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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..54db0d5 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #64248 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64248) diff --git a/old/64248-0.txt b/old/64248-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c2d7b7a..0000000 --- a/old/64248-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,14364 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Some do not..., by Ford Madox Ford - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Some do not... - -Author: Ford Madox Ford - -Release Date: January 11, 2021 [eBook #64248] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously - made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME DO NOT... *** -SOME DO NOT. . . - -A NOVEL - - - -BY - -FORD MADOX FORD - - - -AUTHOR OF "THE MARSDEN CASE," "MISTER BOSPHORUS -AND THE MUSES," ETC., ETC. - - - -London: DUCKWORTH AND COMPANY -3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2 - - - - -CONTENTS -PART ONE -CHAPTER I -CHAPTER II -CHAPTER III -CHAPTER IV -CHAPTER V -CHAPTER VI -CHAPTER VII -PART II -CHAPTER I -CHAPTER II -CHAPTER III -CHAPTER IV -CHAPTER V -CHAPTER VI - - - - -PART ONE - - - - -I - - -The two young men--they were of the English public official class--sat -in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the -windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage -racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging -upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in -an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in -Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable -varnish; the train ran as smoothly--Tietjens remembered thinking--as -British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or -jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or -over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and -allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the -company. Perhaps he would even have written to the _Times_. - -Their class administered the world, not merely the newly-created -Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they -saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency -of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, -they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices, or with letters -to the _Times_, asking in regretful indignation: "Has the British This -or That come to _this_!" Or they wrote, in the serious reviews of which -so many still survived, articles taking under their care, manners, the -Arts, diplomacy, inter-Imperial trade or the personal reputations of -deceased statesmen and men of letters. - -Macmaster, that is to say, would do all that: of himself Tietjens was -not so certain. There sat Macmaster; smallish; Whig; with a trimmed, -pointed black beard, such as a smallish man might wear to enhance his -already germinated distinction; black hair of a stubborn fibre, drilled -down with hard metal brushes; a sharp nose; strong, level teeth; a -white, butterfly collar of the smoothness of porcelain; a tie confined -by a gold ring, steel-blue speckled with black--to match his eyes, as -Tietjens knew. - -Tietjens, on the other hand, could not remember what coloured tie he had -on. He had taken a cab from the office to their rooms, had got himself -into a loose, tailored coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had packed, -quickly, but still methodically, a great number of things in an immense -two-handled kit-bag, which you could throw into a guard's van if need -be. He disliked letting that "man" touch his things; he had disliked -letting his wife's maid pack for him. He even disliked letting porters -carry his kit-bag. He was a Tory--and as he disliked changing his -clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already in large, brown, -hugely-welted and nailed golf boots, leaning forward on the edge of the -cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an immense white hand--and -thinking vaguely. - -Macmaster, on the other hand, was leaning back, reading some small, -unbound printed sheets, rather stiff, frowning a little. Tietjens knew -that this was, for Macmaster, an impressive moment. He was correcting -the proofs of his first book. - -To this affair, as Tietjens knew, there attached themselves many fine -shades. If, for instance, you had asked Macmaster whether he were a -writer, he would have replied with the merest suggestion of a -deprecatory shrug. - -"No, dear lady!" for of course no man would ask the question of anyone -so obviously a man of the world. And he would continue with a smile: -"Nothing so fine! A mere trifler at odd moments. A critic, perhaps. Yes! -A little of a critic." - -Nevertheless Macmaster moved in drawing-rooms that, with long curtains, -blue china plates, large-patterned wallpapers and large, quiet mirrors, -sheltered the long-haired of the Arts. And, as near as possible to the -dear ladies who gave the At Homes, Macmaster could keep up the talk--a -little magisterially. He liked to be listened to with respect when he -spoke of Botticelli, Rossetti, and those early Italian artists whom he -called "The Primitives." Tietjens had seen him there. And he didn't -disapprove. - -For, if they weren't, these gatherings, Society; they formed a stage on -the long and careful road to a career in a first-class Government -office. And, utterly careless as Tietjens imagined himself of careers or -offices, he was, if sardonically, quite sympathetic towards his friend's -ambitiousnesses. It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of -friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture. - -The youngest son of a Yorkshire country gentleman, Tietjens himself was -entitled to the best--the best that first-class public offices and -first-class people could afford. He was without ambition, but these -things would come to him as they do in England. So he could afford to be -negligent of his attire, of the company he kept, of the opinions he -uttered. He had a little private income under his mother's settlement; a -little income from the Imperial Department of Statistics; he had married -a woman of means, and he was, in the Tory manner, sufficiently a master -of flouts and jeers to be listened to when he spoke. He was twenty-six; -but, very big, in a fair, untidy, Yorkshire way, he carried more weight -than his age warranted. His chief, Sir Reginald Ingleby, when Tietjens -chose to talk of public tendencies which influenced statistics, would -listen with attention. Sometimes Sir Reginald would say: "You're a -perfect encyclopædia of exact material knowledge, Tietjens," and -Tietjens thought that that was his due, and he would accept the tribute -in silence. - -At a word from Sir Reginald, Macmaster, on the other hand, would murmur: -"You're very good, Sir Reginald!" and Tietjens thought that perfectly -proper. - -Macmaster was a little the senior in the service as he was probably a -little the senior in age. For, as to his room-mate's years, or as to his -exact origins, there was a certain blank in Tietjens' knowledge. -Macmaster was obviously Scotch by birth, and you accepted him as what -was called a son of the manse. No doubt he was really the son of a -grocer in Cupar or a railway porter in Edinburgh. It does not matter -with the Scotch, and as he was very properly reticent as to his -ancestry, having accepted him, you didn't, even mentally, make any -enquiries. - -Tietjens always had accepted Macmaster--at Clifton, at Cambridge, in -Chancery Lane and in their rooms at Gray's Inn. So for Macmaster he had -a very deep affection--even a gratitude. And Macmaster might be -considered as returning these feelings. Certainly he had always done his -best to be of service to Tietjens. Already at the Treasury and attached -as private secretary to Sir Reginald Ingleby, whilst Tietjens was still -at Cambridge, Macmaster had brought to the notice of Sir Reginald -Tietjens' many great natural gifts, and Sir Reginald, being on the -look-out for young men for his ewe lamb, his newly-founded department, -had very readily accepted Tietjens as his third in command. On the other -hand, it had been Tietjens' father who had recommended Macmaster to the -notice of Sir Thomas Block at the Treasury itself. And, indeed, the -Tietjens' family had provided a little money--that was Tietjens' mother -really--to get Macmaster through Cambridge and install him in Town. He -had repaid the small sum--paying it partly by finding room in his -chambers for Tietjens when in turn he came to Town. - -With a Scots young man such a position had been perfectly possible. -Tietjens had been able to go to his fair, ample, saintly mother in her -morning-room and say: - -"Look here, mother, that fellow Macmaster! He'll need a little money to -get through the University," and his mother would answer: - -"Yes, my dear. How much?" - -With an English young man of the lower orders that would have left a -sense of class obligation. With Macmaster it just didn't. - -During Tietjens' late trouble--for four months before Tietjens' wife had -left him to go abroad with another man--Macmaster had filled a place -that no other man could have filled. For the basis of Christopher -Tietjens' emotional existence was a complete taciturnity--at any rate as -to his emotions. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk." Perhaps -you didn't even think about how you felt. - -And, indeed, his wife's flight had left him almost completely without -emotions that he could realise, and he had not spoken more than twenty -words at most about the event. Those had been mostly to his father, who, -very tall, very largely built, silver-haired and erect, had drifted, as -it were, into Macmaster's drawing-room in Gray's Inn, and after five -minutes of silence had said: - -"You will divorce?" - -Christopher had answered: - -"No! No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of -divorce." - -Mr. Tietjens had suggested that, and after an interval had asked: - -"You will permit her to divorce you?" - -He had answered: - -"If she wishes it. There's the child to be considered." Mr. Tietjens -said: - -"You will get her settlement transferred to the child?" Christopher -answered: - -"If it can be done without friction." - -Mr. Tietjens had commented only: - -"Ah!" Some minutes later he had said: - -"Your mother's very well." Then: "That motor-plough _didn't_ answer," -and then: "I shall be dining at the club." - -Christopher said: - -"May I bring Macmaster in, sir? You said you would put him up." - -Mr. Tietjens answered: - -"Yes, do. Old General ffolliott will be there. He'll second him. He'd -better make his acquaintance." He had gone away. - -Tietjens considered that his relationship with his father was an almost -perfect one. They were like two men in the club--the _only_ club; -thinking so alike that there was no need to talk. His father had spent a -great deal of time abroad before succeeding to the estate. When, over -the moors, he went into the industrial town that he owned, he drove -always in a coach-and-four. Tobacco smoke had never been known inside -Groby Hall: Mr. Tietjens had twelve pipes filled every morning by his -head gardener and placed in rose bushes down the drive. These he smoked -during the day. He farmed a good deal of his own land; had sat for -Holdernesse from 1876 to 1881, but had not presented himself for -election after the re-distribution of seats; he was patron of eleven -livings; rode to hounds every now and then, and shot fairly regularly. -He had three other sons and two daughters, and was now sixty-one. - -To his sister Effie, on the day after his wife's elopement, Christopher -had said over the telephone: - -"Will you take Tommie for an indefinite period? Marchant will come with -him. She offers to take charge of your two youngest as well, so you'll -save a maid, and I'll pay their board and a bit over." - -The voice of his sister--from Yorkshire--had answered: - -"Certainly, Christopher." She was the wife of a vicar, near Groby, and -she had several children. - -To Macmaster Tietjens had said: - -"Sylvia has left me with that fellow Perowne." - -Macmaster had answered only: "Ah!" - -Tietjens had continued: - -"I'm letting the house and warehousing the furniture. Tommie is going to -my sister Effie. Marchant is going with him." - -Macmaster had said: - -"Then you'll be wanting your old rooms." Macmaster occupied a very large -storey of the Gray's Inn buildings. After Tietjens had left him on his -marriage he had continued to enjoy solitude, except that his man had -moved down from the attic to the bedroom formerly occupied by Tietjens. - -Tietjens said: - -"I'll come in to-morrow night if I may. That will give Ferens time to -get back into his attic." - -That morning, at breakfast, four months having passed, Tietjens had -received a letter from his wife. She asked, without any contrition at -all, to be taken back. She was fed-up with Perowne and Brittany. - -Tietjens looked up at Macmaster. Macmaster was already half out of his -chair, looking at him with enlarged, steel-blue eyes, his beard -quivering. By the time Tietjens spoke Macmaster had his hand on the neck -of the cut-glass brandy decanter in the brown wood tantalus. Tietjens -said: - -"Sylvia asks me to take her back." - -Macmaster said: - -"Have a little of this!" - -Tietjens was about to say: "No," automatically. He changed that to: - -"Yes. Perhaps. A liqueur glass." - -He noticed that the lip of the decanter agitated, tinkling on the glass. -Macmaster must be trembling. - -Macmaster, with his back still turned, said: - -"Shall you take her back?" - -Tietjens answered: - -"I imagine so." The brandy warmed his chest in its descent. Macmaster -said: - -"Better have another." - -Tietjens answered: - -"Yes. Thanks." - -Macmaster went on with his breakfast and his letters. So did Tietjens. -Ferens came in, removed the bacon plates and set on the table a silver -water-heated dish that contained poached eggs and haddock. A long time -afterwards Tietjens said: - -"Yes, in principle I'm determined to. But I shall take three days to -think out the details." - -He seemed to have no feelings about the matter. Certain insolent phrases -in Sylvia's letter hung in his mind. He preferred a letter like that. -The brandy made no difference to his mentality, but it seemed to keep -him from shivering. - -Macmaster said: - -"Suppose we go down to Rye by the 11.40. We could get a round after tea -now the days are long. I want to call on a parson near there. He has -helped me with my book." - -Tietjens said: - -"Did your poet know parsons? But of course he did. Duchemin is the name, -isn't it?" - -Macmaster said: - -"We could call about two-thirty. That will be all right in the country. -We stay till four with a cab outside. We can be on the first tee at -five. If we like the course we'll stay next day: then Tuesday at Hythe -and Wednesday at Sandwich. Or we could stay at Rye all your three days." - -"It will probably suit me better to keep moving," Tietjens said. "There -are those British Columbia figures of yours. If we took a cab now I -could finish them for you in an hour and twelve minutes. Then British -North America can go to the printers. It's only 8.30 now." - -Macmaster said, with some concern: - -"Oh, but you _couldn't_. I can make our going all right with Sir -Reginald," Tietjens said. - -"Oh, yes I can. Ingleby will be pleased if you tell him they're -finished. I'll have them ready for you to give him when he comes at -ten." - -Macmaster said: - -"What an extraordinary fellow you are, Chrissie. Almost a genius!" - -"Oh," Tietjens answered. "I was looking at your papers yesterday after -you'd left and I've got most of the totals in my head. I was thinking -about them before I went to sleep. I think you make a mistake in -overestimating the pull of Klondyke this year on the population. The -passes are open, but relatively no one is going through. I'll add a note -to that effect." - -In the cab he said: - -"I'm sorry to bother you with my beastly affairs. But how will it affect -you and the office?" - -"The office," Macmaster said, "not at all. It is supposed that Sylvia is -nursing Mrs. Satterthwaite abroad. As for me, I wish . . . ."--he closed -his small, strong teeth--"I wish you would drag the woman through the -mud. By God I do! Why should she mangle you for the rest of your life? -She's done enough!" - -Tietjens gazed out over the flap of the cab. - -That explained a question. Some days before, a young man, a friend of -his wife's rather than of his own, had approached him in the club and -had said that he hoped Mrs. Satterthwaite--his wife's mother--was -better. He said now: - -"I see. Mrs. Satterthwaite has probably gone abroad to cover up Sylvia's -retreat. She's a sensible woman, if a bitch." - -The hansom ran through nearly empty streets, it being very early for the -public official quarters. The hoofs of the horse clattered -precipitately. Tietjens preferred a hansom, horses being made for -gentlefolk. He had known nothing of how his fellows had viewed his -affairs. It was breaking up a great, numb inertia to enquire. - -During the last few months he had employed himself in tabulating from -memory the errors in the _Encyclopœdia Britannica_, of which a new -edition had lately appeared. He had even written an article for a dull -monthly on the subject. It had been so caustic as to miss its mark, -rather. He despised people who used works of reference; but the point of -view had been so unfamiliar that his article had galled no one's -withers, except possibly Macmaster's. Actually it had pleased Sir -Reginald Ingleby, who had been glad to think that he had under him a -young man with a memory so tenacious and so encyclopædic a -knowledge. . . . - -That had been a congenial occupation, like a long drowse. Now he had to -make enquiries. He said: - -"And my breaking up the establishment at twenty-nine? How's that viewed? -I'm not going to have a house again." - -"It's considered," Macmaster answered, "that Lowndes Street did not -agree with Mrs. Satterthwaite. That accounted for her illness. Drains -wrong. I may say that Sir Reginald entirely--expressly--approves. He -does not think that young married men in Government offices should keep -up expensive establishments in the S.W. district." - -Tietjens said: - -"Damn him." He added: "He's probably right though." He then said: -"Thanks. That's all I want to know. A certain discredit has always -attached to cuckolds. Very properly. A man ought to be able to keep his -wife." - -Macmaster exclaimed anxiously: - -"No! No! Chrissie." - -Tietjens continued: - -"And a first-class public office is very like a public school. It might -very well object to having a man whose wife had bolted amongst its -members. I remember Clifton hated it when the Governors decided to admit -the first Jew and the first nigger." - -Macmaster said: - -"I wish you wouldn't go on." - -"There was a fellow," Tietjens continued, "whose land was next to ours. -Conder his name was. His wife was habitually unfaithful to him. She used -to retire with some fellow for three months out of every year. Conder -never moved a finger. But we felt Groby and the neighbourhood were -unsafe. It was awkward introducing him--not to mention her--in your -drawing-room. All sorts of awkwardnesses. Everyone knew the younger -children weren't Conder's. A fellow married the youngest daughter and -took over the hounds. And not a soul called on her. It wasn't rational -or just. But that's why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never -knows when it mayn't be driven into something irrational and unjust." - -"But you _aren't_," Macmaster said with real anguish, "going to let -Sylvia behave like that." - -"I don't know," Tietjens said. "How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think -Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman -accepts them. If the woman won't divorce, he _must_ accept them, and it -get's talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You -and, I suppose, Mrs. Satterthwaite between you. But you won't be always -there. Or I might come across another woman." - -Macmaster said: - -"Ah!" and after a moment: - -"What then?" - -Tietjens said: - -"God knows . . . There's that poor little beggar to be considered. -Marchant says he's beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already." - -Macmaster said: - -"If it wasn't for that. . . . That would be a solution." - -Tietjens said: "Ah!" - -When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled -arch, reaching up, he said: - -"You've been giving the mare less licorice in her mash. I told you she'd -go better." - -The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab -box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said: - -"Ah! Trust you to remember, sir." - - -In the train, from beneath his pile of polished dressing and despatch -cases--Tietjens had thrown his immense kit-bag with his own hands into -the guard's van--Macmaster looked across at his friend. It was, for him, -a great day. Across his face were the proof-sheets of his first, small, -delicate-looking volume. . . . A small page, the type black and still -odorous! He had the agreeable smell of the printer's ink in his -nostrils; the fresh paper was still a little damp. In his white, rather -spatulate, always slightly cold fingers, was the pressure of the small, -flat, gold pencil he had purchased especially for these corrections. He -had found none to make. - -He had expected a wallowing of pleasure--almost the only sensuous -pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the -appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean -task. But to wallow in your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savour of -your own shrewd pawkinesses, to feel your rhythm balanced and yet -sober--that is a pleasure beyond most, and an inexpensive one at that. -He had had it from mere "articles"--on the philosophies and domestic -lives of such great figures as Carlyle and Mill, or on the expansion of -inter-colonial trade. This was a book. - -He relied upon it to consolidate his position. In the office they were -mostly "born," and not vastly sympathetic. There was a sprinkling, -too--it was beginning to be a large one--of young men who had obtained -their entry by merit or by sheer industry. These watched promotions -jealously, discerning nepotic increases of increment and clamouring -amongst themselves at favouritisms. - -To these he had been able to turn a cold shoulder. His intimacy with -Tietjens permitted him to be rather on the "born" side of the -institution, his agreeableness--he knew he was agreeable and useful!--to -Sir Reginald Ingleby, protecting him in the main from unpleasantness. -His "articles" had given him a certain right to an austerity of -demeanour; his book he trusted to let him adopt an almost judicial -attitude. He would then be _the_ Mr. Macmaster, the critic, the -authority. And the first-class departments are not adverse from having -distinguished men as ornaments to their company; at any rate the -promotion of the distinguished are not objected to. So Macmaster -saw--almost physically--Sir Reginald Ingleby perceiving the empressement -with which his valued subordinate was treated in the drawing-rooms of -Mrs. Leamington, Mrs. Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. de Limoux; Sir Reginald -would perceive that, for he was not a reader himself of much else than -Government publications, and he would feel fairly safe in making easy -the path of his critically-gifted and austere young helper. The son of a -very poor shipping clerk in an obscure Scotch harbour town, Macmaster -had very early decided on the career that he would make. As between the -heroes of Mr. Smiles, an author enormously popular in Macmaster's -boyhood, and the more distinctly intellectual achievements open to the -very poor Scot, Macmaster had had no difficulty in choosing. A pit lad -_may_ rise to be a mine owner; a hard, gifted, unsleeping Scots youth, -pursuing unobtrusively and unobjectionably a course of study and of -public usefulness, _will_ certainly achieve distinction, security and -the quiet admiration of those around him. It was the difference between -the _may_ and the _will_, and Macmaster had had no difficulty in making -his choice. He saw himself by now almost certain of a career that should -give him at fifty a knighthood, and long before that a competence, a -drawing-room of his own and a lady who should contribute to his -unobtrusive fame, she moving about, in that room, amongst the best of -the intellects of the day, gracious, devoted, a tribute at once to his -discernment and his achievements. Without some disaster he was sure of -himself. Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy and women. -Against the first two he knew himself immune, though his expenses had a -tendency to outrun his income, and he was always a little in debt to -Tietjens. Tietjens fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so -certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women, and, arrived at -a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, -be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a -rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he -needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, -passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberative, gracious to -every one around her. He could almost hear the very rustle of her -garments. - -And yet . . . He had had passages when a sort of blind unreason had -attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most -giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked. It was -only Tietjens who had saved him from the most questionable -entanglements. - -"Hang it," Tietjens would say, "don't get messing round that trollop. -All you could do with her would be to set her up in a tobacco shop, and -she would be tearing your beard out inside the quarter. Let alone you -can't afford it." - -And Macmaster, who would have sentimentalised the plump girl to the tune -of _Highland Mary_, would for a day damn Tietjens up and down for a -coarse brute. But at the moment he thanked God for Tietjens. There he -sat, near to thirty, without an entanglement, a blemish on his health, -or a worry with regard to any woman. - -With deep affection and concern he looked across at his brilliant -junior, who hadn't saved himself. Tietjens had fallen into the most -barefaced snare, into the cruellest snare, of the worst woman that could -be imagined. - -And Macmaster suddenly realised that he wasn't wallowing, as he had -imagined that he would, in the sensuous current of his prose. He had -begun spiritedly with the first neat square of a paragraph. . . . -Certainly his publishers had done well by him in the matter of print: - - -"Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and -exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and -full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or -whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing -his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than -himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little -monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly -influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things -that go to make up the life of our higher civilisation as we live it -to-day. . . ." - - -Macmaster realised that he had only got thus far with his prose, and had -got thus far without any of the relish that he had expected, and that -then he had turned to the middle paragraph of page three--after the end -of his exordium. His eyes wandered desultorily along the line: - - -"The subject of these pages was born in the western central district of -the metropolis in the year . . ." - - -The words conveyed nothing to him at all. He understood that that was -because he hadn't got over that morning. He had looked up from his -coffee-cup--over the rim--and had taken in a blue-grey sheet of -notepaper in Tietjens' fingers, shaking, inscribed, in the large, -broad-nibbed writing of that detestable harridan. And Tietjens had been -staring--staring with the intentness of a maddened horse--at his, -Macmaster's, face! And grey! Shapeless! The nose like a pallid triangle -on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens' face. . . . - -He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He -had thought Tietjens was going mad: that he _was_ mad. It had passed. -Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the -office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful--and -quite rude--lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from -the official figures of population movements in the western territories. -Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a -speech of the Colonial Minister--or an answer to a question--and Sir -Reginald had promised to put Tietjens' views before the great man. That -was the sort of thing to do a young fellow good--because it got kudos -for the office. They had to work on figures provided by the Colonial -Governments, and if they could correct those fellows by sheer brain -work--that scored. - -But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, -clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between -his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of -Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blonde, -high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn't tell what in the world he -was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips -in some one's article on Arminianism. For, absurd as it seemed, -Macmaster knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend's feelings. As -to them, practically no confidences had passed between them. Just two: - -On the night before his starting for his wedding in Paris Tietjens had -said to him: - -"Vinny, old fellow, it's a back door way out of it. She's bitched _me_." - -And once, rather lately, he had said: - -"Damn it! I don't even know if the child's my own!" - -This last confidence had shocked Macmaster so irremediably--the child -had been a seven months' child, rather ailing, and Tietjens' clumsy -tenderness towards it had been so marked that, even without this -nightmare, Macmaster had been affected by the sight of them -together--that confidence then had pained Macmaster so frightfully, it -was so appalling, that Macmaster had regarded it almost as an insult. It -was the sort of confidence a man didn't make to his equal, but only to -solicitors, doctors, or the clergy who are not quite men. Or, at any -rate, such confidences are not made between men without appeals for -sympathy, and Tietjens had made no appeal for sympathy. He had just -added sardonically: - -"She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she's as good as -said as much to Marchant"--Marchant had been Tietjens' old nurse. - - -Suddenly--and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his -head--Macmaster remarked: - -"You can't say the man wasn't a poet!" - -The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, -in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens' forelock -and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been -going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very -little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour and blondish often go speckled -with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age -of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap -off to bowl. - -But Macmaster's mind, taking appalled change, had felt assured that -Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife's letter: in four -hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his -thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. The mental process in -Macmaster had been quite subconscious. He would not, advisedly, have -introduced the painter-poet as a topic. - -Tietjens said: - -"I haven't said anything at all that I can remember." - -The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster: - -"'Since,'" he quoted, 'when we stand side by side - - -Only hands may meet, -Better half this weary world -Lay between us, sweet! -Better far tho' hearts may break -Bid farewell for aye! -Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine, -Tempt my soul away!' - - -"You can't," he continued, "say that that isn't poetry! Great poetry." - -"I can't say," Tietjens answered contemptuously. "I don't read poetry -except Byron. But it's a filthy picture. . . ." - -Macmaster said uncertainly: - -"I don't know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?" - -"It isn't painted!" Tietjens said. "But it's there!" - -He continued with sudden fury: - -"Damn it. What's the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? -England's mad about it. Well, you've got your John Stuart Mill's and -your George Eliot's for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! -Or leave me out at least. I tell you it revolts me to think of that -obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown -and the underclothes he's slept in, standing beside a five shilling -model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a -mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop -chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about -passion." - -Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling: - -"You daren't . . . you daren't talk like that," he stuttered. - -"I _dare_!" Tietjens answered; "but I oughtn't to . . . to you! I admit -that. But you oughtn't, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to me, -either. It's an insult to my intelligence." - -"Certainly," Macmaster said stiffly, "the moment was not opportune." - -"I don't understand what you mean," Tietjens answered. "The moment can -never be opportune. Let's agree that making a career is a dirty -business--for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their masks. -They never preach to each other." - -"You're getting esoteric," Macmaster said faintly. - -"I'll underline," Tietjens went on. "I quite understand that the favour -of Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear -of that old don Ingleby." - -Macmaster said: - -"Damn!" - -"I quite agree," Tietjens continued, "I quite approve. It's the game as -it has always been played. It's the tradition, so it's right. It's been -sanctioned since the days of the _Précieuses Ridicules_." - -"You've a way of putting things," Macmaster said. - -"I haven't," Tietjens answered. "It's just because I haven't that what I -_do_ say sticks out in the minds of fellows like you who are always -fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I -stand for monogamy." - -Macmaster uttered a "_You!_" of amazement. - -Tietjens answered with a negligent "_I!_" He continued: - -"I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of -course, if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And -again, no talking about it. He'd no doubt be in the end better, and -better off, if he didn't. Just as it would probably be better for him if -he didn't have the second glass of whisky and soda. . . ." - -"You call that monogamy and chastity!" Macmaster interjected. - -"I do," Tietjens answered. "And it probably is, at any rate it's clean. -What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placket-holes and polysyllabic -Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That's all -right if you can get your club to change its rules." - -"You're out of my depth," Macmaster said. "And being very disagreeable. -You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don't like it." - -"I'm probably being disagreeable," Tietjens said. "Jeremiahs usually -are. But there ought to be a twenty years' close time for discussions of -sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca--and Dante's--went, very -properly, to Hell, and no bones about it. You don't get Dante justifying -them. But your fellow whines about creeping into Heaven." - -"He _doesn't_," Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with equanimity: - -"Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth -seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop -boys . . ." - -"I'll admit," Macmaster coincided, "that Briggs is going too far. I told -him only last Thursday at Mrs. Limoux's. . . ." - -"I'm not talking of anyone in particular," Tietjens said. "I don't read -novels. I'm supposing a case. And it's a cleaner case than that of your -pre-Raphaelite horrors! No! I don't read novels, but I follow -tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of -uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the -rights of man, it's relatively respectable. It would be better just to -boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. -But . . ." - -"You carry joking too far sometimes," Macmaster said. "I've warned you -about it." - -"I'm as solemn as an owl!" Tietjens rejoined. "The lower classes are -becoming vocal. Why shouldn't they? They're the only people in this -country who are sound in wind and limb. They'll save the country if the -country's to be saved." - -"And you call yourself a Tory!" Macmaster said. - -"The lower classes," Tietjens continued equably, "such of them as get -through the secondary schools, want irregular and very transitory -unions. During holidays they go together on personally-conducted tours -to Switzerland and such places. Wet afternoons they pass in their tiled -bathrooms, slapping each other hilariously on the backs and splashing -white enamel paint about." - -"You say you don't read novels," Macmaster said, "but I recognise the -quotation." - -"I don't _read_ novels," Tietjens answered. "I know what's in 'em. There -has been nothing worth _reading_ written in England since the eighteenth -century except by a woman. . . . But it's natural for your enamel -splashers to want to see themselves in a bright and variegated -literature. Why shouldn't they? It's a healthy, human desire, and now -that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied. It's healthy, I -tell you. Infinitely healthier than . . ." He paused. - -"Than what?" Macmaster asked. - -"I'm thinking," Tietjens said, "thinking how not to be too rude." - -"You want to be rude," Macmaster said bitterly, "to people who lead the -contemplative . . . the circumspect life." - -"It's precisely that," Tietjens said. He quoted: - - -"'She walks the lady of, my delight, -A shepherdess of sheep; -She is so circumspect and right: -She has her thoughts to keep.'" - - -Macmaster said: - -"Confound you, Chrissie. You know everything." - -"Well, yes," Tietjens said musingly, "I think I should want to be rude -to her. I don't say I should be. Certainly I shouldn't if she were good -looking. Or if she were your soul's affinity. You can rely on that." - -Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens' large and clumsy form walking -beside the lady of his, Macmaster's, delight, when ultimately she was -found--walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies -and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. -All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn't like Tietjens. Women -didn't as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated -him. - -. . . Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said -conciliatorily: - -"Yes, I think I could rely on that!" He added: "All the same I don't -wonder that . . ." - -He had been about to say: - -"I don't wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral." For Tietjens' wife -alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his -silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his -views. . . . But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on: - -"All the same when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will -save England, because they've the courage to know what they want and to -say so." - -Macmaster said loftily: - -"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to -know as well as I do that a war is impossible--at any rate with this -country in it. Simply because . . ." He hesitated and then emboldened -himself: "_We_--the circumspect--yes, the circumspect classes, will -pilot the nation through the tight places." - -"War, my good fellow," Tietjens said--the train was slowing down -preparatorily to running into Ashford--"is inevitable, and with this -country plumb centre in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows are -such damn hypocrites. There's not a country in the world that trusts us. -We're always, as it were, committing adultery--like your fellow!--with -the name of Heaven on our lips." He was jibing again at the subject of -Macmaster's monograph. - -"He never!" Macmaster said in almost a stutter. "He never whined about -Heaven." - -"He did," Tietjens said: "The beastly poem you quoted ends:" - - -"'Better far though hearts may break, -Since we dare not love, -Part till we once more may meet -In a Heaven above.'" - - -And Macmaster, who had been dreading that shot--for he never knew how -much or how little of any given poem his friend would have by -heart--Macmaster collapsed, as it were, into fussily getting down his -dressing-cases and clubs from the rack, a task he usually left to a -porter. Tietjens who, however much a train might be running into a -station he was bound for, sat like a rock until it was dead-still, said: - -"Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there's you fellows who can't be -trusted. And then there's the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and -white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And -there aren't enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round. -It's like you polygamists with women. There aren't enough women in the -world to go round to satisfy your insatiable appetites. And there aren't -enough men in the world to give each woman one. And most women want -several. So you have divorce cases. I suppose you won't say that because -you're so circumspect and right there shall be no more divorce? Well, -war is as inevitable as divorce. . . ." - -Macmaster had his head out of the carriage window and was calling for a -porter. - - -On the platform a number of women in lovely sable cloaks, with purple or -red jewel cases, with diaphanous silky scarves flying from motor hoods, -were drifting towards the branch train for Rye, under the shepherding of -erect, burdened footmen. Two of them nodded to Tietjens. - -Macmaster considered that he was perfectly right to be tidy in his -dress; you never knew whom you mightn't meet on a railway journey. This -confirmed him as against Tietjens, who preferred to look like a navvy. - -A tall, white-haired, white-moustached, red-cheeked fellow limped after -Tietjens, who was getting his immense bag out of the guard's van. He -clapped the young man on the shoulder and said: - -"Hullo! How's your mother-in-law? Lady Claude wants to know. She says -come up and pick a bone to-night if you're going to Rye." He had -extraordinarily blue, innocent eyes. - -Tietjens said: - -"Hullo, general," and added: "I believe she's much better. Quite -restored. This is Macmaster. I think I shall be going over to bring my -wife back in a day or two. They're both at Lobscheid . . . a German -spa." - -The general said: - -"Quite right. It isn't good for a young man to be alone. Kiss Sylvia's -finger-tips for me. She's the real thing, you lucky beggar." He added, a -little anxiously: "What about a foursome to-morrow? Paul Sandbach is -down. He's as crooked as me. We can't do a full round at singles." - -"It's your own fault," Tietjens said. "You ought to have gone to my -bone-setter. Settle it with Macmaster, will you?" He jumped into the -twilight of the guard's van. - -The general looked at Macmaster, a quick, penetrating scrutiny: - -"You're _the_ Macmaster," he said. "You would be if you're with -Chrissie." - -A high voice called: - -"General! General!" - -"I want a word with you," the general said, "about the figures in that -article you wrote about Pondoland. Figures are all right. But we shall -lose the beastly country if . . . But we'll talk about it after dinner -to-night. You'll come up to Lady Claudine's. . . ." - - -Macmaster congratulated himself again on his appearance. It was all very -well for Tietjens to look like a sweep; he was of these people. He, -Macmaster, wasn't. He had, if anything, to be an authority, and -authorities wear gold tie-rings and broadcloth. General Lord Edward -Campion had a son, a permanent head of the Treasury department that -regulated increases of salaries and promotions in all the public -offices. Tietjens only caught the Rye train by running alongside it, -pitching his enormous kit-bag through the carriage window and swinging -on the footboard. Macmaster reflected that if he had done that half the -station would have been yelling, "Stand away there." - -As it was Tietjens a stationmaster was galloping after him to open the -carriage door and grinningly to part: - -"Well caught, sir!" for it was a cricketing county. - -"Truly," Macmaster quoted to himself. - - -"'The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: -Some enter at the portal. Some do not!'" - - - - -II - - -Mrs. Satterthwaite with her French maid, her priest, and her -disreputable young man, Mr. Bayliss, were at Lobscheid, an unknown and -little-frequented air resort amongst the pinewoods of the Taunus. Mrs. -Satterthwaite was ultra-fashionable and consummately indifferent--she -only really lost her temper if at her table and under her nose you -consumed her famous Black Hamburg grapes without taking their skin and -all. Father Consett was out to have an uproarious good time during his -three weeks' holiday from the slums of Liverpool; Mr. Bayliss, thin like -a skeleton in tight blue serge, golden haired and pink, was so nearly -dead of tuberculosis, was so dead penniless, and of tastes so costly -that he was ready to keep stone quiet, drink six pints of milk a day and -behave himself. On the face of it he was there to write the letters of -Mrs. Satterthwaite, but the lady never let him enter her private rooms -for fear of infection. He had to content himself with nursing a growing -adoration for Father Consett. This priest, with an enormous mouth, high -cheek bones, untidy black hair, a broad face that never looked too clean -and waving hands that always looked too dirty, never kept still for a -moment, and had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned -English novels of Irish life. He had a perpetual laugh, like the noise -made by a steam roundabout. He was, in short, a saint, and Mr. Bayliss -knew it, though he didn't know how. Ultimately, and with the financial -assistance of Mrs. Satterthwaite, Mr. Bayliss became almoner to Father -Consett, adopted the rule of St. Vincent de Paul and wrote some very -admirable, if decorative, devotional verse. - -They proved thus a very happy, innocent party. For Mrs. Satterthwaite -interested herself--it was the only interest she had--in handsome, thin -and horribly disreputable young men. She would wait for them, or send -her car to wait for them, at the gaol gates. She would bring their -usually admirable wardrobes up to date and give them enough money to -have a good time. When contrary to all expectations--but it happened -more often than not!--they turned out well, she was lazily pleased. -Sometimes she sent them away to a gay spot with a priest who needed a -holiday; sometimes she had them down to her place in the west of -England. - -So they were a pleasant company and all very happy. Lobscheid contained -one empty hotel with large verandahs and several square farm-houses, -white with grey beams, painted in the gables with bouquets of blue and -yellow flowers or with scarlet huntsmen shooting at purple stags. They -were like gay cardboard boxes set down in fields of long grass; then the -pinewoods commenced and ran, solemn, brown and geometric for miles up -and down hill. The peasant girls wore black velvet waistcoats, white -bodices, innumerable petticoats and absurd parti-coloured headdresses of -the shape and size of halfpenny buns. They walked about in rows of four -to six abreast, with a slow step, protruding white-stockinged feet in -dancing pumps, their headdresses nodding solemnly; young men in blue -blouses, knee-breeches and, on Sundays, in three-cornered hats, followed -behind singing part-songs. - -The French maid--whom Mrs. Satterthwaite had borrowed from the Duchesse -de Carbon Châteaulherault in exchange for her own maid--was at first -inclined to find the place _maussade_. But getting up a tremendous love -affair with a fine, tall, blonde young fellow, who included a gun, a -gold-mounted hunting knife as long as his arm, a light, grey-green -uniform, with gilt badges and buttons, she was reconciled to her lot. -When the young Förster tried to shoot her--"_et pour cause_," as she -said--she was ravished and Mrs. Satterthwaite lazily amused. - -They were sitting playing bridge in the large, shadowy dining-hall of -the hotel: Mrs. Satterthwaite, Father Consett, Mr. Bayliss. A young -blonde sub-lieutenant of great obsequiousness who was there as a last -chance for his right lung and his career, and the bearded Kur-doctor cut -in. Father Consett, breathing heavily and looking frequently at his -watch, played very fast, exclaiming: "Hurry up now; it's nearly twelve. -Hurry up wid ye." Mr. Bayliss being dummy, the Father exclaimed: "Three, -no trumps; I've to make. Get me a whisky and soda quick, and don't drown -it as ye did the last." He played his hand with extreme rapidity, threw -down his last three cards, exclaimed: "Ach! Botheranouns an' all; I'm -two down and I've revoked on the top av it," swallowed down his whisky -and soda, looked at his watch and exclaimed: "Done it to the minute! -Here, doctor, take my hand and finish the rubber." He was to take the -mass next day for the local priest, and mass must be said fasting from -midnight, and without cards played. Bridge was his only passion; a -fortnight every year was what, in his worn-out life, he got of it. On -his holiday he rose at ten. At eleven it was: "A four for the Father." -From two to four they walked in the forest. At five it was: "A four for -the Father." At nine it was: "Father, aren't you coming to your bridge?" -And Father Consett grinned all over his face and said: "It's good ye are -to a poor ould soggart. It will be paid back to you in Heaven." - -The other four played on solemnly. The Father sat himself down behind -Mrs. Satterthwaite, his chin in the nape of her neck. At excruciating -moments he gripped her shoulders, exclaimed: "Play the _queen_, woman!" -and breathed hard down her back. Mrs. Satterthwaite would play the two -of diamonds, and the Father, throwing himself back, would groan. She -said over her shoulder: - -"I want to talk to you to-night, Father," took the last trick of the -rubber, collected 17 marks 50 from the doctor and 8 marks from the -unter-leutenant. The doctor exclaimed: - -"You gan't dake that immense sum from us and then ko off. Now we shall -be ropped py Herr Payliss at gutt-throat!" - -She drifted, all shadowy black silk, across the shadows of the -dining-hall, dropping her winnings into her black satin vanity bag and -attended by the priest. Outside the door, beneath the antlers of a royal -stag, in an atmosphere of paraffin lamps and varnished pitch-pine, she -said: - -"Come up to my sitting-room. The prodigal's returned. Sylvia's here." - -The Father said: - -"I thought I saw her out of the corner of my eye in the 'bus after -dinner. She'll be going back to her husband. It's a poor world." - -"She's a wicked devil!" Mrs. Satterthwaite said. - -"I've known her myself since she was nine," Father Consett said, "and -it's little I've seen in her to hold up to the commendation of my -flock." He added: "But maybe I'm made unjust by the shock of it." - -They climbed the stairs slowly. - -Mrs. Satterthwaite sat herself on the edge of a cane chair. She said: - -"Well!" - -She wore a black hat like a cart-wheel and her dresses appeared always -to consist of a great many squares of silk that might have been thrown -on to her. Since she considered that her complexion, which was mat -white, had gone slightly violet from twenty years of make up, when she -was not made up--as she never was at Lobscheid--she wore bits of -puce-coloured satin ribbon stuck here and there, partly to counteract -the violet of her complexion, partly to show she was not in mourning. -She was very tall and extremely emaciated; her dark eyes that had -beneath them dark brown thumb-marks were very tired or very indifferent -by turns. - -Father Consett walked backwards and forwards, his hands behind his back, -his head bent, over the not too well polished floor. There were two -candles, lit but dim, in imitation pewter _nouvel art_ candlesticks, -rather dingy; a sofa of cheap mahogany with red plush cushions and -rests, a table covered with a cheap carpet and an American roll-top desk -that had thrown into it a great many papers in scrolls or flat. Mrs. -Satterthwaite was extremely indifferent to her surroundings, but she -insisted on having a piece of furniture for her papers. She liked also -to have a profusion of hot-house, not garden, flowers, but as there were -none of these at Lobscheid she did without them. She insisted also, as a -rule, on a comfortable chaise longue which she rarely, if ever, used; -but the German Empire of those days did not contain a comfortable chair, -so she did without it, lying down on her bed when she was really tired. -The walls of the large room were completely covered with pictures of -animals in death agonies: capercailzies giving up the ghost with gouts -of scarlet blood on the snow; deer dying with their heads back and eyes -glazing, gouts of red blood on their necks; foxes dying with scarlet -blood on green grass. These pictures were frame to frame, representing -sport, the hotel having been a former Grand Ducal hunting-box, freshened -to suit the taste of the day with varnished pitch-pine, bathrooms, -verandahs, and excessively modern but noisy lavatory arrangements which -had been put in for the delight of possible English guests. - -Mrs. Satterthwaite sat on the edge of her chair; she had always the air -of being just about to go out somewhere or of having just come in and -being on the point of going to take her things off. She said: - -"There's been a telegram waiting for her all the afternoon. I knew she -was coming." - -Father Consett said: - -"I saw it in the rack myself. I misdoubted it." He added: "Oh dear, oh -dear! After all we've talked about it; now it's come." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"I've been a wicked woman myself as these things are measured; -but . . ." - -Father Consett said: - -"Ye have! It's no doubt from you she gets it, for your husband was a -good man. But one wicked woman is enough for my contemplation at a time. -I'm no St. Anthony. . . . The young man says he will take her back?" - -"On conditions," Miss Satterthwaite said. "He is coming here to have an -interview." - -The priest said: - -"Heaven knows, Mrs. Satterthwaite, there are times when to a poor priest -the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard and he -almost doubts her inscrutable wisdom. He doesn't mind you. But at times -I wish that that young man would take what advantage--it's all there -is!--that he can of being a Protestant and divorce Sylvia. For I tell -you, there are bitter things to see amongst my flock over there . . ." -He made a vague gesture towards the infinite. . . . "And bitter things -I've seen, for the heart of man is a wicked place. But never a bitterer -than this young man's lot." - -"As you say," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "my husband was a good man. I -hated him, but that was as much my fault as his. More! And the only -reason I don't wish Christopher to divorce Sylvia is that it would bring -disgrace on my husband's name. At the same time, Father . . ." - -The priest said: - -"I've heard near enough." - -"There's this to be said for Sylvia," Mrs. Satterthwaite went on. "There -are times when a woman hates a man--as Sylvia hates her husband. . . . I -tell you I've walked behind a man's back and nearly screamed because of -the desire to put my nails into the veins of his neck. It was a -fascination. And it's worse with Sylvia. It's a natural antipathy." - -"Woman!" Father Consett fulminated, "I've no patience wid ye! If the -woman, as the Church directs, would have children by her husband and -live decent, she would have no such feelings. It's unnatural living and -unnatural practises that cause these complexes. Don't think I'm an -ignoramus, priest if I am." