on the same day. It was enough to break his heart. He only lived a month. I saw him . . ."
Sylvia screamed piercingly:
"Stop! stop! stop!" She clutched at the mantelpiece to hold herself up. "Your father died of a broken heart," she said, "because your brother's best friend, Ruggles, told him you were a squit who lived on women's money and had got the daughter of his oldest friend with child. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Oh! Ah! Yes! . . . I suspected that. I knew it, really. I suppose the poor dear knows better now. Or perhaps he doesn't. . . . It doesn't matter."
It has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. In the smaller matters of the general run of life he will be impeccable and not to be moved; but in sudden confrontations of anything but physical dangers he is apt—he is, indeed, almost certain—to go to pieces very badly. This, at least, was the view of Christopher Tietjens, and he very much dreaded his interview with Lord Port Scatho—because he feared that he must be near breaking point.
In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his temperament as he could control—for, though no man can choose the land of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his automatic habits—Tietjens had quite advisedly and of set purpose adopted a habit of behaviour that he considered to be the best in the world for the normal life. If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic and lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigramatically imbecile over unessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at all—or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of death—except at sea, by fire, railway accident or accidental drowning in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or—and particularly—prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantage of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914. Death for man came but once: the danger of death so seldom as to be practically negligible: love of a distracting kind was a disease merely of the weak: public dishonour for persons of position, so great was the hushing up power of the ruling class, and the power of absorption of the remoter Colonies, was practically unknown.
Tietjens found himself now faced by all these things, coming upon him cumulatively and rather suddenly, and he had before him an interview that might cover them all and with a man whom he much respected and very much desired not to hurt. He had to face these, moreover, with a brain two-thirds of which felt numb. It was exactly like that.
It was not so much that he couldn't use what brain he had as trenchantly as ever: it was that there were whole regions of fact upon which he could no longer call in support of his argument. His knowledge of history was still practically negligible: he knew nothing whatever of the humaner letters and, what was far worse, nothing at all of the higher and more sensuous phases of mathematics. And the comings back of these things was much slower than he had confessed to Sylvia. It was with these disadvantages that he had to face Lord Port Scatho.
Lord Port Scatho was the first man of whom Sylvia Tietjens had thought when she had been considering of men who were absolutely honourable, entirely benevolent . . . and rather lacking in constructive intelligence. He had inherited the management of one of the most respected of the great London banks, so that his commercial and social influences were very extended: he was extremely interested in promoting Low Church interests, the reform of the divorce laws and sports for the people, and he had a great affection for Sylvia Tietjens. He was forty-five, beginning to put on weight, but by no means obese; he had a large, quite round head, very high-coloured cheeks that shone as if with frequent ablutions, an uncropped, dark moustache, dark, very cropped, smooth hair, brown eyes, a very new grey tweed suit, a very new grey Trilby hat, a black tie in a gold ring and very new patent leather boots that had white calf tops. He had a wife almost the spit of himself in face, figure, probity, kindliness and interests, except that for his interest in sports for the people she substituted that for maternity hospitals. His heir was his nephew, Mr. Brownlie, known as Brownie, who would also be physically the exact spit of his uncle, except that, not having put on flesh, he appeared to be taller and that his moustache and hair were both a little longer and more fair. This gentleman entertained for Sylvia Tietjens a gloomy and deep passion that he considered to be perfectly honourable because he desired to marry her after she had divorced her husband. Tietjens he desired to ruin because he wished to marry Mrs. Tietjens and partly because he considered Tietjens to be an undesirable person of no great means. Of this passion Lord Port Scatho was ignorant.
He now came into the Tietjens' dining-room, behind the servant, holding an open letter: he walked rather stiffly because he was very much worried. He observed that Sylvia had been crying and was still wiping her eyes. He looked round the room to see if he could see in it anything to account for Sylvia's crying. Tietjens was still sitting at the head of the lunch-table: Sylvia was rising from a chair beside the fireplace.
Lord Port Scatho said:
"I want to see you, Tietjens, for a minute on business."
Tietjens said:
"I can give you ten minutes. . . ."
Lord Port Scatho said:
"Mrs. Tietjens perhaps . . ."
He waved the open letter towards Mrs. Tietjens. Tietjens said:
"No! Mrs. Tietjens will remain." He desired to say something more friendly. He said: "Sit down."
Lord Port Scatho said:
"I shan't be stopping a minute. But really . . ." and he moved the letter, but not with so wide a gesture, towards Sylvia.
"I have no secrets from Mrs. Tietjens," Tietjens said.
"Absolutely none . . ."
ord Port Scatho said:
"No . . . No, of course not . . . But . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Similarly, Mrs. Tietjens has no secrets from me. Again absolutely none."