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"But Sylvia's had a child." - -Father Consett swung round like a man that has been shot at. - -"Whose?" he asked, and he pointed a dirty finger at his interlocutress. -"It was that blackguard Drake's, wasn't it? I've long suspected that." - -"It was probably Drake's," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. - -"Then," the priest said, "in the face of the pains of the hereafter how -could you let that decent lad in the hotness of his sin? . . ." - -"Indeed," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "I shiver sometimes when I think of -it. Don't believe that I had anything to do with trepanning him. But I -couldn't hinder it. Sylvia's my daughter, and dog doesn't eat dog." - -"There are times when it should," Father Consett said contemptuously. - -"You don't seriously," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "say that I, a mother, -if an indifferent one, with my daughter appearing in trouble, as the -kitchenmaids say, by a married man--that I should step in and stop a -marriage that was a Godsend. . . ." - -"Don't," the priest said, "introduce the sacred name into an affair of -Piccadilly bad girls. . . ." He stopped. "Heaven help me," he said -again, "don't ask me to answer the question of what you should or -shouldn't have done. You know I loved your husband like a brother, and -you know I've loved you and Sylvia ever since she was a tiny. And I -thank God that I am not your spiritual adviser, but only your friend in -God. For if I had to answer your question I could answer it only in one -way." He broke off to ask: "Where is that woman?" - -Mrs. Satterthwaite called: - -"Sylvia! Sylvia! Come here!" - -A door in the shadows opened and light shone from another room behind a -tall figure leaning one hand on the handle of the door. A very deep -voice said: - -"I can't understand, mother, why you live in rooms like a sergeants' -mess." And Sylvia Tietjens wavered into the room. She added: "I suppose -it doesn't matter. I'm bored." - -Father Consett groaned: - -"Heaven help us, she's like a picture of Our Lady by Fra Angelico." - -Immensely tall, slight and slow in her movements, Sylvia Tietjens wore -her reddish, very fair hair in great bandeaux right down over her ears. -Her very oval, regular face had an expression of virginal lack of -interest such as used to be worn by fashionable Paris courtesans a -decade before that time. Sylvia Tietjens considered that, being -privileged to go everywhere where one went and to have all men at her -feet, she had no need to change her expression or to infuse into it the -greater animation that marked the more common beauties of the early -twentieth century. She moved slowly from the door and sat languidly on -the sofa against the wall. - -"There you are, Father," she said. "I'll not ask you to shake hands with -me. You probably wouldn't." - -"As I am a priest," Father Consett answered, "I could not refuse. But -I'd rather not." - -"This," Sylvia repeated, "appears to be a boring place." - -"You won't say so to-morrow," the priest said. "There's two young -fellows. . . . And a sort of policeman to trepan away from your mother's -maid!" - -"That," Sylvia answered, "is meant to be bitter. But it doesn't hurt. I -am done with men." She added suddenly: "Mother, didn't you one day, -while you were still young, say that you had done with men? Firmly! And -mean it?" - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"I did." - -"And did you keep to it?" Sylvia asked. - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"I did." - -"And shall I, do you imagine?" - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"I imagine you will." - -Sylvia said: - -"Oh dear!" - -The priest said: - -"I'd be willing to see your husband's telegram. It makes a difference to -see the words on paper." - -Sylvia rose effortlessly. - -"I don't see why you shouldn't," she said. "It will give you no -pleasure." She drifted towards the door. - -"If it would give me pleasure," the priest said, "you would not show it -me." - -"I would not," she said. - -A silhouette in the doorway, she halted, drooping, and looked over her -shoulder. - -"Both you and mother," she said, "sit there scheming to make life -bearable for the Ox. I call my husband the Ox. He's repulsive: like a -swollen animal. Well . . . you can't do it." The lighted doorway was -vacant. Father Consett sighed. - -"I told you this was an evil place," he said. "In the deep forests. -She'd not have such evil thoughts in another place." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"I'd rather you didn't say that, Father. Sylvia would have evil thoughts -in any place." - -"Sometimes," the priest said, "at night I think I hear the claws of evil -things scratching on the shutters. This was the last place in Europe to -be christianised. Perhaps it wasn't ever even christianised and they're -here yet." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"It's all very well to talk like that in the day-time. It makes the -place seem romantic. But it must be near one at night. And things are -bad enough as it is." - -"They are," Father Consett said. "The devil's at work." - -Sylvia drifted back into the room with a telegram of several sheets. -Father Consett held it close to one of the candles to read, for he was -short-sighted. - -"All men are repulsive," Sylvia said; "don't you think so, mother?" - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"I do not. Only a heartless woman would say so." - -"Mrs. Vanderdecken," Sylvia went on, "says all men are repulsive and -it's woman's disgusting task to live beside them." - -"You've been seeing that foul creature?" Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "She's -a Russian agent. And worse!" - -"She was at Gosingeux all the time we were," Sylvia said. "You needn't -groan. She won't split on us. She's the soul of honour." - -"It wasn't because of that I groaned, if I did," Mrs. Satterthwaite -answered. - -The priest, from over his telegram, exclaimed: - -"Mrs. Vanderdecken! God forbid." - -Sylvia's face, as she sat on the sofa, expressed languid and incredulous -amusement. - -"What do you know of her?" she asked the Father. - -"I know what you know," he answered, "and that's enough." - -"Father Consett," Sylvia said to her mother, "has been renewing his -social circle." - -"It's not," Father Consett said, "amongst the dregs of the people that -you must live if you don't want to hear of the dregs of society." - -Sylvia stood up. She said: - -"You'll keep your tongue off my best friends if you want me to stop and -be lectured. But for Mrs. Vanderdecken I should not be here, returned to -the fold!" - -Father Consett exclaimed: - -"Don't say it, child. I'd rather, heaven help me, you had gone on living -in open sin." - -Sylvia sat down again, her hands listlessly in her lap. - -"Have it your own way," she said, and the Father returned to the fourth -sheet of the telegram. - -"What does this mean?" he asked. He had returned to the first sheet. -"This here: '_Accept resumption yoke_'?" he read, breathlessly. - -"Sylvia," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "go and light the spirit lamp for -some tea. We shall want it." - -"You'd think I was a district messenger boy," Sylvia said as she rose. -"Why don't you keep your maid up? . . . It's a way we had of referring -to our . . . union," she explained to the Father. - -"There was sympathy enough between you and him then," he said, "to have -bywords for things. It was that I wanted to know. I understood the -words." - -"They were pretty bitter bywords, as you call them," Sylvia said. "More -like curses than kisses." - -"It was you that used them then," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "Christopher -never said a bitter thing to you." - -An expression like a grin came slowly over Sylvia's face as she turned -back to the priest. - -"That's mother's tragedy," she said. "My husband's one of her best boys. -She adores him. And he can't bear _her_." She drifted behind the wall of -the next room and they heard her tinkling the tea-things as the Father -read on again beside the candle. His immense shadow began at the centre -and ran along the pitch-pine ceiling, down the wall and across the floor -to join his splay feet in their clumsy boots. - -"It's bad," he muttered. He made a sound like "Umbleumbleumble. . . . -Worse than I feared . . . umble-umble. . . . '_accept resumption yoke -but on rigid conditions_.' What's this: _esoecially_; it ought to be a -'p,' '_especially regards child reduce establishment ridiculous our -position remake settlements in child's sole interests flat not house -entertaining minimum am prepared resign office settle Yorkshire but -imagine this not suit you child remain sister Effie open visits both -wire if this rough outline provisionally acceptable in that case will -express draft general position Monday for you and mother reflect upon -follow self Tuesday arrive Thursday Lobscheid go Wiesbaden fortnight on -social task discussion Thursday limited solely comma emphasised comma to -affairs._'" - -"That means," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "that he doesn't mean to reproach -her. _Emphasised_ applies to the word _solely_. . . ." - -"Why d'you take it. . . ." Father Consett asked, "did he spend an -immense lot of money on this telegram? Did he imagine you were in such -trepidation. . . ." He broke off. Walking slowly, her long arms extended -to carry the tea-tray, over which her wonderfully moving face had a rapt -expression of indescribable mystery, Sylvia was coming through the door. - -"Oh, child," the Father exclaimed, "whether it's St. Martha or that Mary -that made the bitter choice, not one of them ever looked more virtuous -than you. Why aren't ye born to be a good man's help-meet?" - -A little tinkle sounded from the tea-tray and three pieces of sugar fell -on to the floor. Mrs. Tietjens hissed with vexation. - -"I _knew_ that damned thing would slide off the tea-cups," she said. She -dropped the tray from an inch or so of height on to the carpeted table. -"I'd made it a matter of luck between myself and myself," she said. Then -she faced the priest. - -"I'll tell you," she said, "why he sent the telegram. It's because of -that dull display of the English gentleman that I detested. He gives -himself the solemn airs of the Foreign Minister, but he's only a -youngest son at the best. That is why I loathe him." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"That isn't the reason why he sent the telegram." - -Her daughter had a gesture of amused, lazy tolerance. - -"Of course it isn't," she said. "He sent it out of consideration: the -lordly, full dress consideration that drives me distracted." As he would -say: "He'd imagine I'd find it convenient to have ample time for -reflection. It's like being addressed as if one were a monument and by -a herald according to protocol. And partly because he's the soul of -truth like a stiff Dutch doll. He wouldn't write a letter because he -couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours -sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' . . . He's that sort of -precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the -conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them." - -"Then," Father Consett said, "if ye know him so well, Sylvia -Satterthwaite, how is it ye can't get on with him better? They say: -_Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner._" - -"It isn't," Sylvia said. "To know everything about a person is to be -bored . . . bored . . . bored!" - -"And how are ye going to answer this telegram of his?" the Father asked. -"Or have ye answered it already?" - -"I shall wait until Monday night to keep him as bothered as I can to -know whether he's to start on Tuesday. He fusses like a hen over his -packings and the exact hours of his movements. On Monday I shall -telegraph: 'Righto' and nothing else." - -"And why," the Father asked, "will ye telegraph him a vulgar word that -you never use, for your language is the one thing about you that isn't -vulgar?" - -Sylvia said: - -"Thanks!" She curled her legs up under her on the sofa and laid her head -back against the wall so that her Gothic arch of a chinbone pointed at -the ceiling. She admired her own neck, which was very long and white. - -"I know!" Father Consett said. "You're a beautiful woman. Some men would -say it was a lucky fellow that lived with you. I don't ignore the fact -in my cogitation. He'd imagine all sorts of delights to lurk in the -shadow of your beautiful hair. And they wouldn't." - -Sylvia brought her gaze down from the ceiling and fixed her brown eyes -for a moment on the priest, speculatively. - -"It's a great handicap we suffer from," he said. - -"I don't know why I selected that word," Sylvia said, "it's one word, so -it costs only fifty pfennigs. I couldn't hope really to give a jerk to -his pompous self-sufficiency." - -"It's great handicaps we priests suffer from," the Father repeated. -"However much a priest may be a man of the world--and he has to be to -fight the world . . ." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"Have a cup of tea, Father, while it's just right. I believe Sylvia is -the only person in Germany who knows how to make tea." - -"There's always behind him the Roman collar and the silk bib, and you -don't believe in him," Father Consett went on, "yet he knows ten--a -thousand times!--more of human nature than ever you can." - -"I don't see," Sylvia said placably, "how you can learn in your slums -anything about the nature of Eunice Vanderdecken, or Elizabeth B. or -Queenie James, or any of my set." She was on her feet pouring cream into -the Father's tea. "I'll admit for the moment that you aren't giving me -pi-jaw." - -"I'm glad," the priest said, "that ye remember enough of yer schooldays -to use the old term." - -Sylvia wavered backwards to her sofa and sank down again. - -"There you are," she said, "you can't really get away from preachments. -Me for the pyore young girl is always at the back of it." - -"It isn't," the Father said. "I'm not one to cry for the moon." - -"You don't want me to be a pure young girl," Sylvia asked with lazy -incredulity. - -"I do not!" the Father said, "but I'd wish that at times ye'd remember -you once were." - -"I don't believe I ever was," Sylvia said, "if the nuns had known I'd -have been expelled from the Holy Child." - -"You would not," the Father said. "Do stop your boasting. The nuns have -too much sense. . . . Anyhow, it isn't a pure young girl I'd have you or -behaving like a Protestant deaconess for the craven fear of hell. I'd -have ye be a physically healthy, decently honest-with-yourself young -devil of a married woman. It's them that are the plague and the -salvation of the world." - -"You admire mother?" Mrs. Tietjens asked suddenly. She added in -parenthesis: "You see you can't get away from salvation." - -"I mean keeping bread and butter in their husband's stomachs," the -priest said. "Of course I admire your mother." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite moved a hand slightly. - -"You're at any rate in league with her against me," Sylvia said. She -asked with more interest: "Then would you have me model myself on her -and do good works to escape hell fire? She wears a hair shirt in Lent." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite started from her doze on the edge of her chair. She -had been trusting the Father's wit to give her daughter's insolence a -run for its money, and she imagined that if the priest hit hard enough -he might, at least, make Sylvia think a little about some of her ways. - -"Hang it, no, Sylvia," she exclaimed more suddenly. "I may not be much, -but I'm a sportsman. I'm afraid of hell fire; horribly, I'll admit. But -I don't bargain with the Almighty. I hope He'll let me through; but I'd -go on trying to pick men out of the dirt--I suppose that's what you and -Father Consett mean--if I were as certain of going to hell as I am of -going to bed to-night. So that's that!" - -"'And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!'" Sylvia jeered softly. -"All the same I bet you wouldn't bother to reclaim men if you could not -find the young, good-looking, interestingly vicious sort." - -"I wouldn't," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "If they didn't interest me, why -should I?" - -Sylvia looked at Father Consett. - -"If you're going to trounce me any more," she said, "get a move on. It's -late, I've been travelling for thirty-six hours." - -"I will," Father Consett said. "It's a good maxim that if you swat flies -enough some of them stick to the wall. I'm only trying to make a little -mark on your common sense. Don't you see what you're going to?" - -"What?" Sylvia said indifferently. "Hell?" - -"No," the Father said, "I'm talking of this life. Your confessor must -talk to you about the next. But I'll not tell you what you're going to. -I've changed my mind. I'll tell your mother after you're gone." - -"Tell me," Sylvia said. - -"I'll not," Father Consett answered. "Go to the fortune-tellers at the -Earl's Court exhibition; they'll tell ye all about the fair woman you're -to beware of." - -"There's some of them said to be rather good," Sylvia said. "Di Wilson's -told me about one. She said she was going to have a baby. . . . You -don't mean that, Father? For I swear I never will. . . ." - -"I daresay not," the priest said. "But let's talk about men." - -"There's nothing you can tell me I don't know," Sylvia said. - -"I daresay not," the priest answered. "But let's rehearse what you do -know. Now suppose you could elope with a new man every week and no -questions asked? Or how often would you want to?" - -Sylvia said: - -"Just a moment, Father," and she addressed Mrs. Satterthwaite: "I -suppose I shall have to put myself to bed." - -"You will," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "I'll not have any maid kept up -after ten in a holiday resort. What's she to do in a place like this? -Except listen for the bogies it's full of?" - -"Always considerate!" Mrs. Tietjens gibed. "And perhaps it's just as -well. I'd probably beat that Marie of your's arms to pieces with a -hair-brush if she came near me." She added: "You were talking about men, -Father. . . ." And then began with sudden animation to her mother: - -"I've changed my mind about that telegram. The first thing to-morrow I -shall wire: '_Agreed entirely but arrange bring Hullo Central with -you._'" - -She addressed the priest again: - -"I call my maid Hullo Central because she's got a tinny voice like a -telephone." I say: "Hullo Central"--when she answers 'Yes, modd'm,' -you'd swear it was the Exchange speaking. . . . But you were telling me -about men." - -"I was reminding you!" the Father said. "But I needn't go on. You've -caught the drift of my remarks. That is why you are pretending not to -listen." - -"I assure you, no," Mrs. Tietjens said. "It is simply that if a thing -comes into my head I have to say it. . . . You were saying that if one -went away with a different man for every week-end . . ." - -"You've shortened the period already," the priest said. "I gave a full -week to every man." - -"But, of course, one would have to have a home," Sylvia said, "an -address. One would have to fill one's mid-week engagements. Really it -comes to it that one has to have a husband and a place to store one's -maid in. Hullo Central's been on board-wages all the time. But I don't -believe she likes it. . . . Let's agree that if I had a different man -every week I'd be bored with the arrangement. That's what you're getting -at, isn't it?" - -"You'd find," the priest said, "that it whittled down until the only -divvy moment was when you stood waiting in the booking-office for the -young man to take the tickets. . . . And then gradually that wouldn't be -divvy any more. . . . And you'd yawn and long to go back to your -husband." - -"Look here," Mrs. Tietjens said, "you're abusing the secrets of the -confessional. That's exactly what Tottie Charles said. She tried it for -three months while Freddie Charles was in Madeira. It's _exactly_ what -she said down to the yawn and the booking-office. _And_ the 'divvy.' -It's only Tottie Charles who uses it every two words. Most of us prefer -ripping! It _is_ more sensible." - -"Of course I haven't been abusing the secrets of the confessional," -Father Consett said mildly. - -"Of course you haven't," Sylvia said with affection. "You're a good old -stick and no end of a mimic, and you know us all to the bottom of our -hearts." - -"Not all that much," the priest said, "there's probably a good deal of -good at the bottom of your hearts." - -Sylvia said: - -"Thanks." She asked suddenly: "Look here. _Was_ it what you saw of -us--the future mothers of England, you know, and all--at Miss -Lampeter's--that made you take to the slums? Out of disgust and -despair?" - -"Oh, let's not make melodrama out of it," the priest answered. "Let's -say I wanted a change. I couldn't see that I was doing any good." - -"You did us all the good there was done," Sylvia said. "What with Miss -Lampeter always drugged to the world, and all the French mistresses as -wicked as hell." - -"I've heard you say all this before," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "But it -was supposed to be the best finishing school in England. I know it cost -enough!" - -"Well, say it was we who were a rotten lot," Sylvia concluded; and then -to the Father: "We _were_ a lot of rotters, weren't we?" - -The priest answered: - -"I don't know. I don't suppose you were--or are--any worse than your -mother or grandmother, or the patricianesses of Rome or the worshippers -of Ashtaroth. It seems we have to have a governing class and governing -classes are subject to special temptations." - -"Who's Ashtaroth?" Sylvia asked. "Astarte?" and then: "Now, Father, -after your experiences would you say the factory girls of Liverpool, or -any other slum, are any better women than us that you used to look -after?" - -"Astarte Syriaca," the Father said, "was a very powerful devil. There's -some that hold she's not dead yet. I don't know that I do myself." - -"Well, I've done with her," Sylvia said. - -The Father nodded: - -"You've had dealings with Mrs. Profumo?" he asked. "And that loathsome -fellow. . . . What's his name?" - -"Does it shock you?" Sylvia asked. "I'll admit it was a bit thick. . . . -But I've done with it. I prefer to pin my faith to Mrs. Vanderdecken. -And, of course, Freud." - -The priest nodded his head and said: - -"Of course! Of course. . . ." - -But Mrs. Satterthwaite exclaimed, with sudden energy: - -"Sylvia Tietjens, I don't care what you do or what you read, but if you -ever speak another word to that woman, you never do to me!" - -Sylvia stretched herself on her sofa. She opened her brown eyes wide and -let the lids slowly drop again. - -"I've said once," she said, "that I don't like to hear my friends -miscalled. Eunice Vanderdecken is a bitterly misjudged woman. She's a -real good pal." - -"She's a Russian spy," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. - -"Russian grandmother," Sylvia answered. "And if she is, who cares? She's -welcome for me. . . . Listen now, you two. I said to myself when I came -in: 'I daresay I've given them both a rotten time.' I know you're both -more nuts on me than I deserve. And I said I'd sit and listen to all the -pi-jaw you wanted to give me if I sat till dawn. And I will. As a -return. But I'd rather you let my friends alone." - -Both the elder people were silent. There came from the shuttered windows -of the dark room a low, scratching rustle. - -"You hear!" the priest said to Mrs. Satterthwaite. - -"It's the branches," Mrs. Satterthwaite answered. - -The Father answered: "There's no tree within ten yards! Try bats as an -explanation." - -"I've said I wish you wouldn't, once," Mrs. Satterthwaite shivered. -Sylvia said: - -"I don't know what you two are talking about. It sounds like -superstition. Mother's rotten with it." - -"I don't say that it's devils trying to get in," the Father said. "But -it's just as well to remember that devils _are_ always trying to get in. -And there are especial spots. These deep forests are noted among -others." He suddenly turned his back and pointed at the shadowy wall. -"Who," he asked, "but a savage possessed by a devil could have conceived -of _that_ as a decoration?" He was pointing at a life-sized, coarsely -daubed picture of a wild boar dying, its throat cut, and gouts of -scarlet blood. Other agonies of animals went away into all the shadows. - -"_Sport!_" he hissed. "It's devilry!" - -"That's perhaps true," Sylvia said. Mrs. Satterthwaite was crossing -herself with great rapidity. The silence remained. - -Sylvia said: - -"Then if you're both done talking I'll say what I have to say. To begin -with . . ." She stopped and sat rather erect, listening to the rustling -from the shutters. - -"To begin with," she began again with impetus, "you spared me the -catalogue of the defects of age; I know them. One grows skinny--my -sort--the complexion fades, the teeth stick out. And then there is the -boredom. I know it; one is bored . . . bored . . . bored! You can't tell -me anything I don't know about that. I'm thirty. I know what to expect. -You'd like to have told me, Father, only you were afraid of taking away -from your famous man of the world effect--you'd like to have told me -that one can insure against the boredom and the long, skinny teeth by -love of husband and child. The home stunt! I believe it! I do quite -believe it. Only I hate my husband . . . and I hate . . . I hate my -child." - -She paused, waiting for exclamations of dismay or disapprobation from -the priest. These did not come. - -"Think," she said, "of all the ruin that child has meant for me; the -pain in bearing him and the fear of death." - -"Of course," the priest said, "child-bearing is for women a very -terrible thing." - -"I can't say," Mrs. Tietjens went on, "that this has been a very decent -conversation. You get a girl . . . fresh from open sin, and make her -talk about it. Of course you're a priest and mother's mother; we're _en -famille_. But Sister Mary of the Cross at the convent had a maxim: 'Wear -velvet gloves in family life.' We seem to be going at it with the gloves -off." - -Father Consett still didn't say anything. - -"You're trying, of course, to draw me," Sylvia said. "I can see that -with half an eye. . . . Very well then, you shall. . . ." - -She drew a breath. - -"You want to know why I hate my husband. I'll tell you; it's because of -his simple, sheer immorality. I don't mean his actions; his views! Every -speech he utters about everything makes me--I swear it makes me--in -spite of myself, want to stick a knife into him, and I can't prove he's -wrong, not ever, about the simplest thing. But I can pain him. And I -will. . . . He sits about in chairs that fit his back, clumsy, like a -rock, not moving for hours. . . . And I can make him wince. Oh, without -showing it. . . . He's what you call . . . oh, loyal. . . . There's an -absurd little chit of a fellow. . . . oh, Macmaster . . . and his mother -. . . whom he persists in a silly, mystical way in calling a saint . . . -a Protestant saint! . . . And his old nurse, who looks after the -child . . . and the child itself. . . . I tell you I've only got to raise -an eyelid . . . yes, cock an eyelid up a little when anyone of them is -mentioned . . . and it hurts him dreadfully. His eyes roll in a sort of -mute anguish. . . . Of course he doesn't say anything. He's an English -country gentleman." - -Father Consett said: - -"This immorality you talk about in your husband. . . . I've never -noticed it. I saw a good deal of him when I stayed with you for the week -before your child was born. I talked with him a great deal. Except in -matters of the two communions--and even in these I don't know that we -differed so much--I found him perfectly sound." - -"Sound!" Mrs. Satterthwaite said with sudden emphasis; "of course he's -sound. It isn't even the word. He's the best ever. There was your -father, for a good man . . . and him. That's an end of it." - -"Ah," Sylvia said, "you don't know. . . . Look here. Try and be just. -Suppose I'm looking at the _Times_ at breakfast and say, not having -spoken to him for a week: "It's wonderful what the doctors are doing. -Have you seen the latest?" And at once he'll be on his high-horse--he -knows everything!--and he'll prove . . . _prove_ . . . that all -unhealthy children must be lethal-chambered or the world will go to -pieces. And it's like being hypnotised; you can't think of what to -answer him. Or he'll reduce you to speechless rage by proving that -murderers ought not to be executed. And then I'll ask, casually, if -children ought to be lethal-chambered for being constipated. Because -Marchant--that's the nurse--is always whining that the child's bowels -aren't regular and the dreadful diseases that leads to. Of course _that_ -hurts him. For he's perfectly soppy about that child, though he half -knows it isn't his own. . . . But that's what I mean by immorality. -He'll profess that murderers ought to be preserved in order to breed -from because they're bold fellows, and innocent little children executed -because they're sick . . . And he'll almost make you believe it, though -you're on the point of retching at the ideas." - -"You wouldn't now," Father Consett began, and almost coaxingly, "think -of going into retreat for a month or two." - -"I wouldn't," Sylvia said. "How could I?" - -"There's a convent of female Premonstratensians near Birkenhead, many -ladies go there," the Father went on. "They cook very well, and you can -have your own furniture and your own maid if ye don't like nuns to wait -on you." - -"It can't be done," Sylvia said, "you can see for yourself. It would -make people smell a rat at once. Christopher wouldn't hear of it. . . ." - -"No, I'm afraid it can't be done, Father," Mrs. Satterthwaite -interrupted finally. "I've hidden here for four months to cover Sylvia's -tracks. I've got Wateman's to look after. My new land steward's coming -in next week." - -"Still," the Father urged, with a sort of tremulous eagerness, "if only -for a month. . . . If only for a fortnight. . . . So many Catholic -ladies do it. . . . Ye might think of it." - -"I see what you're aiming at," Sylvia said with sudden anger; "you're -revolted at the idea of my going straight from one man's arms to -another." - -"I'd be better pleased if there could be an interval," the Father said. -"It's what's called bad form." - -Sylvia became electrically rigid on her sofa. - -"Bad form!" she exclaimed. "You accuse me of bad form." - -The Father slightly bowed his head like a man facing a wind. - -"I do," he said. "It's disgraceful. It's unnatural. I'd travel a bit at -least." - -She placed her hand on her long throat. - -"I know what you mean," she said, "you want to spare Christopher . . . -the humiliation. The . . . the nausea. No doubt he'll feel nauseated. -I've reckoned on that. It will give me a little of my own back." - -The Father said: - -"That's enough, woman. I'll hear no more." - -Sylvia said: - -"You will then. Listen here. . . . I've always got this to look forward -to: I'll settle down by that man's side. I'll be as virtuous as any -woman. I've made up my mind to it and I'll be it. And I'll be bored -stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that -man. And I'll do it. Do you understand how I'll do it? There are many -ways. But if the worst comes to the worst, I can always drive him silly -. . . by corrupting the child!" She was panting a little, and round her -brown eyes the whites showed. "I'll get even with him. I can. I know -how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I've come -all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven't slept. . . . But I -can . . ." - -Father Consett put his hand beneath the tail of his coat. - -"Sylvia Tietjens," he said, "in my pistol pocket I've a little bottle of -holy water which I carry for such occasions. What if I was to throw two -drops of it over you and cry: _Exorciso te Ashtaroth in nomine?_ . . ." - -She erected her body above her skirts on the sofa, stiffened like a -snake's neck above its coils. Her face was quite pallid, her eyes -staring out. - -"You . . . you _daren't_," she said. "To me . . . an outrage!" Her feet -slid slowly to the floor; she measured the distance to the doorway with -her eyes. "You _daren't_," she said again; "I'd denounce you to the -Bishop . . ." - -"It's little the Bishop would help you with them burning into your -skin," the priest said. "Go away, I bid you, and say a Hail Mary or two. -Ye need them. Ye'll not talk of corrupting a little child before me -again." - -"I won't," Sylvia said. "I shouldn't have . . ." - -Her black figure showed in silhouette against the open doorway. - - -When the door was closed upon them, Mrs. Satterthwaite said: - -"Was it necessary to threaten her with that? You know best, of course. -It seems rather strong to me." - -"It's a hair from the dog that's bit her," the priest said. "She's a -silly-girl. She's been playing at black masses along with that Mrs. -Profumo and the fellow who's name I can't remember. You could tell that. -They cut the throat of a white kid and splash its blood about. . . . -That was at the back of her mind. . . . It's not very serious. A parcel -of silly, idle girls. It's not much more than palmistry or -fortune-telling to them if one has to weigh it, for all it's ugliness, -as a sin. As far as their volition goes, and it's volition that's the -essence of prayer, black or white. . . . But it was at the back of her -mind, and she won't forget to-night." - -"Of course, that's your affair, Father," Mrs. Satterthwaite said lazily. -"You hit her pretty hard. I don't suppose she's ever been hit so hard. -What was it you wouldn't tell her?" - -"Only," the priest said, "I wouldn't tell her because the thought's best -not put in her head. . . . But her hell on earth will come when her -husband goes running, blind, head down, mad after another woman." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite looked at nothing; then she nodded. - -"Yes," she said; "I hadn't thought of it. . . . But will he? He is a -very sound fellow, isn't he?" - -"What's to stop it?" the priest asked. "_What_ in the world but the -grace of our blessed Lord, which he hasn't got and doesn't ask for? And -then . . . He's a young man, full-blooded, and they won't be living . . . -_maritalement_. Not if I know him. And then. . . . _Then_ she'll tear -the house down. The world will echo with her wrongs." - -"Do you mean to say," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "that Sylvia would do -anything vulgar?" - -"Doesn't every woman who's had a man to torture for years when she loses -him?" the priest asked. "The more she's made an occupation of torturing -him the less right she thinks she has to lose him." - -Mrs. Satterthwaite looked gloomily into the dusk. - -"That poor devil. . . ." she said. "Will he get any peace anywhere? . . . -What's the matter, Father?" The Father said: - -"I've just remembered she gave me tea and cream and I drank it. Now I -can't take mass for Father Reinhardt. I'll have to go and knock up his -curate, who lives away in the forest." - -At the door, holding the candle, he said: - -"I'd have you not get up to-day nor yet to-morrow, if ye can stand it. -Have a headache and let Sylvia nurse you . . . You'll have to tell how -she nursed you when you get back to London. And I'd rather ye didn't lie -more out and out than ye need, if it's to please me. . . . Besides, if -ye watch Sylvia nursing you, you might hit on a characteristic touch to -make it seem more truthful. . . . How her sleeves brushed the medicine -bottles and irritated you, maybe . . . or--_you'll_ know! If we can save -scandal to the congregation, we may as well." - -He ran downstairs. - - - -III - - -At the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, -Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing -patience engrossedly in a sort of garret bedroom. It had a sloping roof -outlined by black oak beams, which cut into squares the cream coloured -patent distemper of the walls. The room contained also a four-post -bedstead, a corner cupboard in black oak, and many rush mats on a -polished oak floor of very irregular planking. Tietjens, who hated these -disinterred and waxed relics of the past, sat in the centre of the room -at a flimsy card-table beneath a white-shaded electric light of a -brilliance that, in those surroundings, appeared unreasonable. This was -one of those restored old groups of cottages that it was at that date -the fashion to convert into hostelries. To it Macmaster, who was in -search of the inspiration of the past, had preferred to come. Tietjens, -not desiring to interfere with his friend's culture, had accepted the -quarters, though he would have preferred to go to a comfortable modern -hotel as being less affected and cheaper. Accustomed to what he called -the grown oldnesses of a morose, rambling Yorkshire manor house, he -disliked being among collected and rather pitiful bits which, he said, -made him feel ridiculous, as if he were trying to behave seriously at a -fancy-dress ball. Macmaster, on the other hand, with gratification and a -serious air, would run his finger tips along the bevellings of a -darkened piece of furniture, and would declare it genuine "Chippendale" -or "Jacobean oak," as the case might be. And he seemed to gain an added -seriousness and weight of manner with each piece of ancient furniture -that down the years he thus touched. But Tietjens would declare that you -could tell the beastly thing was a fake by just cocking an eye at it -and, if the matter happened to fall under the test of professional -dealers in old furniture, Tietjens was the more often in the right of -it, and Macmaster, sighing slightly, would prepare to proceed still -further along the difficult road to connoisseurship. Eventually, by -conscientious study, he got so far as at times to be called in by -Somerset House to value great properties for probate--an occupation at -once distinguished and highly profitable. - - -Tietjens swore with the extreme vehemence of a man who has been made, -but who much dislikes being seen, to start. - -Macmaster--in evening dress he looked extremely miniature!--said: - -"I'm sorry, old man, I know how much you dislike being interrupted. But -the General is in a terrible temper." - -Tietjens rose stiffly, lurched over to an eighteenth century rosewood -folding washstand, took from its top a glass of flat whisky and soda, -and gulped down a large quantity. He looked about uncertainly, perceived -a notebook on a "Chippendale" bureau, made a short calculation in pencil -and looked at his friend momentarily. - -Macmaster said again: - -"I'm sorry old man. I must have interrupted one of your immense -calculations." - -Tietjens said: - -"You haven't. I was only thinking. I'm just as glad you've come. What -did you say?" - -Macmaster repeated: - -"I said the General is in a terrible temper. It's just as well you -didn't come up to dinner." - -Tietjens said: - -"He isn't . . . He isn't in a temper. He's as pleased as punch at not -having to have these women up before him." - -Macmaster said: - -"He says he's got the police scouring the whole county for them, and -that you'd better leave by the first train to-morrow." - -Tietjens said: - -"I won't. I can't. I've got to wait here for a wire from Sylvia." - -Macmaster groaned: - -"Oh dear! Oh dear!" Then he said hopefully: "But we could have it -forwarded to Hythe." - -Tietjens said with some vehemence: - -"I tell you I won't leave here. I tell you I've settled it with the -police and that swine of a Cabinet Minister. I've mended the leg of the -canary of the wife of the police-constable. Sit down and be reasonable. -The police don't touch people like us." - -Macmaster said: - -"I don't believe you realise the public feeling there is . . ." - -"Of course I do, amongst people like Sandbach," Tietjens said. "Sit down -I tell you. . . . Have some whisky. . . ." He filled himself out another -long tumbler and, holding it, dropped into a too low-seated, reddish -wicker arm-chair that had cretonne fixings. Beneath his weight the chair -sagged a good deal and his dress-shirt front bulged up to his chin. - -Macmaster said: - -"What's the matter with you?" Tietjens' eyes were bloodshot. - -"I tell you," Tietjens said, "I'm waiting for a wire from Sylvia." - -Macmaster said: - -"Oh!" And then: "It can't come to-night, it's getting on for one." - -"It can," Tietjens said, "I've fixed it up with the postmaster--all the -way up to Town! It probably won't come because Sylvia won't send it -until the last moment, to bother me. None the less I'm waiting for a -wire from Sylvia, and this is what I look like." - -Macmaster said: - -"That woman's the cruellest beast . . ." - -"You might," Tietjens interrupted, "remember that you're talking about -my wife." - -"I don't see," Macmaster said, "how one can talk about Sylvia -without . . ." - -"The line is a perfectly simple one to draw," Tietjens said. "You can -relate a lady's actions if you know them and are asked to. You mustn't -comment. In this case you don't know the lady's actions even, so you may -as well hold your tongue." He sat looking straight in front of him. - -Macmaster sighed from deep in his chest. He asked himself if this was -what sixteen hours waiting had done for his friend, what were all the -remaining hours going to do? - -Tietjens said: - -"I shall be fit to talk about Sylvia after two more whiskies. . . . -Let's settle your other perturbations first. . . . The fair girl is -called Wannop: Valentine Wannop." - -"That's the Professor's name," Macmaster said. - -"She's the late Professor Wannop's daughter," Tietjens said. "She's also -the daughter of the novelist." - -Macmaster interjected: - -"But . . ." - -"She supported herself for a year after the Professor's death as a -domestic servant," Tietjens said. "Now she's housemaid for her mother, -the novelist, in an inexpensive cottage. I should imagine the two -experiences would make her desire to better the lot of her sex." - -Macmaster again interjected a "But . . ." - -"I got that information from the policeman whilst I was putting his -wife's canary's leg in splints." - -Macmaster said: - -"The policeman you knocked down?" His eyes expressed unreasoning -surprise. He added: "He knew Miss . . . eh . . . Wannop then!" - -"You would not expect much intelligence from the police of Sussex," -Tietjens said. "But you would be wrong. P.C. Finn is clever enough to -recognise the young lady who for several years past has managed the -constabulary's wives' and children's annual tea and sports. He says Miss -Wannop holds the quarter-mile, half-mile, high jump, long jump and -putting the weight records for East Sussex. That explains how she went -over that dyke in such tidy style. . . . And precious glad the good, -simple man was when I told him he was to leave the girl alone. He didn't -know, he said, how he'd ever a had the face to serve the warrant on Miss -Wannop. The other girl--the one that squeaked--is a stranger, a Londoner -probably." - -Macmaster said: - -"_You_ told the policeman . . ." - -"I gave him," Tietjens said, "the Rt. Hon. Stephen Fenwick Waterhouse's -compliments, and he'd be much obliged if the P.C. would hand in a 'No -Can Do' report in the matter of those ladies every morning to his -inspector. I gave him also a brand new fi' pun note--from the Cabinet -Minister--and a couple of quid and the price of a new pair of trousers -from myself. So he's the happiest constable in Sussex. A very decent -fellow; he told me how to know a dog otter's spoor from a gravid -bitch's. . . . But that wouldn't interest you." - -He began again: - -"Don't look so inexpressibly foolish. I told you I'd been dining with -that swine. . . . No, I oughtn't to call him a swine after eating his -dinner. Besides, he's a very decent fellow. . . ." - -"You didn't tell me you'd been dining with Mr. Waterhouse," Macmaster -said. "I hope you remembered that, as he's amongst other things the -President of the Funded Debt Commission he's the power of life and death -over the department and us." - -"You didn't think," Tietjens answered, "that you are the only one to -dine with the great ones of the earth! I wanted to talk to that -fellow . . . about those figures their cursed crowd made me fake. I meant -to give him a bit of my mind." - -"You _didn't_!" Macmaster said with an expression of panic. "Besides, -they didn't ask you to fake the calculation. They only asked you to work -it out on the basis of given figures." - -"Anyhow," Tietjens said, "I gave him a bit of my mind. I told him that, -at threepence, it must run the country--and certainly himself as a -politician!--to absolute ruin." - -Macmaster uttered a deep "Good Lord!" and then: "But won't you ever -remember you're a Government servant. He could . . ." - -"Mr. Waterhouse," Tietjens said, "asked me if I wouldn't consent to be -transferred to his secretary's department. And when I said: "Go to -hell!" he walked round the streets with me for two hours arguing. . . . -I was working out the chances on a 4½d. basis for him when you -interrupted me. I've promised to let him have the figures when he goes -by up the 1.30 on Monday." - -Macmaster said: - -"You haven't. . . . But by Jove you're the only man in England that -could do it." - -"That was what Mr. Waterhouse said," Tietjens commented. "He said old -Ingleby had told him so." - -"I do hope," Macmaster said, "that you answered him politely!" - -"I told him," Tietjens answered, "that there were a dozen men who could -do it as well as I, and I mentioned your name in particular." - -"But I _couldn't_," Macmaster answered. "Of course I could convert a 3d. -rate into 4½d. But these are the actuarial variations; they're -infinite. I couldn't touch them." - -Tietjens said negligently: "I don't want my name mixed up in the -unspeakable affair." "When I give him the papers on Monday I shall tell -him you did most of the work." - -Again Macmaster groaned. - -Nor was this distress mere altruism. Immensely ambitious for his -brilliant friend, Macmaster's ambition was one ingredient of his strong -desire for security. At Cambridge he had been perfectly content with a -moderate, quite respectable place on the list of mathematical -postulants. He knew that that made him safe, and he had still more -satisfaction in the thought that it would warrant him in never being -brilliant in after life. But when Tietjens, two years after, had come -out as a mere Second Wrangler, Macmaster had been bitterly and loudly -disappointed. He knew perfectly well that Tietjens simply hadn't taken -trouble; and, ten chances to one, it was on purpose that Tietjens hadn't -taken trouble. For the matter of that, for Tietjens it wouldn't have -been trouble. - -And, indeed, to Macmaster's upbraidings, which Macmaster hadn't spared -him, Tietjens had answered that he hadn't been able to think of going -through the rest of his life with a beastly placard like Senior Wrangler -hung round his neck. - -But Macmaster had early made up his mind that life for him would be -safest if he could go about, not very much observed but still an -authority, in the midst of a body of men all labelled. He wanted to walk -down Pall Mall on the arm, precisely, of a largely-lettered Senior -Wrangler; to return eastward on the arm of the youngest Lord Chancellor -England had ever seen; to stroll down Whitehall in familiar converse -with a world-famous novelist, saluting on the way a majority of My Lords -Commissioners of the Treasury. And, after tea, for an hour at the club -all these, in a little group, should treat him with the courtesy of men -who respected him for his soundness. Then he would be safe. - -And he had no doubt that Tietjens was the most brilliant man in England -of that day, so that nothing caused him more anguish than the thought -that Tietjens might not make a brilliant and rapid career towards some -illustrious position in the public services. He would very willingly--he -desired, indeed, nothing better!--have seen Tietjens pass over his own -head! It did not seem to him a condemnation of the public services that -this appeared to be unlikely. - -Yet Macmaster was still not without hope. He was quite aware that there -are other techniques of careers than that which he had prescribed for -himself. He could not imagine himself, even in the most deferential way, -correcting a superior; yet he could see that, though Tietjens treated -almost every hierarch as if he were a born fool, no one very much -resented it. Of course Tietjens was a Tietjens of Groby; but was that -going to be enough to live on for ever? Times were changing, and -Macmaster imagined this to be a democratic age. - -But Tietjens went on, with both hands as it were, throwing away -opportunity and committing outrage. . . . - -That day Macmaster could only consider to be one of disaster. He got up -from his chair and filled himself another drink; he felt himself to be -distressed and to need it. Slouching amongst his cretonnes, Tietjens was -gazing in front of him. He said: - -"Here!" without looking at Macmaster, and held out his long glass. Into -it Macmaster poured whisky with a hesitating hand. Tietjens said: "Go -on!" - -Macmaster said: - -"It's late; we're breakfasting at the Duchemin's at ten." - -Tietjens answered: - -"Don't worry, sonny. We'll be there for your pretty lady." He added: -"Wait another quarter of an hour. I want to talk to you." - -Macmaster sat down again and deliberately began to review the day. It -had begun with disaster, and in disaster it had continued. - -And, with something like a bitter irony, Macmaster remembered and -brought up now for digestion the parting words of General Campion to -himself. The General had limped with him to the hall door up at Mountby -and, standing patting him on the shoulder, tall, slightly bent and very -friendly, had said: - -"Look here. Christopher Tietjens is a splendid fellow. But he needs a -good woman to look after him. Get him back to Sylvia as quick as you -can. Had a little tiff, haven't they? Nothing serious? Chrissie hasn't -been running after the skirts? No? I daresay a little. No? Well -then . . ." - -Macmaster had stood like a gate-post, so appalled. He had stuttered: - -"No! No!" - -"We've known them both so long," the General went on. "Lady Claudine in -particular. And, believe me, Sylvia is a splendid girl. Straight as a -die; the soul of loyalty to her friends. And fearless.--She'd face the -devil in his rage. You should have seen her out with the Belvoir! Of -course you know her. . . . Well then!" - -Macmaster had just managed to say that he knew Sylvia, of course. - -"Well then . . ." the General had continued . . . "you'll agree with me -that if there _is_ anything wrong between them he's to blame. And it -will be resented. Very bitterly. He wouldn't set foot in this house -again. But he says he's going out to her and Mrs. Satterthwaite. . . ." - -"I believe . . ." Macmaster had begun . . . "I believe he is . . ." - -"Well then!" the General had said: "It's all right. . . . But -Christopher Tietjens needs a good woman's backing. . . . He's a splendid -fellow. There are few young fellows for whom I have more . . . I could -almost say respect. . . . But he needs that. To ballast him." - -In the car, running down the hill from Mountby, Macmaster had exhausted -himself in the effort to restrain his execrations of the General. He -wanted to shout that he was a pig-headed old fool: a meddlesome ass. But -he was in the car with the two secretaries of the Cabinet Minister: the -Rt. Hon. Edward Fenwick Waterhouse, who, being himself an advanced -Liberal down for a week-end of golf, preferred not to dine at the house -of the Conservative member. At that date there was, in politics, a phase -of bitter social feud between the parties: a condition that had not till -lately been characteristic of English political life. The prohibition -had not extended itself to the two younger men. - -Macmaster was not unpleasurably aware that these two fellows treated him -with a certain deference. They had seen Macmaster being talked to -familiarly by General Lord Edward Campion. Indeed, they and the car had -been kept waiting whilst the General patted their fellow guest on the -shoulder; held his upper arm and spoke in a low voice into his -ear. . . . - -But that was the only pleasure that Macmaster got out of it. - -Yes, the day had begun disastrously with Sylvia's letter; it ended--if -it was ended!--almost more disastrously with the General's eulogy of -that woman. During the day he had nerved himself to having an immensely -disagreeable scene with Tietjens. Tietjens _must_ divorce the woman; it -was necessary for the peace of mind of himself, of his friends, of his -family; for the sake of his career; in the very name of decency! - -In the meantime Tietjens had rather forced his hand. It had been a most -disagreeable affair. They had arrived at Rye in time for lunch--at which -Tietjens had consumed the best part of a bottle of Burgundy. During -lunch Tietjens had given Macmaster Sylvia's letter to read, saying that, -as he should later consult his friend, his friend had better be made -acquainted with the document. - -The letter had appeared extraordinary in its effrontery, for it said -nothing. Beyond the bare statement, "I am now ready to return to you," -it occupied itself simply with the fact that Mrs. Tietjens wanted--could -no longer get on without--the services of her maid, whom she called -Hullo Central. If Tietjens wanted her, Mrs. Tietjens, to return to him -he was to see that Hullo Central was waiting on the doorstep for her, -and so on. She added the detail that there was _no one_ else, -underlined, she could bear round her while she was retiring for the -night. On reflection Macmaster could see that this was the best letter -the woman could have written if she wanted to be taken back; for, had -she extended herself into either excuses or explanations, it was ten -chances to one Tietjens would have taken the line that he couldn't go on -living with a woman capable of such a lapse in taste. But Macmaster had -never thought of Sylvia as wanting in _savoir faire_. - -It had none the less hardened him in his determination to urge his -friend to divorce. He had intended to begin this campaign in the fly, -driving to pay his call on the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, who, in early life, -had been a personal disciple of Mr. Ruskin and a patron and acquaintance -of the poet-painter, the subject of Macmaster's monograph. On this drive -Tietjens preferred not to come. He said that he would loaf about the -town and meet Macmaster at the golf club towards four-thirty. He was not -in the mood for making new acquaintances. Macmaster, who knew the -pressure under which his friend must be suffering, thought this -reasonable enough, and drove off up Iden Hill by himself. - - -Few women had ever made so much impression on Macmaster as Mrs. -Duchemin. He knew himself to be in a mood to be impressed by almost any -woman, but he considered that that was not enough to account for the -very strong influence she at once exercised over him. There had been two -young girls in the drawing-room when he had been ushered in, but they -had disappeared almost simultaneously, and although he had noticed them -immediately afterwards riding past the window on bicycles, he was aware -that he would not have recognised them again. From her first words on -rising to greet him: "Not _the_ Mr. Macmaster!" he had had eyes for no -one else. - -It was obvious that the Rev. Mr. Duchemin must be one of those clergymen -of considerable wealth and cultured taste who not infrequently adorn the -Church of England. The rectory itself, a great, warm-looking manor house -of very old red brick, was abutted on to by one of the largest tithe -barns that Macmaster had ever seen; the church itself, with a primitive -roof of oak shingles, nestled in the corner formed by the ends of -rectory and tithe barn, and was by so much the smallest of the three and -so undecorated that but for its little belfry it might have been a good -cow-byre. All three buildings stood on the very edge of the little row -of hills that looks down on the Romney Marsh; they were sheltered from -the north wind by a great symmetrical fan of elms and from the -south-west by a very tall hedge and shrubbery, all of remarkable yews. -It was, in short, an ideal cure of souls for a wealthy clergyman of -cultured tastes, for there was not so much as a peasant's cottage within -a mile of it. - -To Macmaster, in short, this was the ideal English home. Of Mrs. -Duchemin's drawing-room itself, contrary to his habit, for he was -sensitive and observant in such things, he could afterwards remember -little except that it was perfectly sympathetic. Three long windows gave -on to a perfect lawn, on which, isolated and grouped, stood standard -rose trees, symmetrical half globes of green foliage picked out with -flowers like bits of carved pink marble. Beyond the lawn was a low stone -wall; beyond that the quiet expanse of the marsh shimmered in the -sunlight. - -The furniture of the room was, as to its woodwork, brown, old, with the -rich softnesses of much polishing with beeswax. What pictures there were -Macmaster recognised at once as being by Simeon Solomon, one of the -weaker and more frail æsthetes--aureoled, palish heads of ladies -carrying lilies that were not very like lilies. They were in the -tradition--but not the best of the tradition. Macmaster understood--and -later Mrs. Duchemin confirmed him in the idea--that Mr. Duchemin kept -his more precious specimens of work in a sanctum, leaving to the -relatively public room, good-humouredly and with slight contempt, these -weaker specimens. That seemed to stamp Mr. Duchemin at once as being of -the elect. - -Mr. Duchemin in person was, however, not present; and there seemed to be -a good deal of difficulty in arranging a meeting between the two men. -Mr. Duchemin, his wife said, was much occupied at the week-ends. She -added, with a faint and rather absent smile, the word, "Naturally." -Macmaster at once saw that it was natural for a clergyman to be much -occupied during the week-ends. With a little hesitation Mrs. Duchemin -suggested that Mr. Macmaster and his friend might come to lunch on the -next day--Saturday. But Macmaster had made an engagement to play the -foursome with General Campion--half the round from twelve till -one-thirty: half the round from three to half-past four. And, as their -then present arrangements stood, Macmaster and Tietjens were to take the -6.30 train to Hythe; that ruled out either tea or dinner next day. - -With sufficient, but not too extravagant regret, Mrs. Duchemin raised -her voice to say: - -"Oh dear! Oh dear! But you must see my husband and the pictures after -you have come so far." - -A rather considerable volume of harsh sound was coming through the end -wall of the room--the barking of dogs, apparently the hurried removal of -pieces of furniture or perhaps of packing cases, guttural ejaculations. -Mrs. Duchemin said, with her far away air and deep voice: - -"They are making a good deal of noise. Let us go into the garden and -look at my husband's roses, if you've a moment more to give us." - -Macmaster quoted to himself: - -"'I looked and saw your eyes in the shadow of your hair. . . .'" - -There was no doubt that Mrs. Duchemin's eyes, which were of a dark, -pebble blue, were actually in the shadow of her blue-black, very -regularly waved hair. The hair came down on the square, low forehead. It -was a phenomenon that Macmaster had never before really seen, and, he -congratulated himself, this was one more confirmation--if confirmation -were needed!