Sylvia said:
"I don't, of course, tell Tietjens about my maid's love affairs or what the fish costs every day."
Tietjens said:
"You'd better sit down." He added on an impulse of kindness: "As a matter of fact I was just clearing up things for Sylvia to take over . . . this command." It was part of the disagreeableness of his mental disadvantages that upon occasion he could not think of other than military phrases. He felt intense annoyance. Lord Port Scatho affected him with some of the slight nausea that in those days you felt at contact with the civilian who knew none of your thoughts, phrases or preoccupations. He added, nevertheless equably:
"One has to clear up. I'm going out."
Lord Port Scatho said hastily:
"Yes; yes. I won't keep you. One has so many engagements in spite of the war. . . ." His eyes wandered in bewilderment. Tietjens could see them at last fixing themselves on the oil stains that Sylvia's salad dressing had left on his collar and green tabs. He said to himself that he must remember to change his tunic before he went to the War Office. He must not forget. Lord Port Scatho's bewilderment at these oil stains was such that he had lost himself in the desire to account for them. . . . You could see the slow thoughts moving inside his square, polished brown forehead. Tietjens wanted very much to help him. He wanted to say: "It's about Sylvia's letter that you've got in your hand, isn't it?" But Lord Port Scatho had entered the room with the stiffness, with the odd, high-collared sort of gait that on formal and unpleasant occasions Englishmen use when they approach each other; braced up, a little like strange dogs meeting in the street. In view of that, Tietjens couldn't say "Sylvia." . . . But it would add to the formality and unpleasantness if he said again "Mrs. Tietjens!"Thatwouldn't help Port Scatho. . . .
Sylvia said suddenly:
"You don't understand, apparently. My husband is going out to the front line. To-morrow morning. It's for the second time."
Lord Port Scatho sat down suddenly on a chair beside the table. With his fresh face and brown eyes suddenly anguished he exclaimed:
"But, my dear fellow! You! Good God!" and then to Sylvia: "I beg your pardon!" To clear his mind he said again to Tietjens: "You! Going out to-morrow!" And, when the idea was really there, his face suddenly cleared. He looked with a swift, averted glance at Sylvia's face and then for a fixed moment at Tietjens' oil-stained tunic. Tietjens could see him explaining to himself with immense enlightenment thatthatexplained both Sylvia's tears and the oil on the tunic. For Port Scatho might well imagine that officers went to the conflict in their oldest clothes. . . .
But, if his puzzled brain cleared, his distressed mind became suddenly distressed doubly. He had to add to the distress he had felt on entering the room and finding himself in the midst of what he took to be a highly emotional family parting. And Tietjens knew that during the whole war Port Scatho had never witnessed a family parting at all. Those that were not inevitable he would avoid like the plague, and his own nephew and all his wife's nephews were in the bank. That was quite proper for, if the ennobled family of Brownlie were not of the Ruling Class—who had to go!—they were of the Administrative Class, who were privileged to stay. So he had seen no partings.
Of his embarrassed hatred of them he gave immediate evidence. For he first began several sentences of praise of Tietjens' heroism which he was unable to finish and then getting quickly out of his chair exclaimed:
"In the circumstances then . . . the little matter I came about . . . I couldn't of course think . . ."
Tietjens said:
"No; don't go. The matter you came about—I know all about it of course—had better be settled."
Port Scatho sat down again: his jaw fell slowly: under his bronzed complexion his skin became a shade paler. He said at last:
"You know what I came about? But then . . ."
His ingenuous and kindly mind could be seen to be working with reluctance: his athletic figure drooped. He pushed the letter that he still held along the tablecloth towards Tietjens. He said, in the voice of one awaiting a reprieve:
"But youcan'tbe . . . aware . . . Not of this letter. . . ."
Tietjens left the letter on the cloth, from there he could read the large handwriting on the blue-grey paper:
"Mrs. Christopher Tietjens presents her compliments to Lord Port Scatho and the Honourable Court of Benchers of the Inn. . . ." He wondered where Sylvia had got hold of that phraseology: he imagined it to be fantastically wrong. He said:
"I have already told you that I know about this letter, as I have already told you that I know—and I will add that I approve!—of all Mrs. Tietjens' actions. . . ." With his hard blue eyes he looked brow-beatingly into Port Scatho's soft brown orbs, knowing that he was sending the message: "Think what you please and be damned to you!"
The gentle brown things remained on his face; then they filled with an expression of deep pain. Port Scatho cried:
"But good God! Then . . ."
He looked at Tietjens again. His mind, which took refuge from life in the affairs of the Low Church, of Divorce Law Reform and of Sports for the People, became a sea of pain at the contemplation of strong situations. His eye said:
"For heaven's sake do not tell me that Mrs. Duchemin, the mistress of your dearest friend, is the mistress of yourself, and that you take this means of wreaking a vulgar spite on them."
Tietjens, leaning heavily forward, made his eyes as enigmatic as he could; he said very slowly and very clearly:
"Mrs. Tietjens is, of course, not aware ofallthe circumstances."
Port Scatho threw himself back in his chair.
"I don't understand!" he said. "I do not understand. How am I to act? You do not wish me to act on this letter? You can't!"
Tietjens, who found himself, said:
"You had better talk to Mrs. Tietjens about that. I will say something myself later. In the meantime let me say that Mrs. Tietjens would seem to me to be quite within her rights. A lady, heavily veiled, comes here every Friday and remains until four of the Saturday morning. . . . If you are prepared to palliate the proceeding you had better do so to Mrs. Tietjens. . . ."
Port Scatho turned agitatedly on Sylvia.
"I can't, of course, palliate," he said. "God forbid. . . . But, my dear Sylvia . . . my dear Mrs. Tietjens. . . . In the case of two people so much esteemed! . . . We have, of course, argued the matter of principle. It is a part of a subject I have very much at heart: the granting of divorce . . . civil divorce, at least . . . in cases in which one of the parties to the marriage is in a lunatic asylum. I have sent you the pamphlets of E. S. P. Haynes that we publish. I know that as a Roman Catholic you hold strong views. . . . I do not, I assure you, stand for latitude. . . ." He became then simply eloquent: he really had the matter at heart, one of his sisters having been for many years married to a lunatic. He expatiated on the agonies of this situation all the more eloquently in that it was the only form of human distress which he had personally witnessed.
Sylvia took a long look at Tietjens: he imagined for counsel. He looked at her steadily for a moment, then at Port Scatho, who was earnestly turned to her, then back at her. He was trying to say:
"Listen to Port Scatho for a minute. I need time to think of my course of action!"
He needed, for the first time in his life, time to think of his course of action.
He had been thinking with his under mind ever since Sylvia had told him that she had written her letter to the benchers denouncing Macmaster and his woman; ever since Sylvia had reminded him that Mrs. Duchemin in the Edinburgh to London express of the day before the war had been in his arms he had seen, with extraordinary clearness a great many north country scenes though he could not affix names to all the places. The forgetfulness of the names was abnormal: he ought to know the names of places from Berwick down to the vale of York—but that he should have forgotten the incidents was normal enough. They had been of little importance: he preferred not to remember the phases of his friend's love affair; moreover, the events that happened immediately afterwards had been of a nature to make one forget quite normally what had just preceded them. That Mrs. Duchemin should be sobbing on his shoulder in a locked corridor carriage hadn't struck him as in the least important: she was the mistress of his dearest friend: she had had a very trying time for a week or so, ending in a violent, nervous quarrel with her agitated lover. She was, of course, crying off the effects of the quarrel which had been all the more shaking in that Mrs. Duchemin, like himself, had always been almost too self-contained. As a matter of fact he did not himself like Mrs. Duchemin, and he was pretty certain that she herself more than a little disliked him; so that nothing but their common feeling for Macmaster had brought them together. General Campion, however, was not to know that. . . . He had looked into the carriage in the way one does in a corridor just after the train had left. . . . He couldn't remember the name. . . . Doncaster . . . No! . . . Darlington; it wasn't that. At Darlington there was a model of the Rocket . . . or perhaps it isn't the Rocket. An immense clumsy leviathan of a locomotive by . . . by . . . The great gloomy stations of the north-going trains . . . Durham . . . No! Alnwick. . . . No! . . . Wooler . . . By God! Wooler! The junction for Bamborough. . . .
It had been in one of the castles at Bamborough that he and Sylvia had been staying with the Sandbachs. Then . . . a name had come into his mind spontaneously! . . . Two names! . . . It was, perhaps, the turn of the tide! For the first time . . . To be marked with a red stone . . . after this: some names, sometimes, on the tip of the tongue, might come over! He had, however, to get on. . . .
The Sandbachs, then, and he and Sylvia . . . others too . . . had been in Bamborough since mid-July: Eton and Harrow at Lord's, waiting for the real house parties that would come with the 12th. . . . He repeated these names and dates to himself for the personal satisfaction of knowing that, amongst the repairs effected in his mind, these two remained: Eton and Harrow, the end of the London season: 12th of August, grouse shooting begins. . . . It was pitiful. . . .
When General Campion had come up to rejoin his sister he, Tietjens, had stopped only two days. The coolness between the two of them remained; it was the first time they had met, except in Court, after the accident. . . . For Mrs. Wannop, with grim determination, had sued the General for the loss of her horse. It had lived all right—but it was only fit to draw a lawn-mower for cricket pitches. . . . Mrs. Wannop, then, had gone bald-headed for the General, partly because she wanted the money, partly because she wanted a public reason for breaking with the Sandbachs. The general had been equally obstinate and had undoubtedly perjured himself in Court: not the best, not the most honourable, the most benevolent man in the world would not turn oppressor of the widow and orphan when his efficiency as a chauffeur was impugned or the fact brought to light that at a very dangerous turning he hadn't sounded his horn. Tietjens had sworn that he hadn't: the General that he had. Therecouldnot be any question of doubt, for the horn was a beastly thing that made a prolonged noise like that of a terrified peacock. . . . So Tietjens had not, till the end of that July, met the General again. It had been quite a proper thing for gentlemen to quarrel over and was quite convenient, though it had cost the General fifty pounds for the horse and, of course, a good bit over for costs. Lady Claudine had refused to interfere in the matter: she was privately of opinion that the Generalhadn'tsounded his horn, but the General was both a passionately devoted and explosive brother. She had remained closely intimate with Sylvia, mildly cordial with Tietjens and had continued to ask the Wannops to such of her garden parties as the General did not attend. She was also very friendly with Mrs. Duchemin.
Tietjens and the General had met with the restrained cordiality of English gentlemen who had some years before accused each other of perjury in a motor accident. On the second morning a violent quarrel had broken out between them on the subject of whether the General had or hadn't sounded his horn. The General had ended up by shouting . . . really shouting:
"By God! If I ever get you under my command. . . ."
Tietjens remembered that he had quoted and given the number of a succinct paragraph in King's Regs, dealing with the fate of general or higher field officers who gave their subordinates bad confidential reports because of private quarrels. The General had exploded into noises that ended in laughter.
"What a rag-bag of a mind you have, Chrissie!" he said. "What's King's Regs, to you? And how do you know it's paragraph 66 or whatever you say it is? I don't." He added more seriously: "Whata fellow you are for getting into obscure rows! What in the world do you do it for?"
That afternoon Tietjens had gone to stop, a long way up in the moors, with his son, the nurse, his sister Effie and her children. They were the last days of happiness he was to know and he hadn't known so many. He was then content. He played with his boy, who, thank God, was beginning to grow healthy at last. He walked about the moors with his sister Effie, a large, plain, parson's wife, who had no conversation at all, though at times they talked of their mother. The moors were like enough to those above Groby to make them happy. They lived in a bare, grim farmhouse, drank great quantities of butter-milk and ate great quantities of Wensleydale. It was the hard, frugal life of his desire and his mind was at rest.
His mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance. Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of its hills, the shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible pall, over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread from . . . oh, Middlesbrough! We were fitted neither for defeat nor for victory: we could be true to neither friend nor foe. Not even to ourselves!
But of war for us he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till the opportune moment and then grabbing a French channel port or a few German colonies as the price of neutrality. And he was thankful to be out of it; for his back-doorway out—his second!—was the French Foreign Legion. First Sylvia: then that! Two tremendous disciplines: for the soul and for the body.
The French he admired: for their tremendous efficiency, for their frugality of life, for the logic of their minds, for their admirable achievements in the arts, for their neglect of the industrial system, for their devotion, above all, to the eighteenth century. It would be restful to serve, if only as a slave, people who saw clearly, coldly, straight: not obliquely and with hypocrisy only such things as should deviously conduce to the standard of comfort of hogs and to lecheries winked at. . . . He would rather sit for hours on a bench in a barrack-room polishing a badge in preparation for the cruellest of route marches of immense lengths under the Algerian sun.
For, as to the Foreign Legion, he had had no illusion. You were treated not as a hero, but as a whipped dog: he was aware of all theasticoteries, the cruelties, the weight of the rifle, the cells. You would have six months of training in the desert and then be hurtled into the line to be massacred without remorse . . . as foreign dirt. But the prospect seemed to him one of deep peace: he had never asked for soft living and now was done with it. . . . The boy was healthy; Sylvia, with the economies they had made, very rich . . . and even at that date he was sure that, if the friction of himself, Tietjens, were removed, she would make a good mother. . . .
Obviously he might survive; but after that tremendous physical drilling what survived would not be himself, but a man with cleaned, sand-dried bones: a clear mind. His private ambition had always been for saintliness: he must be able to touch pitch and not be defiled. That he knew marked him off as belonging to the sentimental branch of humanity. He couldn't help it: Stoic or Epicurean: Caliph in the harem or Dervish desiccating in the sand: one or the other you must be. And his desire was to be a saint of the Anglican variety . . . as his mother had been, without convent, ritual, vows, or miracles to be performed by your relics! That sainthood, truly, the Foreign Legion might give you. . . . The desire of every English gentleman from Colonel Hutchinson upwards. . . . A mysticism. . . .