--of the powers of observation of the subject of his -monograph! - -Mrs. Duchemin bore the sunlight! Her dark complexion was clear; there -was, over the cheekbones, a delicate suffusion of light carmine. Her -jawbone was singularly clear-cut, to the pointed chin--like an -alabaster, mediæval saint's. - -She said: - -"Of course you're Scotch. I'm from Auld Reekie myself." - -Macmaster would have known it. He said he was from the Port of Leith. He -could not imagine hiding anything from Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin said -with renewed insistence: - -"Oh, but of _course_ you must see my husband and the pictures. Let me -see. . . . We must think. . . . Would breakfast now? . . ." - -Macmaster said that he and his friend were Government servants and up to -rising early. He had a great desire to breakfast in that house. She -said: - -"At a quarter to ten, then, our car will be at the bottom of your -street. It's a matter of ten minutes only, so you won't go hungry long!" - -She said, gradually gaining animation, that of course Macmaster would -bring his friend. He could tell Tietjens that he should meet a very -charming girl. She stopped and added suddenly: "Probably, at any rate." -She said the name which Macmaster caught as "Wanstead." And possibly -another girl. And Mr. Horsted, or something like it, her husband's -junior curate. She said reflectively: - -"Yes, we might try quite a party . . ." and added, "quite noisy and gay. -I hope your friend's talkative!" - -Macmaster said something about trouble. - -"Oh, it can't be too much trouble," she said. "Besides, it might do my -husband good." She went on: "Mr. Duchemin is apt to brood. It's perhaps -too lonely here." And added the rather astonishing words: "After all." - - -And, driving back in the fly, Macmaster said to himself that you -couldn't call Mrs. Duchemin ordinary, at least. Yet meeting her was like -going into a room that you had long left and never ceased to love. It -felt good. It was perhaps partly her Edinburgh-ness. Macmaster allowed -himself to coin that word. There was in Edinburgh a society--he himself -had never been privileged to move in it, but its annals are part of the -literature of Scotland!--where the ladies are all great ladies in tall -drawing-rooms; circumspect yet shrewd: still yet with a sense of the -comic: frugal yet warmly hospitable. It was perhaps just Edinburgh-ness -that was wanting in the drawing-rooms of his friends in London. Mrs. -Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. Limoux and Mrs. Delawnay were all almost -perfection in manner, in speech, in composure. But, then, they were not -young, they weren't Edinburgh--and they weren't strikingly elegant! - -Mrs. Duchemin was all three! Her assured, tranquil manner she would -retain to any age: it betokened the enigmatic soul of her sex, but, -physically, she couldn't be more than thirty. That was unimportant, for -she would never want to do anything in which physical youth counted. She -would never, for instance, have occasion to run: she would always just -"move"--floatingly! He tried to remember the details of her dress. - -It had certainly been dark blue--and certainly of silk: that rather -coarsely-woven, exquisite material that has on its folds as of a silvery -shimmer with minute knots. But very dark blue. And it contrived to be at -once artistic--absolutely in the tradition! And yet well cut! Very large -sleeves, of course, but still with a certain fit. She had worn an -immense necklace of yellow polished amber: on the dark blue! And Mrs. -Duchemin had said, over her husband's roses, that the blossoms always -reminded her of little mouldings of pink cloud come down for the cooling -of the earth. . . . A charming thought! - -Suddenly he said to himself: - -"What a mate for Tietjens!" And his mind added: "Why should she not -become an Influence!" - -A vista opened before him, in time! He imagined Tietjens, in some way -proprietarily responsible for Mrs. Duchemin: quite _pour le bon_, -tranquilly passionate and accepted, _motif_; and "immensely improved" by -the association. And himself, in a year or two, bringing the at last -found Lady of his Delight to sit at the feet of Mrs. Duchemin--the Lady -of his Delight whilst circumspect would be also young and -impressionable!--to learn the mysterious assuredness of manner, the gift -of dressing, the knack of wearing amber and bending over standard -roses--and the Edinburgh-ness! - -Macmaster was thus not a little excited, and finding Tietjens at tea -amid the green-stained furnishings and illustrated papers of the large, -corrugated iron golf-house, he could not help exclaiming: - -"I've accepted the invitation to breakfast with the Duchemins to-morrow -for us both. I hope you won't mind," although Tietjens was sitting at a -little table with General Campion and his brother-in-law, the Hon. Paul -Sandbach, Conservative member for the division and husband of Lady -Claudine. The General said pleasantly to Tietjens: - -"Breakfast! With Duchemin! You go, my boy! You'll get the best breakfast -you ever had in your life." - -He added to his brother-in-law: "Not the eternal mock kedgeree Claudine -gives us every morning." - -Sandbach grunted: - -"It's not for want of trying to steal their cook. Claudine has a shy at -it every time we come down here." - -The General said pleasantly to Macmaster--he spoke always pleasantly, -with a half smile and a slight sibilance: - -"My brother-in-law isn't serious, you understand. My sister wouldn't -think of stealing a cook. Let alone from Duchemin. She'd be frightened -to." - -Sandbach grunted: - -"Who wouldn't?" - -Both these gentlemen were very lame: Mr. Sandbach from birth and the -General as the result of a slight but neglected motor accident. He had -practically only one vanity, the belief that he was qualified to act as -his own chauffeur, and since he was both inexpert and very careless, he -met with frequent accidents. Mr. Sandbach had a dark, round, bull-dog -face and a violent manner. He had twice been suspended from his -Parliamentary duties for applying to the then Chancellor of the -Exchequer the epithet "lying attorney," and he was at that moment still -suspended. - -Macmaster then became unpleasantly perturbed. With his sensitiveness he -was perfectly aware of an unpleasant chill in the air. There was also a -stiffness about Tietjens' eyes. He was looking straight before him; -there was a silence too. Behind Tietjens' back were two men with bright -green coats, red knitted waistcoats and florid faces. One was bald and -blonde, the other had black hair, remarkably oiled and shiny; both were -forty-fivish. They were regarding the occupants of the Tietjens' table -with both their mouths slightly open. They were undisguisedly listening. -In front of each were three empty sloe-gin glasses and one half-filled -tumbler of brandy and soda. Macmaster understood why the General had -explained that his sister had not tried to steal Mrs. Duchemin's cook. - -Tietjens said: - -"Drink up your tea quickly and let's get started." He was drawing from -his pocket a number of telegraph forms which he began arranging. The -General said: - -"Don't burn your mouth. We can't start off before all . . . all these -other gentlemen. We're too slow." - -"No; we're beastly well stuck," Sandbach said. - -Tietjens handed the telegraph forms over to Macmaster. - -"You'd better take a look at these," he said. "I mayn't see you again -to-day after the match. You're dining up at Mountby. The General will -run you up. Lady Claude will excuse me. I've got work to do." - -This was already matter for dismay for Macmaster. He was aware that -Tietjens would have disliked dining up at Mountby with the Sandbachs, -who would have a crowd, extremely smart but more than usually -unintelligent. Tietjens called this crowd, indeed, the plague-spot of -the party--meaning of Toryism. But Macmaster couldn't help thinking that -a disagreeable dinner would be better for his friend than brooding in -solitude in the black shadows of the huddled town. Then Tietjens said: - -"I'm going to have a word with that swine!" He pointed his square chin -rather rigidly before him, and looking past the two brandy drinkers, -Macmaster saw one of those faces that frequent caricature made familiar -and yet strange. Macmaster couldn't, at the moment, put a name to it. It -must be a politician, probably a Minister. But which? His mind was -already in a dreadful state. In the glimpse he had caught of the -telegraph form now in his hand he had perceived that it was addressed to -Sylvia Tietjens and began with the word "agreed." He said swiftly: - -"Has that been sent or is it only a draft?" - -Tietjens said: - -"That fellow is the Rt. Hon. Stephen Fenwick Waterhouse. He's chairman -of the Funded Debt Commission. He's the swine who made us fake that -return in the office." - -That moment was the worst Macmaster had ever known. A worse came. -Tietjens said: - -"I'm going to have a word with him. That's why I'm not dining at -Mountby. It's a duty to the country." - -Macmaster's mind simply stopped. He was in a space, all windows. There -was sunlight outside. And clouds. Pink and white. Woolly! Some ships. -And two men: one dark and oily, the other rather blotchy on a blonde -baldness. They were talking, but their words made no impression on -Macmaster. The dark, oily man said that he was not going to take Gertie -to Budapest. Not half! He winked like a nightmare. Beyond were two young -men and a preposterous face. . . . It was all so like a nightmare that -the Cabinet Minister's features were distorted for Macmaster. Like an -enormous mask of pantomime: shiny, with an immense nose and elongated, -Chinese eyes. - -Yet not unpleasant! Macmaster was a Whig by conviction, by nation, by -temperament. He thought that public servants should abstain from -political activity. Nevertheless, he couldn't be expected to think a -Liberal Cabinet Minister ugly. On the contrary, Mr. Waterhouse appeared -to have a frank, humorous, kindly expression. He listened deferentially -to one of his secretaries, resting his hand on the young man's shoulder, -smiling a little, rather sleepily. No doubt he was overworked. And then, -letting himself go in a side-shaking laugh. Putting on flesh! - -What a pity! What a _pity_! Macmaster was reading a string of -incomprehensible words in Tietjens' heavily scored writing. _Not -entertain_ . . . _flat not house_ . . . _child remain at sister._ . . . -His eyes went backwards and forwards over the phrases. He could not -connect the words without stops. The man with the oily hair said in a -sickly voice that Gertie was hot stuff, but not the one for Budapest -with all the Gitana girls you were telling me of! Why, he'd kept Gertie -for five years now. More like the real thing! His friend's voice was -like a result of indigestion. Tietjens, Sandbach and the General were -stiff, like pokers. - -What a pity! Macmaster thought. - -He ought to have been sitting . . . It would have been pleasant and -right to be sitting with the pleasant Minister. In the ordinary course -he, Macmaster, would have been. The best golfer in the place was usually -set to play with distinguished visitors, and there was next to no one in -the south of England who ordinarily could beat him. He had begun at -four, playing with a miniature cleek and a found shilling ball over the -municipal links. Going to the poor school every morning and back to -dinner; and back to school and back to bed! Over the cold, rushy, sandy -links, beside the grey sea. Both shoes full of sand. The found shilling -ball had lasted him three years. . . . - -Macmaster exclaimed: "Good God!" He had just gathered from the telegram -that Tietjens meant to go to Germany on Tuesday. As if at Macmaster's -ejaculation Tietjens said: - -"Yes. It _is_ unbearable. If you don't stop those swine, General, I -shall." - -The General sibilated low, between his teeth: - -"Wait a minute. . . . Wait a minute. . . . Perhaps that other fellow -will." - -The man with the black oily hair said: - -"If Budapest's the place for the girls you say it is, old pal, with the -Turkish baths and all, we'll paint the old town red all right, next -month," and he winked at Tietjens. His friend, with his head down, -seemed to make internal rumblings, looking apprehensively beneath his -blotched forehead at the General. - -"Not," the other continued argumentatively, "that I don't love my old -woman. She's all right. And then there's Gertie. 'Ot stuff, but the real -thing. But I say a man wants . . ." He ejaculated, "Oh!" - -The General, his hands in his pockets, very tall, thin, red-cheeked, his -white hair combed forward in a fringe, sauntered towards the other -table. It was not two yards, but it seemed a long saunter. He stood -right over them, they looking up, open-eyed, like schoolboys at a -balloon. He said: - -"I'm glad you're enjoying our links, gentlemen." - -The bald man said: "We are! We are! First-class. A treat!" - -"But," the General said, "it isn't wise to discuss one's . . . eh . . . -domestic circumstances . . . at . . . at mess, you know, or in a golf -house. People might hear." - -The gentleman with the oily hair half rose and exclaimed: - -"Oo, the . . ." The other man mumbled: "Shut up, Briggs." - -The General said: - -"I'm the president of the club, you know. It's my duty to see that the -_majority_ of the club and its visitors are pleased. I hope you don't -mind." - -The General came back to his seat. He was trembling with vexation. - -"It makes one as beastly a bounder as themselves," he said. "But what -the devil else was one to do?" The two city men had ambled hastily into -the dressing-rooms; the dire silence fell. Macmaster realised that, for -these Tories at least, this was really the end of the world. The last of -England! He returned, with panic in his heart, to Tietjens' -telegram. . . . Tietjens was going to Germany on Tuesday. He offered to -throw over the department. . . . These were unthinkable things. You -couldn't imagine them! - -He began to read the telegram all over again. A shadow fell upon the -flimsy sheets. The Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse was between the head of the -table and the windows. He said: - -"We're much obliged, General. It was impossible to hear ourselves speak -for those obscene fellows' smut. It's fellows like that that make our -friends the suffragettes! That warrants them. . . ." He added: "Hullo! -Sandbach! Enjoying your rest?" - -The General said: - -"I was hoping you'd take on the job of telling these fellows off." - -Mr. Sandbach, his bull-dog jaw sticking out, the short black hair on his -scalp appearing to rise, barked: - -"Hullo, Waterslop! Enjoying your plunder?" - -Mr. Waterhouse, tall, slouching and untidy-haired, lifted the flaps of -his coat. It was so ragged that it appeared as if straws stuck out of -the elbows. - -"All that the suffragettes have left of me," he said, laughingly. "Isn't -one of you fellows a genius called Tietjens?" He was looking at -Macmaster. The General said: - -"Tietjens . . . Macmaster . . ." The Minister went on very friendly: - -"Oh, it's you? . . . I just wanted to take the opportunity of thanking -you." - -Tietjens said: - -"Good God! What for?" - -"_You_ know!" the Minister said, "we couldn't have got the Bill before -the House till next session without your figures. . . ." He said slily: -"Could we, Sandbach?" and added to Tietjens: "Ingleby told me. . . ." - -Tietjens was chalk-white and stiffened. He stuttered: - -"I can't take any credit. . . . I consider . . ." - -Macmaster exclaimed: - -"Tietjens . . . you . . ." he didn't know what he was going to say. - -"Oh, you're too modest," Mr. Waterhouse overwhelmed Tietjens. "We know -whom we've to thank . . ." His eyes drifted to Sandbach a little -absently. Then his face lit up. - -"Oh! Look here, Sandbach," he said. . . . "Come here, will you?" He -walked a pace or two away, calling to one of his young men: "Oh, -Sanderson, give the bobbie a drink. A good stiff one." Sandbach jerked -himself awkwardly out of his chair and limped to the Minister. - -Tietjens burst out: - -"Me too modest! _Me_! . . . The swine. . . . The unspeakable swine!" - -The General said: - -"What's it all about, Chrissie? You probably are too modest." - -Tietjens said: - -"Damn it. It's a serious matter. It's driving me out of the unspeakable -office I'm in." - -Macmaster said: - -"No! No! You're wrong. It's a wrong view you take." And with a good deal -of real passion he began to explain to the General. It was an affair -that had already given him a great deal of pain. The Government had -asked the statistical department for figures illuminating a number of -schedules that they desired to use in presenting their new Bill to the -Commons. Mr. Waterhouse was to present it. - -Mr. Waterhouse at the moment was slapping Mr. Sandbach on the back, -tossing the hair out of his eyes and laughing like a hysterical -schoolgirl. He looked suddenly tired. A police constable, his buttons -shining, appeared, drinking from a pewter-pot outside the glazed door. -The two city men ran across the angle from the dressing-room to the same -door, buttoning their clothes. The Minister said loudly: - -"Make it guineas!" - -It seemed to Macmaster painfully wrong that Tietjens should call anyone -so genial and unaffected an unspeakable swine. It was unjust. He went on -with his explanation to the General. - -The Government had wanted a set of figures based on a calculation called -B 7. Tietjens, who had been working on one called H 19--for his own -instruction--had persuaded himself that H 19 was the lowest figure that -was actuarially sound. - -The General said pleasantly: "All this is Greek to me." - -"Oh no, it needn't be," Macmaster heard himself say. "It amounts to -this. Chrissie was asked by the Government--by Sir Reginald Ingleby--to -work out what 3 x 3 comes to: it was that sort of thing in principle. He -said that the only figure that would not ruin the country was nine times -nine. . . ." - -"The Government wanted to shovel money into the working man's pockets, -in fact," the General said. "Money for nothing. . . . or votes, I -suppose." - -"But that isn't the point, sir," Macmaster ventured to say. "All that -Chrissie was asked to do was to say what 3 x 3 was." - -"Well, he appears to have done it and earned no end of kudos," the -General said. "That's all right. We've all, always, believed in -Chrissie's ability. But he's a strong-tempered beggar." - -"He was extraordinarily rude to Sir Reginald over it," Macmaster went -on. - -The General said: - -"Oh dear! Oh dear!" He shook his head at Tietjens and assumed with care -the blank, slightly disappointing air of the regular officer. "I don't -like to hear of rudeness to a superior. In _any_ service." - -"I don't think," Tietjens said with extreme mildness, "that Macmaster is -quite fair to me. Of course he's a right to his opinion as to what the -discipline of a service demands. I certainly told Ingleby that I'd -rather resign than do that beastly job. . . ." - -"You shouldn't have," the General said. "What would become of the -services if everyone did as you did?" - -Sandbach came back laughing and dropped painfully into his low -arm-chair. - -"That fellow . . ." he began. - -The General slightly raised his hand. - -"A minute!" he said. "I was about to tell Chrissie, here, that if I am -offered the job--of course it's an order really--of suppressing the -Ulster Volunteers . . . I'd rather cut my throat than do it. . . ." - -Sandbach said: - -"Of course you would, old chap. They're our brothers. You'd see the -beastly, lying Government damned first." - -"I was going to say that I should accept," the General said, "I -shouldn't resign my commission." - -Sandbach said: - -"Good _God_!" - -Tietjens said: - -"Well, I didn't." - -Sandbach exclaimed: - -"General! You! After all Claudine and I have said. . . ." - -Tietjens interrupted: - -"Excuse me, Sandbach. I'm receiving this reprimand for the moment. I -wasn't, then, rude to Ingleby. If I'd expressed contempt for what he -said or for himself, that would have been rude. I didn't. He wasn't in -the least offended. He looked like a cockatoo, but he wasn't offended. -And I let him over-persuade me. He was right, really. He pointed out -that, if I didn't do the job, those swine would put on one of our little -competition wallah head clerks and get all the schedules faked, as well -as starting off with false premises!" - -"That's the view I take," the General said, "if I don't take the Ulster -job the Government will put on a fellow who'll bum all the farm-houses -and rape all the women in the three counties. They've got him up their -sleeve. He only asks for the Connaught Rangers to go through the north -with. And you know what _that_ means. All the same . . ." He looked at -Tietjens: "One should not be rude to one's superiors." - -"I tell you I wasn't rude," Tietjens exclaimed. "Damn your nice, -paternal old eyes. Get that into your mind!" - -The General shook his head: - -"You brilliant fellows!" he said. "The country, or the army, or -anything, could not be run by you. It takes stupid fools like me and -Sandbach, along with sound, moderate heads like our friend here." He -indicated Macmaster and, rising, went on: "Come along. You're playing -me, Macmaster. They say you're hot stuff. Chrissie's no good. He can -take Sandbach on." - -He walked off with Macmaster towards the dressing-room. - -Sandbach, wriggling awkwardly out of his chair, shouted: - -"Save the country. . . . Damn it. . . ." He stood on his feet. "I and -Campion . . . Look at what the country's come to. . . . What with swine -like these two in our club houses! And policemen to go round the links -with Ministers to protect them from the wild women. . . . By God! I'd -like to have the flaying of the skin off some of their backs. I would. -By God I would." - -He added: - -"That fellow Waterslops is a bit of a sportsman. I haven't been able to -tell you about our bet, you've been making such a noise. . . . Is your -friend really plus one at North Berwick? What are you like?" - -"Macmaster is a good plus two anywhere when he's in practice." - -Sandbach said: - -"Good Lord. . . . A stout fellow. . . ." - -"As for me," Tietjens said, "I loathe the beastly game." - -"So do I," Sandbach answered. "We'll just lollop along behind them." - - - - -IV - - -They came out into the bright open where all the distances under the -tall sky showed with distinct prismatic outlines. They made a little -group of seven--for Tietjens would not have a caddy--waiting on the -flat, first teeing ground. Macmaster walked up to Tietjens and said -under his voice: - -"You've really _sent_ that wire? . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"It'll be in Germany by now!" - -Mr. Sandbach hobbled from one to the other explaining the terms of his -wager with Mr. Waterhouse. Mr. Waterhouse had backed one of the young -men playing with him to drive into and hit twice in the eighteen holes -the two city men who would be playing ahead of them. As the Minister had -taken rather short odds Mr. Sandbach considered him a good sport. - -A long way down the first hole Mr. Waterhouse and his two companions -were approaching the first green. They had high sandhills to the right -and, to their left, a road that was fringed with rushes and a narrow -dyke. Ahead of the Cabinet Minister the two city men and their two -caddies stood on the edge of the dyke or poked downwards into the -rushes. Two girls appeared and disappeared on the tops of the sandhills. -The policeman was strolling along the road, level with Mr. Waterhouse. -The General said: - -"I think we could go now." - -Sandbach said: - -"Waterslops will get a hit at them from the next tee. They're in the -dyke." - -The General drove a straight, goodish ball. Just as Macmaster was in his -swing Sandbach shouted: - -"By God! He nearly did it. See that fellow jump!" - -Macmaster looked round over his shoulder and hissed with vexation -between his teeth: - -"Don't you know that you don't shout while a man is driving? Or haven't -you played golf?" He hurried fussily after his ball. - -Sandbach said to Tietjens: - -"Golly! That chap's got a temper!" - -Tietjens said: - -"Only over this game. You deserved what you got." - -Sandbach said: - -"I did. . . . But I didn't spoil his shot. He's outdriven the General -twenty yards." - -Tietjens said: - -"It would have been sixty but for you." - -They loitered about on the tee waiting for the others to get their -distance. Sandbach said: - -"By Jove, your friend is on with his second . . . You wouldn't believe -it of such a _little_ beggar!" He added: "He's not much class, is he?" - -Tietjens looked down his nose. - -"Oh, about _our_ class!" he said. "He wouldn't take a bet about driving -into the couple ahead." - -Sandbach hated Tietjens for being a Tietjens of Groby: Tietjens was -enraged by the existence of Sandbach, who was the son of an ennobled -mayor of Middlebrough, seven miles or so from Groby. The feuds between -the Cleveland landowners and the Cleveland plutocrats are very bitter. -Sandbach said: - -"Ah, I suppose he gets you out of scrapes with girls and the Treasury, -and you take him about in return. It's a practical combination." - -"Like Pottle Mills and Stanton," Tietjens said. The financial operations -connected with the amalgamating of these two steelworks had earned -Sandbach's father a good deal of odium in the Cleveland district. . . . -Sandbach said: - -"Look here, Tietjens. . . ." But he changed his mind and said: - -"We'd better go now." He drove off with an awkward action but not -without skill. He certainly outplayed Tietjens. - -Playing very slowly, for both were desultory and Sandbach very lame, -they lost sight of the others behind some coastguard cottages and dunes -before they had left the third tee. Because of his game leg Sandbach -sliced a good deal. On this occasion he sliced right into the gardens of -the cottages and went with his boy to look for his ball among -potato-haulms, beyond a low wall. Tietjens patted his own ball lazily up -the fairway and, dragging his bag behind him by the strap, he sauntered -on. - -Although Tietjens hated golf as he hated any occupation that was of a -competitive nature he could engross himself in the mathematics of -trajectories when he accompanied Macmaster in one of his expeditions for -practice. He accompanied Macmaster because he liked there to be one -pursuit at which his friend undisputably excelled himself, for it was a -bore always brow-beating the fellow. But he stipulated that they should -visit three different and, if possible, unknown courses every week-end -when they golfed. He interested himself then in the way the courses were -laid out, acquiring thus an extraordinary connoisseurship in golf -architecture, and he made abstruse calculations as to the flight of -balls off sloped club-faces, as to the foot-poundals of energy exercised -by one muscle or the other, and as to theories of spin. As often as not -he palmed Macmaster off as a fair, average player on some other -unfortunate fair, average stranger. Then he passed the afternoon in the -club-house studying the pedigrees and forms of racehorses, for every -club-house contained a copy of Ruff's guide. In the spring he would hunt -for and examine the nests of soft-billed birds, for he was interested in -the domestic affairs of the cuckoo, though he hated natural history and -field botany. - -On this occasion he had just examined some notes of other mashie shots, -had put the notebook back in his pocket, and had addressed his ball with -a niblick that had an unusually roughened face and a head like a -hatchet. Meticulously, when he had taken his grip he removed his little -and third fingers from the leather of the shaft. He was thanking heaven -that Sandbach seemed to be accounted for for ten minutes at least, for -Sandbach was miserly over lost balls and, very slowly, he was raising -his mashie to half cock for a sighting shot. - -He was aware that someone, breathing a little heavily from small lungs, -was standing close to him and watching him: he could indeed, beneath his -cap-rim, perceive the tips of a pair of boy's white sand-shoes. It in no -way perturbed him to be watched since he was avid of no personal glory -when making his shots. A voice said: - -"I say . . ." He continued to look at his ball. - -"Sorry to spoil your shot," the voice said. "But . . ." - -Tietjens dropped his club altogether and straightened his back. A fair -young woman with a fixed scowl was looking at him intently. She had a -short skirt and was panting a little. - -"I say," she said, "go and see they don't hurt Gertie. I've lost -her . . ." She pointed back to the sandhills. "There looked to be some -beasts among them." - -She seemed a perfectly negligible girl except for the frown: her eyes -blue, her hair no doubt fair under a white canvas hat. She had a striped -cotton blouse, but her fawn tweed skirt was well hung. - -Tietjens said: - -"You've been demonstrating." - -She said: - -"Of course we have, and of course you object on principle. But you won't -let a girl be man-handled. Don't wait to tell me I know it . . . ." - -Noises existed. Sandbach, from beyond the low garden wall fifty yards -away, was yelping, just like a dog: "Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!" and gesticulating. -His little caddy, entangled in his golf-bag, was trying to scramble over -the wall. On top of a high sandhill stood the policeman: he waved his -arms like a windmill and shouted. Beside him and behind, slowly rising, -were the heads of the General, Macmaster and their two boys. Further -along, in completion were appearing the figures of Mr. Waterhouse, his -two companions and _their_ three boys. The Minister was waving his -driver and shouting. They all shouted. - -"A regular rat-hunt," the girl said; she was counting. "Eleven and two -more caddies!" She exhibited satisfaction. "I headed them all off except -two beasts. They couldn't run. But neither can Gertie . . ." - -She said urgently: - -"Come along! You aren't going to leave Gertie to those beasts! They're -drunk. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Cut away then. I'll look after Gertie." He picked up his bag. - -"No, I'll come with you," the girl said. - -Tietjens answered: "Oh, you don't want to go to gaol. Clear out!" - -She said: - -"Nonsense. I've put up with worse than that. Nine months as a -slavey. . . . Come _along_!" - -Tietjens started to run--rather like a rhinoceros seeing purple. He had -been violently spurred, for he had been pierced by a shrill, faint -scream. The girl ran beside him. - -"You . . . can . . . run!" she panted, "put on a spurt." - -Screams protesting against physical violence were at that date rare -things in England. Tietjens had never heard the like. It upset him -frightfully, though he was aware only of an expanse of open country. The -policeman, whose buttons made him noteworthy, was descending his conical -sandhill, diagonally, with caution. There is something grotesque about a -town policeman, silvered helmet and all, in the open country. It was so -clear and still in the air; Tietjens felt as if he were in a light -museum looking at specimens. . . . - -A little young woman, engrossed, like a hunted rat, came round the -corner of a green mound. "This is an assaulted female!" the mind of -Tietjens said to him. She had a black skirt covered with sand, for she -had just rolled down the sandhill; she had a striped grey and black silk -blouse, one shoulder torn completely off, so that a white camisole -showed. Over the shoulder of the sandhill came the two city men, flushed -with triumph and panting; their red knitted waistcoats moved like -bellows. The black-haired one, his eyes lurid and obscene, brandished -aloft a fragment of black and grey stuff. He shouted hilariously: - -"Strip the bitch naked! . . . Ugh . . . Strip the bitch stark naked!" -and jumped down the little hill. He cannoned into Tietjens, who roared -at the top of his voice: - -"You infernal swine. I'll knock your head off if you move!" - -Behind Tietjens' back the girl said: - -"Come along, Gertie. . . . It's only to there . . ." - -A voice panted in answer: - -"I . . . can't. . . . My heart . . ." - -Tietjens kept his eye upon the city man. His jaw had fallen down, his -eyes stared! It was as if the bottom of his assured world, where all men -desire in their hearts to bash women, had fallen out. He panted: - -"Ergle! Ergle!" - -Another scream, a little further than the last voices from behind his -back, caused in Tietjens a feeling of intense weariness. What did -beastly women want to scream for? He swung round, bag and all. The -policeman, his face scarlet like a lobster just boiled, was lumbering -unenthusiastically towards the two girls who were trotting towards the -dyke. One of his hands, scarlet also, was extended. He was not a yard -from Tietjens. - -Tietjens was exhausted, beyond thinking or shouting. He slipped his -clubs off his shoulder and, as if he were pitching his kit-bag into a -luggage van, threw the whole lot between the policeman's running legs. -The man, who had no impetus to speak of, pitched forward on to his hands -and knees. His helmet over his eyes, he seemed to reflect for a moment; -then he removed his helmet and with great deliberation rolled round and -sat on the turf. His face was completely without emotion, long, -sandy-moustached and rather shrewd. He mopped his brow with a carmine -handkerchief that had white spots. - -Tietjens walked up to him. - -"Clumsy of me!" he said. "I hope you're not hurt." He drew from his -breast pocket a curved silver flask. The policeman said nothing. His -world, too, contained uncertainties and he was profoundly glad to be -able to sit still without discredit. He muttered: - -"Shaken. A bit! Anybody would be!" - -That let him out and he fell to examining with attention the bayonet -catch of the flask top. Tietjens opened it for him. The two girls, -advancing at a fatigued trot, were near the dyke side. The fair girl, as -they trotted, was trying to adjust her companion's hat; attached by pins -to the back of her hair it flapped on her shoulder. - -All the rest of the posse were advancing at a very slow walk, in a -converging semi-circle. Two little caddies were running, but Tietjens -saw them check, hesitate and stop. And there floated to Tietjens' ears -the words: - -"Stop, you little devils. She'll knock your heads off." - -Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse must have found an admirable voice trainer -somewhere. The drab girl was balancing tremulously over a plank on the -dyke; the other took it at a jump: up in the air--down on her feet; -perfectly business-like. And, as soon as the other girl was off the -plank, she was down on her knees before it, pulling it towards her, the -other girl trotting away over the vast marsh field. - -The girl dropped the plank on the grass. Then she looked up and faced -the men and boys who stood in a row on the road. She called in a shrill, -high voice, like a young cockerel's: - -"Seventeen to two! The usual male odds! You'll _have_ to go round by -Camber railway bridge, and we'll be in Folkestone by then. We've got -bicycles!" She was half going when she checked and, searching out -Tietjens to address, exclaimed: "I'm sorry I said that. Because some of -you didn't want to catch us. But some of you _did_. And you _were_ -seventeen to two." She addressed Mr. Waterhouse: - -"Why _don't_ you give women the vote?" she said. "You'll find it will -interfere a good deal with your indispensable golf if you don't. Then -what becomes of the nation's health?" - -Mr. Waterhouse said: - -"If you'll come and discuss it quietly . . ." - -She said: - -"Oh, tell that to the marines," and turned away, the men in a row -watching her figure disappear into the distance of the flat land. Not -one of them was inclined to risk that jump: there was nine foot of mud -in the bottom of the dyke. It was quite true that, the plank being -removed, to go after the women they would have had to go several miles -round. It had been a well thought out raid. Mr. Waterhouse said that -girl was a ripping girl: the others found her just ordinary. Mr. -Sandbach, who had only lately ceased to shout: "Hi!" wanted to know what -they were going to do about catching the women, but Mr. Waterhouse said: -"Oh, chuck it, Sandy," and went off. - -Mr. Sandbach refused to continue his match with Tietjens. He said that -Tietjens was the sort of fellow who was the ruin of England. He said he -had a good mind to issue a warrant for the arrest of Tietjens--for -obstructing the course of justice. Tietjens pointed out that Sandbach -wasn't a borough magistrate and so couldn't. And Sandbach went off, dot -and carry one, and began a furious row with the two city men who had -retreated to a distance. He said they were the sort of men who were the -ruin of England. They bleated like rams. . . . - -Tietjens wandered slowly up the course, found his ball, made his shot -with care and found that the ball deviated several feet less to the -right of a straight line than he had expected. He tried the shot again, -obtained the same result and tabulated his observations in his notebook. -He sauntered slowly back towards the club-house. He was content. - -He felt himself to be content for the first time in four months. His -pulse beat calmly; the heat of the sun all over him appeared to be a -beneficent flood. On the flanks of the older and larger sandhills he -observed the minute herbage, mixed with little purple aromatic plants. -To these the constant nibbling of sheep had imparted a protective -tininess. He wandered, content, round the sandhills to the small, silted -harbour mouth. After reflecting for some time on the wave-curves in the -sloping mud of the water sides he had a long conversation, mostly in -signs, with a Finn who hung over the side of a tarred, stump-masted, -battered vessel that had a gaping, splintered hole where the anchor -should have hung. She came from Archangel; was of several hundred tons -burthen, was knocked together anyhow, of soft wood, for about ninety -pounds, and launched, sink or swim, in the timber trade. Beside her, -taut, glistening with brass work, was a new fishing boat, just built -there for the Lowestoft fleet. Ascertaining her price from a man who was -finishing her painting, Tietjens reckoned that you could have built -three of the Archangel timber ships for the cost of that boat, and that -the Archangel vessel would earn about twice as much per hour per -ton. . . . - -It was in that way his mind worked when he was fit: it picked up little -pieces of definite, workmanlike information. When it had enough it -classified them: not for any purpose, but because to know things was -agreeable and gave a feeling of strength, of having in reserve something -that the other fellow would not suspect. . . . He passed a long, quiet, -abstracted afternoon. - -In the dressing-room he found the General, among lockers, old coats, and -stoneware, washing basins set in scrubbed wood. The General leaned back -against a row of these things. - -"You are the ruddy _limit_!" he exclaimed. - -Tietjens said: - -"Where's Macmaster?" - -The General said he had sent Macmaster off with Sandbach in the -two-seater. Macmaster had to dress before going up to Mountby. He added: -"The _ruddy_ limit!" again. - -"Because I knocked the bobbie over?" Tietjens asked. "He liked it." - -The General said: - -"Knocked the bobbie over . . . I didn't see that." - -"He didn't want to catch the girls," Tietjens said, "you could see -him--oh, yearning not to." - -"I don't want to know anything about that," the General said. "I shall -hear enough about it from Paul Sandbach. Give the bobbie a quid and -let's hear no more of it. I'm a magistrate." - -"Then what have I done?" Tietjens said. "I helped those girls to get -off. _You_ didn't want to catch them; Waterhouse didn't, the policeman -didn't. No one did except the swine. Then what's the matter?" - -"Damn it all!" the General said, "don't you remember that you're a young -married man?" - -With the respect for the General's superior age and achievements, -Tietjens stopped himself laughing. - -"If you're really serious, sir," he said, "I always remember it very -carefully. I don't suppose you're suggesting that I've ever shown want -of respect for Sylvia." - -The General shook his head. - -"I don't know," he said. "And damn it all I'm worried. I'm . . . Hang -it, I'm your father's oldest friend." The General looked indeed worn and -saddened in the light of the sand-drifted, ground glass windows. He -said: "Was that skirt a . . . a friend of yours? Had you arranged it -with her?" - -Tietjens said: - -"Wouldn't it be better, Sir, if you said what you had on your -mind? . . ." - -The old General blushed a little. - -"I don't like to," he said straightforwardly. "You brilliant -fellows. . . . I only want, my dear boy, to hint that. . ." - -Tietjens said, a little more stiffly: - -"I'd prefer you to get it out, sir. . . . I acknowledge your right as my -father's oldest friend." - -"Then," the General burst out, "who was the skirt you were lolloping up -Pall Mall with? On the last day they trooped the colours? . . . I didn't -see her myself. . . . Was it this same one? Paul said she looked like a -cook maid." - -Tietjens made himself a little more rigid. - -"She was, as a matter of fact, a bookmaker's secretary," Tietjens said. -"I imagine I have the right to walk where I like, with whom I like. And -no one has the right to question it. . . . I don't mean you, sir. But no -one else." - -The General said puzzledly: - -"It's you _brilliant_ fellows. . . . They all say you're -brilliant. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"You might let your rooted distrust of intelligence . . . It's natural -of course; but you might let it allow you to be just to me. I assure you -there was nothing discreditable." - -The General interrupted: - -"If you were a stupid young subaltern and told me you were showing your -mother's new cook the way to the Piccadilly tube I'd believe you. . . . -But, then, no young subaltern would do such a damn, blasted, tomfool -thing! Paul said you walked beside her like the king in his glory! -Through the crush outside the Haymarket, of all places in the world!" - -"I'm obliged to Sandbach for his commendation. . . ." Tietjens said. He -thought a moment. Then he said: - -"I was trying to get that young woman. . . . I was taking her out to -lunch from her office at the bottom of the Haymarket. . . . To get her -off a friend's back. That is, of course, between ourselves." - -He said this with great reluctance because he didn't want to cast -reflection on Macmaster's taste, for the young lady had been by no means -one to be seen walking with a really circumspect public official. But he -had said nothing to indicate Macmaster, and he had other friends. - -The General choked. - -"Upon my soul," he said, "what do you take me for?" He repeated the -words as if he were amazed. "If," he said, "my G.S.O. II.--who's the -stupidest ass I know--told me such a damn-fool lie as that I'd have him -broke to-morrow." He went on expostulatorily: "Damn it all, it's the -first duty of a soldier--it's the first duty of all Englishmen--to be -able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge. But a lie like -that . . ." - -He broke off breathless, then he began again: - -"Hang it all, I told that lie to my grandmother and my grandfather told -it to _his_ grandfather. And they call you brilliant! . . ." He paused -and then asked reproachfully: - -"Or do you think I'm in a state of senile decay?" - -Tietjens said: - -"I know you, sir, to be the smartest general of division in the British -Army. I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why I said what I -did. . . ." He had told the exact truth, but he was not sorry to be -disbelieved. - -The General said: - -"Then I'll take it that you tell me a lie meaning me to know that it's a -lie. That's quite proper. I take it you mean to keep the woman -officially out of it. But look here, Chrissie"--his tone took a deeper -seriousness--"if the woman that's come between you and Sylvia--that's -broken up your home, damn it, for that's what it is!--is little Miss -Wannop . . ." - -"Her name was Julia Mandelstein," Tietjens said. - -The General said: - -"Yes! Yes! Of course! . . . But if it _is_ the little Wannop girl and -it's not gone too far . . . Put her back . . . Put her back, as you used -to be a good boy! It would be too hard on the mother. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"General! I give you my word . . ." - -The General said: - -"I'm not asking any questions, my boy; I'm talking now. You've told me -the story you want told and it's the story I'll tell for you! But that -little piece is . . . she used to be! . . . as straight as a die. I -daresay you know better than I. Of course when they get among the wild -women there's no knowing what happens to them. They say they're all -whores. . . . I beg your pardon, if you like the girl . . ." - -"Is Miss Wannop," Tietjens asked, "the girl who demonstrates?" - -"Sandbach said," the General went on, "that he couldn't see from where -he was whether that girl was the same as the one in the Haymarket. But -he thought it was . . . He was pretty certain." - -"As he's married your sister," Tietjens said, "one can't impugn his -taste in women." - -"I say again, I'm not asking," the General said. "But I do say again -too: put her back. Her father was a great friend of your father's: or -your father was a great admirer of his. They say he was the most -brilliant brain of the party." - -"Of course I know who Professor Wannop was," Tietjens said. "There's -nothing you could tell me about him." - -"I daresay not," the General said drily. "Then you know that he didn't -leave a farthing when he died and the rotten Liberal Government wouldn't -put his wife and children on the Civil List because he'd sometimes -written for a Tory paper. And you know that the mother has had a deuced -hard row to hoe and has only just turned the corner. If she can be said -to have turned it. I know Claudine takes them all the peaches she can -cadge out of Paul's gardener." - -Tietjens was about to say that Mrs. Wannop, the mother, had written the -only novel worth reading since the eighteenth century. . . . But the -General went on: - -"Listen to me, my boy. . . . If you can't get on without women . . . I -should have thought Sylvia was good enough. But I know what we men are. -. . . I don't set up to be a saint. I heard a woman in the promenade of -the Empire say once that it was the likes of them that saved the lives -and figures of all the virtuous women of the country. And I daresay it's -true. . . . But choose a girl that you can set up in a tobacco shop and -do your courting in the back parlour. Not in the Haymarket. . . . Heaven -knows if you can afford it. That's your affair. You appear to have been -sold up. And from what Sylvia's let drop to Claudine . . ." - -"I don't believe," Tietjens said, "that Sylvia's said anything to Lady -Claudine . . . She's too straight." - -"I didn't say 'said,'" the General exclaimed, "I particularly said 'let -drop.' And perhaps I oughtn't to have said as much as that, but you know -what devils for ferreting out women are. And Claudine's worse than any -woman I ever knew. . . ." - -"And, of course, she's had Sandbach to help," Tietjens said. - -"Oh, that fellow's worse than any woman," the General exclaimed. - -"Then what does the whole indictment amount to?" Tietjens asked. - -"Oh, hang it," the General brought out, "I'm not a beastly detective, I -only want a plausible story to tell Claudine. Or not even plausible. An -obvious lie as long as it shows you're not flying in the face of -society--as walking up the Haymarket with the little Wannop when your -wife's left you because of her would be." - -"What does it amount to?" Tietjens said patiently: "What Sylvia 'let -drop'?" - -"Only," the General answered, "that you are--that your views -are--immoral. Of course they often puzzle me. And, of course, if you -have views that aren't the same as other people's, and don't keep them -to yourself, other people will suspect you of immorality. That's what -put Paul Sandbach on your track! . . . and that you're extravagant. . . . -Oh, hang it. . . . Eternal hansoms, and taxis and telegrams. . . . You -know, my boy, times aren't what they were when your father and I -married. We used to say you could do it on five hundred a year as a -younger son. . . . And then this girl too. . . ." His voice took on a -more agitated note of shyness--pain. . . . "It probably hadn't occurred -to you. . . . But, of course, Sylvia has an income of her own. . . . -And, don't you see . . . if you outrun the constable and . . . In short, -you're spending Sylvia's money on the other girl, and that's what people -can't stand." He added quickly: "I'm bound to say that Mrs. -Satterthwaite backs you through thick and thin. Thick and thin! Claudine -wrote to her. But you know what women are with a handsome son-in-law -that's always polite to them. But I may tell you that but for your -mother-in-law, Claudine would have cut you out of her visiting list -months ago. And you'd have been cut out of some others too. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Thanks. I think that's enough to go on with. . . . Give me a couple of -minutes to reflect on what you've said . . ." - -"I'll wash my hands and change my coat," the General said with intense -relief. - -At the end of two minutes Tietjens said: - -"No; I don't see that there is anything I want to say." - -The General exclaimed with enthusiasm: - -"That's my good lad! Open confession is next to reform. . . . And . . . -and try to be more respectful to your superiors. . . . Damn it; they say -you're brilliant. But I thank heaven I haven't got you in my -command. . . . Though I believe you're a good lad. But you're the sort of -fellow to set a whole division by the ears. . . . A regular . . . what's -'is name? A regular Dreyfus!" - -"Did you think Dreyfus was guilty?" Tietjens asked. - -"Hang it," the General said, "he was worse than guilty--the sort of -fellow you couldn't believe in and yet couldn't prove anything against. -The curse of the world. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Ah." - -"Well, they are," the General said: "fellows like that _unsettle_ -society. You don't know where you are. You can't judge. They make you -uncomfortable. . . . A brilliant fellow too! I believe he's a -brigadier-general by now. . . ." He put his arm round Tietjens' -shoulders. - -"There, there, my dear boy," he said, "come and have a sloe gin. That's -the real answer to all beastly problems." - -It was some time before Tietjens could get to think of his own problems. -The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over -the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid -of the very old town. Tietjens had to listen to the General suggesting -that it would be better if he didn't come to the golf-club till Monday. -He would get Macmaster some good games. A good, sound fellow that -Macmaster now. It was a pity Tietjens hadn't some of his soundness! - -The two city men had approached the General on the course and had used -some violent invectives against Tietjens: they had objected to being -called ruddy swine to their faces: they were going to the police. The -General said that he had told them himself, slowly and distinctly, that -they _were_ ruddy swine and that they would never get another ticket at -that club after Monday. But till Monday, apparently, they had the right -to be there and the club wouldn't want scenes. Sandbach, too, was -infuriated about Tietjens. - -Tietjens said that the fault lay with the times that permitted the -introduction into gentlemen's company of such social swipes as Sandbach. -One acted perfectly correctly and then a dirty little beggar like that -put dirty little constructions on it and ran about and bleated. He added -that he knew Sandbach was the General's brother-in-law, but he couldn't -help it. That was the truth. . . . The General said: "I know, my boy: I -know. . . ." But one had to take society as one found it. Claudine had -to be provided for and Sandbach made a very good husband, careful, -sober, and on the right side in politics. A bit of a rip; but they -couldn't ask for everything! And Claudine was using all the influence -she had with the other side--which was not a little, women were so -wonderful!--to get him a diplomatic job in Turkey, so as to get him out -of the way of Mrs. Crundall! Mrs. Crundall was the leading -Anti-Suffragette of the little town. That was what made Sandbach so -bitter against Tietjens. He told Tietjens so that Tietjens might -understand. - -Tietjens had hitherto flattered himself that he could examine a subject -swiftly and put it away in his mind. To the General he hardly listened. -The allegations against himself were beastly; but he could usually -ignore allegations against himself and he imagined that if he said no -more about them he would himself hear no more. If there were, in clubs -and places where men talk, unpleasant rumours as to himself he preferred -it to be thought that he was the rip, not his wife the strumpet. That -was normal, male vanity: the preference of the English gentleman! Had it -been a matter of Sylvia spotless and himself as spotless as he was--for -in all these things he knew himself to be spotless!--he would certainly -have defended himself, at least, to the General. But he had acted -practically in not defending himself more vigorously. For he imagined -that, had he really tried, he could have made the General believe him. -But he had behaved rightly! It was not mere vanity. There was the child -up at his sister Effie's. It was better for a boy to have a rip of a -father than a whore for mother! - -The General was expatiating on the solidity of a squat castle, like a -pile of draughts, away to the left, in the sun, on the flatness. He was -saying that we didn't build like that nowadays. - -Tietjens said: - -"You're perfectly wrong, General. All the castles that Henry VIII. built -in 1543 along this coast are mere monuments of jerry-building. . . . -'_In 1543 jactat castra Delis, Sandgatto, Reia, Hastingas Henricus -Rex_' . . . That means he chucked them down . . ." - -The General laughed: - -"You are an incorrigible fellow. . . . If ever there's any known, -certain fact . . ." - -"But go and _look_ at the beastly things," Tietjens said. "You'll see -they've got just a facing of Caen stone that they tide-floated here, and -the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish. . . . Look here! It's a -known certain fact, isn't it, that your eighteen-pounders are better -than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the -hustings, in the papers: the public believes it. . . . But would you put -one of your tin-pot things firing--what is it?--four shells a -minute?--with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the -recoil--against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air -cylinders. . . ." - -The General sat stiffly upon his cushions: - -"That's different," he said. "How the devil do you get to know these -things?" - -"It isn't different," Tietjens said, "it's the same muddle-headed frame -of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII. as lets us into wars with -hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You'd -fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute -against the French." - -"Well, anyhow," the General said, "I thank heaven you're not on my staff -for you'd talk my hind leg off in a week. It's perfectly true that the -public . . ." - -But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural -for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should -exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady -Claudine Sandbach with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband to -believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women! - -The General was saying: - -"Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?" - -Tietjens said: - -"From you. Three weeks ago!" - -And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands. . . . They -must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their -visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs! -. . . Suddenly he thought that he didn't know for certain that he was -the father of his child and he groaned. - -"Well, what have I said wrong now?" the General asked. "Surely you don't -maintain that pheasants do eat mangolds. . . ." - -Tietjens proved his reputation for sanity with: - -"No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That's sound -enough for you, isn't it?" But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn't been -able to pigeonhole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been -as good as talking to himself. . . . - -In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of -Mr. Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great -man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr. Waterhouse was anxious that -Tietjens--whom he assumed to be a man of sense--should get any pursuit -of the two girls stopped off. He couldn't move in the matter himself, -but a five pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might be -handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account -of their raid of that afternoon. - -It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be -found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the mayor, the town clerk, -the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found -drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came -into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his -affability. . . . - -Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to -talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn't find him a disagreeable -fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired -obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskies, and certainly not -as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a -fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was -then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted -its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English -working-class, you could see that Mr. Waterhouse didn't want to be -dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens' emendations -in the actuarial schedules. . . . And over their port they agreed on two -fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of -four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay -less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as -it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left. . . . - -And Tietjens, who hated no man, in face of this simple-minded and -agreeable schoolboy type of fellow, fell to wondering why it was that -humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass, -a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by -any means detestable and not uninteresting: for each of them would have -technical details of their affairs to impart: you formed them into a -Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, -gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the -combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human -society. And he remembered the words of some Russian: "Cats and monkeys. -Monkeys and cats. All humanity is there." - -Tietjens and Mr. Waterhouse spent the rest of the evening together. - -Whilst Tietjens was interviewing the policeman, the Minister sat on the -front steps of the cottage and smoked cheap cigarettes, and when -Tietjens went to bed Mr. Waterhouse insisted on sending by him kindly -messages to Miss Wannop, asking her to come and discuss female suffrage -any afternoon she liked in his private room at the House of Commons. Mr. -Waterhouse flatly refused to believe that Tietjens hadn't arranged the -raid with Miss Wannop. He said it had been too neatly planned for any -woman, and he said Tietjens was a lucky fellow, for she was a ripping -girl. - -Back in his room under the rafters, Tietjens fell, nevertheless, at once -a prey to real agitation. For a long time he pounded from wall to wall -and, since he could not shake off the train of thought, he got out at -last his patience cards, and devoted himself seriously to thinking out -the conditions of his life with Sylvia. He wanted to stop scandal if he -could; he wanted them to live within his income, he wanted to subtract -that child from the influence of its mother. These were all definite but -difficult things. . . . Then one half of his mind lost itself in the -re-arrangement of schedules, and on his brilliant table his hands set -queens on kings and checked their recurrences. - -In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible -physical shock. He nearly vomited: his brain reeled and the room fell -about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster's -goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn't talk, and he dropped into -his bed faintly aware of his friend's efforts to loosen his clothes. He -had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind -so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the -time, paralysed both his body and his mind. - - - - -V - - -"It doesn't seem quite fair, Valentine," Mrs. Duchemin said. She was -rearranging in a glass bowl some minute flowers that floated on water. -They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic -amongst silver chafing dishes, silver épergnes piled with peaches in -pyramids, and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to -the damask cloth. A congeries of silver largenesses made as if a -fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great -silver kettle on a tripod and a couple of silver vases filled with the -extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as -if a fan. The eighteenth century room was very tall and long; panelled -in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the -light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and -the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large -gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: "J. M. W. Turner." The -chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had -the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden -mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a -brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an -épergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another épergne that -supported the large pale globes of grape-fruit; a galantine, a cube of -inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly. - -"Oh, women have to back each other up in these days," Valentine Wannop -said. "I couldn't let you go through this alone after breakfasting with -you every Saturday since I don't know when." - -"I do feel," Mrs. Duchemin said, "immensely grateful to you for your -moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But -I've told Parry to keep him out till 10.15." - -"It's, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you," the girl said. "I -think it was worth trying." - -Mrs. Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position -of the delphiniums. - -"I think they make a good screen," Mrs. Duchemin said. - -"Oh, nobody will be able to see him," the girl answered reassuringly. -She added with a sudden resolution, "Look here, Edie. Stop worrying -about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after -nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an -invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you're simply -mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let's say no more -about it." - -Mrs. Duchemin said, "Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?" - -"She didn't know," the girl said. "She was out of her mind for grief. -She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before -her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it -took the five shillings a week that I earned to make up the money." She -added, "Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays, -too." - -"I don't understand!" Mrs. Duchemin said. "I simply don't understand." - -"Of course you wouldn't," the girl answered. "You're like the kindly -people who subscribed at the sale to buy my father's library back and -present it to my mother. That cost us five shillings a week for -warehousing, and at Ealing they were always nagging at me for the state -of my print dresses. . . ." - -She broke off and said: - -"Let's not talk about it any more if you don't mind. You have me in your -house, so I suppose you've a right to references, as the mistresses call -them. But you've been very good to me and never asked. Still, it's come -up; do you know I told a man on the links yesterday that I'd been a -slavey for nine months. I was trying to explain why I was a suffragette; -and, as I was asking him a favour, I suppose I felt I needed to give -_him_ references too." - -Mrs. Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively, -exclaimed: - -"You darling!" - -Miss Wannop said: - -"Wait a minute. I haven't finished. I want to say this: I never talk -about that stage of my career because I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of -it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I -did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would -probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent -people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if -we've inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we've inherited the Wannop pride. -And I _couldn't_ do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we -were going into the country after the sale. I'm not educated at all, as -you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had -ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical -don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don't know why he -had that tic . . . But I'd like you to understand two things. One I've -said already: what I hear in this house won't ever shock or corrupt me; -that it's said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin -almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and -Gilbert as soon as we talked at all. . . . And, oh yes: I'm a -suffragette because I've been a slavey. But I'd like you to understand -that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette--you're an -old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two -things--then I'd like you to understand that in spite of it all I'm -pure! Chaste, you know. . . . Perfectly virtuous." - -Mrs. Duchemin said: - -"Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap and apron." - -Miss Wannop replied: - -"Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled, 'M'm!' to the mistress; and -slept under the stairs too. Because I would not sleep with the beast of -a cook." - -Mrs. Duchemin now ran forward and catching Miss Wannop by both hands -kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek. - -"Oh, Valentine," she said, "you're a heroine. And you only -twenty-two! . . . Isn't that the motor coming?" - -But it wasn't the motor coming and Miss Wannop said: - -"Oh, no! I'm not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister -yesterday, I just couldn't. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I -just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: 'V . . . V . . . -Votes for W . . . W . . . W . . . omen!' . . . If I'd been decently -brave I shouldn't have been too shy to speak to a strange man. . . . For -that was what it really came to." - -"But that surely," Mrs. Duchemin said--she continued to hold both the -girl's hands--"makes you all the braver. . . . It's the person who does -the thing he's afraid of who's the real hero, isn't it?" - -"Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten. -You can't tell. You've got to define the term brave. I was just abject. -. . . I could harangue the whole crowd when I got them together. But -speak to one man in cold blood I couldn't. . . . Of course I _did_ speak -to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. But -that was different." - -Mrs. Duchemin moved both the girl's hands up and down in her own. - -"As you know, Valentine," she said, "I'm an old-fashioned woman. I -believe that woman's true place is at her husband's side. At the same -time . . ." - -Miss Wannop moved away. - -"Now, don't, Edie, don't!" she said. "If you believe that, you're an -anti. Don't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It's your defect -really. . . . I tell you I'm _not_ a heroine. I _dread_ prison: I _hate_ -rows. I'm thankful to goodness that it's my duty to stop and -housemaid-typewrite for mother, so that I can't really _do_ things. . . . -Look at that miserable, adenoidy little, Gertie, hiding upstairs in -our garret. She was crying all last night--but that's just nerves. Yet -she's been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a moment of -funk about her! . . . But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock that -prison wouldn't touch. . . . Why, I'm all of a jump now. That's why I'm -talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound -may be the police coming for me." - -Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl's fair hair and tucked a loose strand -behind her ear. - -"I wish you'd let me show you how to do your hair," she said. "The right -man might come along at any moment." - -"Oh, the right man!" Miss Wannop said. "Thanks for tactfully changing -the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a -married man. That's the Wannop luck!" - -Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern: - -"Don't talk like that. . . . Why should you regard yourself as being -less lucky than other people? Surely your mother's done well. She has a -position; she makes money. . . ." - -"Ah, but mother isn't a Wannop," the girl said, "only by marriage. The -real Wannops . . . they've been executed, and attaindered, and falsely -accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died -penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, -mother's got her mascot . . ." - -"Oh, what's that?" Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, "a -relic . . ." - -"Don't you know mother's mascot?" the girl asked. "She tells everybody. -. . . Don't you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother -was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came -in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and -asks us to remember him as such in our prayers. . . . He was a man who'd -been at a German university with father years before and loved him very -dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he'd been out of England for -nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: 'Now Mrs. -Wannop, what's this?' And she told him. And he said, 'What you want is -champagne!' And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of -Veuve Cliquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the -mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood -over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he -took her out to lunch . . . o . . . o . . . oh, it's cold! . . . And -lectured her . . . And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had -shares in . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin said: - -"You're shivering!" - -"I know I am," the girl said. She went on very fast. "And of course, -mother always _wrote_ father's articles for him. He found the ideas, but -couldn't write, and she's a splendid style. . . . And, since then, -he--the mascot--Tea-tray--has always turned up when she's been in tight -places. When the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for -inaccuracies! She's frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table -of things every leader writer must know, such as that 'A. Ebor' is the -Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he -turned up and said: 'Why don't you write a novel on that story you told -me?' And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we're in now to be -quiet and write in . . . Oh, I can't go on!" - -Miss Wannop burst into tears. - -"It's thinking of those beastly days," she said. "And that beastly, -_beastly_ yesterday!" She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely -into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin's handkerchief and -embraces. She said almost contemptuously: - -"A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over -you! Do you suppose I don't appreciate all your silent heroism of the -home, while we're marching about with flags and shouting? But it's just -to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out, -that we . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had -her handkerchief hiding her face. - -"Why women in your position don't take lovers . . ." the girl said, -hotly. "Or that women in your position _do_ take lovers . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air -of serious dignity: - -"Oh, _no_, Valentine," she said, using her deeper tones. "There's -something beautiful, there's something _thrilling_ about chastity. I'm -not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don't _condemn_! But to preserve in -word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity. . . . It's no mean -achievement. . . ." - -"You mean like an egg and spoon race," Miss Wannop said. - -"It isn't," Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, "the way I should have put it. -Isn't the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for -the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the -beautiful old legend. . . ." - -"I don't know," Miss Wannop said, "when I read what Ruskin says about it -in the _Crown of Wild Olive_. Or no! It's the _Queen of the Air_. That's -his Greek rubbish, isn't it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in -which the young woman didn't keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it -comes to the same thing." - -Mrs. Duchemin said: - -"My _dear_! Not a word against John Ruskin in _this_ house." - -Miss Wannop screamed. - -An immense voice had shouted: - -"This way! This way! . . . The ladies will be here!" - - -Of Mr. Duchemin's curates--he had three of them, for he had three -marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very -rich clergyman could have held them--it was observed that they were all -very large men with the physiques rather of prize-fighters than of -clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who himself -was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along -a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to -encounter went pit-a-pat. - -Mr. Horsley--the number two--had in addition an enormous voice. He -shouted four or five words, interjected tee-hee, shouted four or five -words more and again interjected "tee-hee." He had enormous wrist-bones -that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam's apple, a -large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very -sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to -stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form -of interruption. - -This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the -breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the -steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The -introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success. . . . - -"A STATE OF SIEGE, LADIES! Tee-hee!" he alternately roared and giggled. -"We're living in a regular state of siege. . . . What with . . ." It -appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr. Sandbach and rather -more than half-a-dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had -gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed -with loaded canes . . . for Suffragettes! Every woman they had come -across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their -loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up -in arms. - -As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions, -a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the -opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that -this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her -again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be -searching for herself and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment -in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs. Wannop. On the -links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely -hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his -rather cropped head and his masked, rather shapeless features, he -affected her queerly as being both in and out of place. He seemed to go -with the ham, the meat-pie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the -roses; but the Turner pictures, the æsthetic curtain and Mrs. -Duchemin's flowing robes, amber and rose in the hair did not go with him -at all. Even the Chippendale chairs hardly did. And she felt herself -thinking oddly, beneath her perturbations, of a criminal and the voice -of the Rev. Horsley that _his_ Harris tweeds went all right with her -skirt, and she was glad that she had on a clean, cream-coloured silk -blouse, not a striped pink cotton. - -She was right as to that. - -In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one -checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect -corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, -before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in -their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them. - -The night before, Tietjens shad given several thoughts to this young -woman. General Campion had assigned her to him as _maîtresse en -tître_. He was said to have ruined himself, broken up his home and -spent his wife's money on her. Those were lies. On the other hand they -were not inherent impossibilities. Upon occasion and given the right -woman, quite sound men have done such things. He might, heaven knows, -himself be so caught. But that he should have ruined himself over an -unnoticeable young female who had announced herself as having been a -domestic servant, and wore a pink cotton blouse . . . that had seemed to -go beyond the bounds of even the unreason of club gossip! - -That was the strong, first impression! It was all very well for his -surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she -was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens -held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes -was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common -people couldn't. . . . But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop -was a tweeny maid. Say a lady's help, by nature. She was of good family, -for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the -year 1417--no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men of -good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by -nature. That was one of the queernesses of heredity. . . . And, though -Tietjens had even got as far as to realise that Miss Wannop must be a -heroine who had sacrificed her young years to her mother's gifts, and no -doubt to a brother at school--for he had guessed as far as that--even -then Tietjens couldn't make her out as more than a lady help. Heroines -are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let -themselves get careworn in face and go shabby. . . . Well, they must -wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven. On this -earth you could hardly accept them as wives for men of your own set. -Certainly you wouldn't spend your own wife's money on them. That was -what it really came to. - -But, brightened up as he now suddenly saw her, with silk for the pink -cotton, shining coiled hair for the white canvas hat, a charming young -neck, good shoes beneath neat ankles, a healthy flush taking the place -of yesterday's pallor of fear for her comrade; an obvious equal in the -surroundings of quite good people; small, but well-shaped and healthy; -immense blue eyes fixed without embarrassment on his own. . . . - -"By Jove . . ." he said to himself: "It's true! What a jolly little -mistress she'd make!" - -He blamed Campion, Sandbach and the club gossips for the form the -thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the -world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and -female in its inexorable rings of talk it will be because there is -something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of -suggestion! - -He took a look at Mrs. Duchemin and considered her infinitely -commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered, -many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear -clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of -cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and -considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster -liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough. - -He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs. Duchemin: - -"Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?" - -Mrs. Duchemin answered: - -"No! I've asked Miss Fox to pour out. She's nearly stone deaf." Miss Fox -was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. "You're to amuse Mr. -Tietjens." - -Tietjens noticed that Mrs. Duchemin had an agreeable throat-voice; it -penetrated the noises of Mr. Horsley as the missel-thrush's note -penetrates a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop -made a little grimace. - -Mr. Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side -to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was -bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens' turn again in a moment to -hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs. Haglen at Nobeys. -But Tietjens' turn did not come. . . . - -A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fivish lady, with agreeable -eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed, -entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr. Horsley on his -declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by -the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones: - -"Which is Mr. Macmaster, the critic?" and then, in the dead lull to -Tietjens: "Are you Mr. Macmaster, the critic? No! . . . Then _you_ must -be." - -Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself -had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it -was an affair so strictly business-like that he took it without any -offence. She was remarking to Macmaster: - -"Oh, Mr. Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week," and she -had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room. - -Miss Wannop said: - -"What have you done with Gertie?" - -"Gertie!" Mrs. Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a -dream. "Oh yes! She's fast asleep. She'll sleep till four. I told Hannah -to give a look at her now and then." - -Miss Wannop's hands fell open at her side. - -"Oh, _mother_!" forced itself from her. - -"Oh, yes," Mrs. Wannop said, "we'd agreed to tell old Hannah we didn't -want her to-day. So we had!" She said to Macmaster: "Old Hannah is our -charwoman," wavered a little and then went on brightly: "Of course it -will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a -little bit of previous explanation . . ." and she dragged off -Macmaster. . . . - -That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to be -driven to the rectory--for she herself could not drive a horse--Miss -Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one -whose name she didn't know; the other, a Mr. Macmaster, a celebrated -critic. Mrs. Wannop had called up to her: - -"A critic? Of what?" her whole sleepy being electrified. - -"I don't know," her daughter had answered. "Books, I daresay. . . ." - -A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn't -stand, had made twenty yards at several bounds, the handy man who drove -had said: - -"Yer mother's 'owlin' after yer." But Miss Wannop had answered that it -didn't matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. -She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional -look at Gertie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be -told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that -Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep -in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did, the news would be -all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on -them. - -But Mrs. Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer -within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The -moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the -rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped -her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police. - -Her arrival worried Mrs. Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all -her guests to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance -of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs. Wannop, who was uninvited, -refused to be separated from Mr. Macmaster. Mr. Macmaster had told her -that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the -heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs. Wannop that an article on -her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She -was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr. Macmaster how to write about -herself, and twice after Mrs. Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr. -Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs. Wannop had conducted him back to the -embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her -chair next to Macmaster that Mrs. Duchemin was able to retain for -herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by -calling out: - -"Mr. Horsley, _do_ take Mrs. Wannop to the seat beside you and feed -her," that Mrs. Duchemin got Mrs. Wannop out of Mr. Duchemin's own seat -at the head of the table, for Mrs. Wannop, having perceived this seat to -be vacant and next to Mr. Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale -arm-chair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt -disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs. Duchemin's husband loose -amongst the other guests. - -Mr. Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady -with such firmness that Mrs. Wannop conceived of him as a very -disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley's seat was next to Miss -Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of -silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these -machines. This seat, too, Mrs. Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that, -by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would -be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She -found, however, that she couldn't, and so resigned herself to taking the -chair that had been reserved for Miss Gertie Wilson, who was to have -been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom, -occasionally saying to her daughter: - -"I think it's very bad management. I think this party's very badly -arranged." Mr. Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed -before her; Tietjens she did not even look at. - -Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner -of a panelled wall, Mrs. Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and -overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest, -though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing: - -"It wasn't perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get -nothing out of my husband. He's apt . . . especially on Saturdays. . . ." - -She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might -occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing _did_ occur. Then an -admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her -life with a knowledge that he needn't have had--to be a slur on her -memory in his mind. . . . But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her -the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled -to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish -her sentence. But Macmaster said: - -"Oh, dear lady!" (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed -thus!) "One understands . . . One is surely trained and adapted to -understand . . . that these great scholars, these abstracted -cognoscenti . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin breathed a great "Ah!" of relief. Macmaster had used the -exactly right words. - -"And," Macmaster was going on, "merely to spend a short hour; a swallow -flight . . . 'As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty -portal' . . . You know the lines . . . in these, your perfect -surroundings . . ." - -Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that -men should speak; in that way--steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring, -steel-blue eyes beneath black brows!--that men should look. She was -half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep, -truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely; -their scent came to her. - -A voice came to her: - -"You _do_ do the thing in style, I must say." - -The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating -man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. -He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a -little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sèvres, pinkish, -delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to -him: "Oh . . . a little caviare! A peach!" a long time before, with the -vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her -person a charm in the eyes of Caliban. - -She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with -large, fishish eyes at the caviare before her. - -"How do you get _that_, for instance?" he asked. - -"Oh!" she answered: "If it wasn't my husband's doing it would look like -ostentation. I'd find it ostentatious for myself." She found a smile, -radiant, yet muted. "He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a -telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at -dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice -too. It's such pretty stuff . . . and then by seven the car goes to -Ashford Junction. . . . All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast -before ten." - -She didn't want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she -couldn't, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly -running phrases--as if out of books she had read!--of the smaller man. - -"Ah, but it isn't," Tietjens said, "ostentation. It's the great -Tradition. You mustn't ever forget that your husband's Breakfast -Duchemin of Magdalen." - -He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he -meant to be agreeable. - -"Sometimes I wish I could," she said. "He doesn't get anything out of it -himself. He's ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at -all. It makes me quite anxious . . . for Saturdays." - -Tietjens said: - -"I know." - -She exclaimed--and almost with sharpness: - -"You _know_!" - -He continued to gaze straight into her eyes: - -"Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!" he said. "He was -one of Ruskin's road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of -them all!" - -Mrs. Duchemin cried out: "Oh!" Fragments of the worst stories that in -his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went -through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate -life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned -sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, with undefined -outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external! -She felt herself say to herself: "I will do you an injury, if ever----" -For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts -and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender, -in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption, -like the sweet pulp of figs. . . . It was inevitable; it was essential -to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs. Duchemin -should have these feelings. . . . - -She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from -behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones: - -"_Post coitum tristis_! Ha! Ha! That's what it is?" The voice repeated -the words and added sardonically: "You know what _that_ means?" But the -problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: "What -was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend, -when, for long hours, they were away?" - -He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low: - -"I wouldn't look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to -dealing with the situation." - -His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother's. And at once Mrs. -Duchemin knew--that _he_ knew that already close ties were developing -between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in -emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of -those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right -intuitions. . . . - -Tietjens said: "You heard!" - -To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked: - -"You know what that means?" Macmaster had answered clearly, but with the -snappy intonation of a reproving Don: - -"Of course I know what it means. It's no discovery!" That was exactly -the right note. Tietjens--and Mrs. Duchemin too--could hear Mr. -Duchemin, invisible behind his rampart of blue spikes and silver, give -the answering snuffle of a reproved schoolboy. A hard-faced, small man, -in grey tweed that buttoned, collar-like, tight round his throat, -standing behind the invisible chair, gazed straight forward into -infinity. - -Tietjens said to himself: - -"By God! Parry! the Bermondsey light middle-weight! He's there to carry -Duchemin off if he becomes violent!" - -During the quick look that Tietjens took round the table Mrs. Duchemin -gave, sinking lower in her chair, a short gasp of utter relief. Whatever -Macmaster was going to think of her, he thought now. He knew the worst! -It was settled, for good or ill. In a minute she would look round at -him. - -Tietjens said: - -"It's all right, Macmaster will be splendid. We had a friend up at -Cambridge with your husband's tendencies, and Macmaster could get him -through _any_ social occasion. . . . Besides, we're all gentlefolk -here!" - -He had seen the Rev. Horsley and Mrs. Wannop both interested in their -plates. Of Miss Wannop he was not so certain. He had caught, bent -obviously on himself, from large, blue eyes, an appealing glance. He -said to himself: "She must be in the secret. She's appealing to me not -to show emotion and upset the apple-cart! It is a shame that she should -be here: a girl!" and into his answering glance he threw the message: -"It's all right as far as this end of the table is concerned." - -But Mrs. Duchemin had felt come into herself a little stiffening of -morale. Macmaster by now knew the worst; Duchemin was quoting snuffingly -to him the hot licentiousness of the _Trimalchion_ of Petronius; -snuffing into Macmaster's ear. She caught the phrase: _Festinans, puer -calide_. . . . Duchemin, holding her wrist with the painful force of the -maniac, had translated it to her over and over again. . . . No doubt, -that too, this hateful man beside her would have guessed! - -She said: "Of course we should be all gentlefolk here. One naturally -arranges that. . . ." - -Tietjens began to say: - -"Ah! But it isn't so easy to arrange nowadays. All sorts of bounders get -into all sorts of holies of holies!" - -Mrs. Duchemin turned her back on him right in the middle of his -sentence. She devoured Macmaster's face with her eyes, in an infinite -sense of calm. - - -Macmaster four minutes before had been the only one to see the entrance, -from a small panelled door that had behind it another of green baize, of -the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, and following him a man whom Macmaster, too, -recognised at once as Parry, the ex-prize-fighter. It flashed through -his mind at once that this was an extraordinary conjunction. It flashed -through his mind, too, that it was extraordinary that anyone so -ecstatically handsome as Mrs. Duchemin's husband should not have earned -high preferment in a church always hungry for male beauty. Mr. Duchemin -was extremely tall, with a slight stoop of the proper clerical type. His -face was of alabaster; his grey hair, parted in the middle, fell -brilliantly on his high brows; his glance was quick, penetrating, -austere; his nose very hooked and chiselled. He was the exact man to -adorn a lofty and gorgeous fane, as Mrs. Duchemin was the exact woman to -consecrate an episcopal drawing-room. With his great wealth, scholarship -and tradition. . . . "Why then?" went through Macmaster's mind in a -swift pinprick of suspicion, "isn't he at least a dean?" - -Mr. Duchemin had walked swiftly to his chair which Parry, as swiftly -walking behind him, drew out. His master slipped into it with a -graceful, sideways motion. He shook his head at grey Miss Fox who had -moved a hand towards an ivory urn-tap. There was a glass of water beside -his plate, and round it his long, very white fingers closed. He stole a -quick glance at Macmaster, and then looked at him steadily with -glittering eyes. He said: "Good-morning, doctor," and then, drowning -Macmaster's quiet protest: "Yes! Yes! The stethoscope meticulously -packed into the top-hat and the shining hat left in the hall." - -The prize-fighter, in tight box-cloth leggings, tight whipcord breeches, -and a short tight jacket that buttoned up at the collar to his chin--the -exact stud-groom of a man of property, gave a quick glance of -recognition to Macmaster and then to Mr. Duchemin's back another quick -look, raising his eyebrows. Macmaster, who knew him very well because he -had given Tietjens boxing lessons at Cambridge, could almost hear him -say: "A queer change this, sir! Keep your eyes on him a second!" and, -with the quick, light, tip-toe of the pugilist he slipped away to the -sideboard. Macmaster stole a quick glance on his own account at Mrs. -Duchemin. She had her back to him, being deep in conversation with -Tietjens. His heart jumped a little when, looking back again, he saw Mr. -Duchemin half raised to his feet, peering round the fortifications of -silver. But he sank down again in his chair, and surveying Macmaster -with an expression of cunning singular on his ascetic features, -exclaimed: - -"And your friend? Another medical man! All with stethoscope complete. It -takes, of course, two medical men to certify . . ." - -He stopped and with an expression of sudden, distorted rage, pushed -aside the arm of Parry, who was sliding a plate of sole-fillets on to -the table beneath his nose. - -"Take away," he was beginning to exclaim thunderously, "these -conducements to the filthy lusts of . . ." But with another cunning and -apprehensive look at Macmaster, he said: "Yes! yes! Parry! That's right. -Yes! Sole! A touch of kidney to follow. Another! Yes! Grape-fruit! With -sherry!" He had adopted an old Oxford voice, spread his napkin over his -knees and hastily placed in his mouth a morsel of fish. - -Macmaster with a patient and distinct intonation said that he must be -permitted to introduce himself. He was Macmaster, Mr. Duchemin's -correspondent on the subject of his little monograph. Mr. Duchemin -looked at him, hard, with an awakened attention that gradually lost -suspicion and became gloatingly joyful: - -"Ah, yes, Macmaster!" he said. "Macmaster. A budding critic. A little of -a hedonist perhaps? And yes . . . you wired that you were coming. Two -friends! Not medical men! Friends!" He moved his face closer to -Macmaster and said: - -"How tired you look! Worn! Worn!" - -Macmaster was about to say that he was rather hard-worked when, in a -harsh, high cackle close to his face there came the Latin words. Mrs. -Duchemin--and Tietjens!--had heard. Macmaster knew then what he was up -against. He took another look at the prize-fighter; moved his head to -one side to catch a momentary view of the gigantic Mr. Horsley, whose -size took on a new meaning. Then he settled down in his chair and ate a -kidney. The physical force present was no doubt enough to suppress Mr. -Duchemin should he become violent. And trained! It was one of the -curious, minor coincidences of life that, at Cambridge, he had once -thought of hiring this very Parry to follow round his dear friend Sim. -Sim, the most brilliant of sardonic ironists, sane, decent and -ordinarily a little prudish on the surface, had been subject to just -such temporary lapses as Mr. Duchemin. On society occasions he would -stand up and shout or sit down and whisper the most unthinkable -indecencies. Macmaster, who had loved him very much, had run round with -Sim as often as he could, and had thus gained skill in dealing with -these manifestations. . . . He felt suddenly a certain pleasure! He -thought he might gain prestige in the eyes of Mrs. Duchemin if he dealt -quietly and efficiently with this situation. It might even lead to an -intimacy. He asked nothing better! - -He knew that Mrs. Duchemin had turned towards him: he could feel her -listening and observing him; it was as if her glance was warm on his -cheek. But he did not look round; he had to keep his eyes on the -gloating face of her husband. Mr. Duchemin was quoting Petronius, -leaning towards his guest. Macmaster consumed kidneys stiffly. - -He said: - -"That isn't the amended version of the iambics. Willamovitz Möllendorf -that we used . . ." - -To interrupt him Mr. Duchemin put his thin hand courteously on -Macmaster's arm. It had a great cornelian seal set in red gold on the -third finger. He went on, reciting in ecstasy; his head a little on one -side as if he were listening to invisible choristers. Macmaster really -disliked the Oxford intonation of Latin. He looked for a short moment at -Mrs. Duchemin; her eyes were upon him; large, shadowy, full of -gratitude. He saw, too, that they were welling over with wetness. - -He looked quickly back at Duchemin. And suddenly it came to him; she was -suffering! She was probably suffering intensely. It had not occurred to -him that she would suffer--partly because he was without nerves himself, -partly because he had conceived of Mrs. Duchemin as firstly feeling -admiration for himself. Now it seemed to him abominable that she should -suffer. - -Mrs. Duchemin was in an agony. Macmaster had looked at her intently and -looked away! She read into his glance contempt for her situation, and -anger that he should have been placed in such a position. In her pain -she stretched out her hand and touched his arm. - -Macmaster was aware of her touch; his mind seemed filled with sweetness. -But he kept his head obstinately averted. For her sake he did not dare -to look away from the maniacal face. A crisis was coming. Mr. Duchemin -had arrived at the English translation. He placed his hands on the -tablecloth in preparation for rising; he was going to stand on his feet -and shout obscenities wildly to the other guests. It was the exact -moment. - -Macmaster made his voice dry and penetrating to say: - -"'Youth of tepid loves' is a lamentable rendering of _puer calide_! It's -lamentably antiquated . . ." - -Duchemin choked and said: - -"What? What? What's that?" - -"It's just like Oxford to use an eighteenth century crib. I suppose -that's Whiston and Ditton? Something like that . . ." He observed -Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering--as if he were -coming awake in a strange place! He added: - -"Anyhow it's wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have -some galantine. I'm going to. Your sole's cold." - -Mr. Duchemin looked down at his plate. - -"Yes! Yes!" he muttered. "Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce!" The -prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable quiet fellow; -as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said: - -"You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What -became of Maggie . . . Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was Rossetti's -model for _Alla Finestra del Cielo_?" - -Mr. Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted -eyes: - -"_Alla Finestra_!" he exclaimed: "Oh yes! I've got the water-colour. I -saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot. . . ." He looked again -at his plate, started at sight of the galantine and began to eat -ravenously: "A beautiful girl!" he said: "Very long necked . . . She -wasn't of course . . . eh . . . respectable! She's living yet, I think. -Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of -course! . . . In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of -that class. . . ." He went muttering on, his head above his plate. -Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled -to turn to Mrs. Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly: - -"If he'll eat a little: get his stomach filled . . . It calls the blood -down from the head. . . ." - -She said: - -"Oh, forgive! It's dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive!" - -He said: - -"No! No! . . . Why; it's what I'm _for_!" - -A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life: - -"Oh, you _good_ man!" she said in her profound tones, and they remained -gazing at each other. - -Suddenly, from behind Macmaster's back Mr. Duchemin shouted: - -"I say he made a settlement on her, _dum casta et sola_, of course. -Whilst she remained chaste and alone!" - -Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had -seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on -his feet, panting and delighted: - -"Chaste!" He shouted. "Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion -in the word . . .'" He surveyed the opulent broadness of his tablecloth; -it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of -meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long -captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford -Movement voice: "But chastity . . ." - -Mrs. Wannop suddenly said: - -"Oh!" and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she -continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her -and said: - -"You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned -than my poor readers would care for . . ." Mr. Horsley had been -preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a -description of an article he had been writing about the _Mosella_ of -Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She -talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned -across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, -said to her as loudly as he could: - -"I've got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if -you'll . . ." - -The completely deaf Miss Fox--who had had her training by -writing--remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin: - -"I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of -minute insects. . . ." - -"When my revered preceptor," Mr. Duchemin thundered on "drove away in -the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: 'We will live like -the blessed angels!' How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin suddenly screamed: - -"Oh . . . _no_!" - -As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others paused--for a -breath. Then they continued talking with polite animation and listening -with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the highest achievement -and justification of English manners! - -Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and -shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that -he and the Rev. Horsley could get Mr. Duchemin away, but there'd be a -hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: "Wait!" and, turning to Mrs. -Duchemin he said: "I can stop him. Shall I?" She said: - -"Yes! Yes! Anything!" He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a -thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered -into the prize-fighter's hairy ear that was held down to him: - -"Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As _hard_ as you can without -breaking your thumb . . ." - -Mr. Duchemin had just declaimed: - -"I, too, after my nuptials . . ." He began to wave his arms, pausing and -looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs. Duchemin had -just screamed. - - -Mr. Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined -himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of -he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes. - -"He won't get up again." Macmaster whispered to the appreciative -pugilist. "He'll want to. But he'll be afraid." - -He said to Mrs. Duchemin: - -"Dearest lady! It's all over. I assure you of that. It's a scientific -nerve counter-irritant." - -Mrs. Duchemin said: - -"Forgive!" with one deep sob: "You can never respect . . ." She felt her -eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his -executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath -suspended itself. . . . - -Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers -beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the -fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed -themselves. - -In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first -with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained -that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if -not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not -to ensue, sharp physical pain--which of course is a nervous matter, -too! . . . - -Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master's ear: - -"It's time you prepared your sermon for to-morrow, sir," and Mr. -Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick -carpet to the small door. - -Then Macmaster said to her: - -"You come from Edinburgh? You'll know the Fifeshire coast then." - -"Do I not?" she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the -whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a -Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, -and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool -hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if -much of her life went. She said: "You'll be knowing Kingussie House, -just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child." - -He answered: - -"Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur -within." - -She said: - -"Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And . . . -And indeed there are other things I will tell you." - -She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm -buckled on again: - -"Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our -youths." - -He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated: - -"Then you're an older friend than I," he asked, "though I've known him -since I was fourteen, and I don't believe you could be a better. He's a -good fellow. . ." - -She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his -warning--she _knew_ it was a warning--to her to spare his friend. - -Mrs. Wannop gave a distinct, but not an alarming scream. Mr. Horsley had -been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the -Moselle in Roman times. The _Mosella_ of Ausonius; the subject of the -essay he was writing is mostly about fish. . . . - -"No," he shouted, "it's been said to be the roach. But there are no -roach in the river now." "_Vannulis viridis, oculisque_. No. It's the -other way round: _Red_ fins . . ." - -Mrs. Wannop's scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly -over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate!--were enough to -interrupt him. - -"_Tietjens_!" she again screamed. "Is it possible? . . ." - -She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the -young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had -turned to speak to Mrs. Duchemin she had recognised his aquiline -half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding-breakfast. -To the table that knew it by heart--though Tietjens himself didn't!--she -recited the story of how his father had saved her life, and was her -mascot. And she offered the son--for to the father she had never been -allowed to make any return--her house, her purse, her heart, her time, -her all. She was so completely sincere that, as the party broke up, she -just nodded to Macmaster and, catching Tietjens forcibly by the arm, -said perfunctorily to the critic: - -"Sorry I can't help you any more with the article. But my dear Chrissie -must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute!" - -She moved off, Tietjens grappled to her, her daughter following as a -young swan follows its parents. In her gracious manner Mrs. Duchemin had -received the thanks of her guests for her wonderful breakfast and had -hoped that now that they had found their ways there. . . . - -The echoes of the dispersed festival seemed to whisper in the room. -Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin faced each other, their eyes wary--and -longing. - -He said: - -"It's dreadful to have to go now. But I have an engagement." - -She said: - -"Yes! I know! With your great friends." - -He answered: - -"Oh, only with Mr. Waterhouse and General Campion . . . and Mr. -Sandbach, of course . . ." - -She had a moment of fierce pleasure at the thought that Tietjens was not -to be of the company: _her_ man would be out-soaring the vulgarian of -his youth, of his past that she didn't know. . . . Almost harshly she -exclaimed: - -"I don't want you to be mistaken about Kingussie House. It was just a -holiday school. Not a grand place." - -"It was very costly," he said, and she seemed to waver on her feet. - -"Yes! yes!" she said, nearly in a whisper "But you're so grand now! I -was only the child of very poor bodies. Johnstons of Midlothian. But -very poor bodies. . . . I . . . He bought me, you might say. You know. -. . . Put me to very rich schools: when I was fourteen . . . my people -were glad. . . . But I think if my mother had known when I married . . ." -She writhed her whole body. "Oh, dreadful! dreadful!" she exclaimed. -"I want you to know . . ." - -His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart. . . . - -Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to -say: "I must see you this evening. . . . I shall be mad with anxiety -about you." She whispered: "Yes! yes! . . . In the yew walk." Her eyes -were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. "You are the . . . -first . . . man . . ." she breathed. - -"I will be the only one for ever," he said. - -He began to see himself: in the tall room, with the long curtains: a -round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture -with great depths: the entwined figures. - -They drew apart to gaze at each other: holding hands. . . . The voice of -Tietjens said: - -"Macmaster! You're to dine at Mrs. Wannop's to-night. Don't dress; I -shan't." He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had -interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white -patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair. - -Macmaster said: - -"All right. It's near here, isn't it? . . . I've got an engagement just -after . . ." Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be -working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse . . . - -Mrs. Duchemin said with swift jealousy: - -"You let him order you about . . ." Tietjens was gone. - -Macmaster said absently: - -"Who? Chrissie? . . . Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me. . . . We -make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of -the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby. . . ." Feeling that she didn't -appreciate his friend he was abstractly piling on commendations: "He's -making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England -could make. But he's going . . ." - -An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet -triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly -that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself -quote: - -"'Since when we stand side by side!'" His voice trembled. - -"Ah yes!" came in her deep tones: "The beautiful lines . . . They're -true. We must part. In this world . . ." They seemed to her lovely and -mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, -arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said: - -"We must wait." He added fiercely: "But to-night, at dusk!" He imagined -the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight -under the window. - -"Yes! yes!" she said. "There's a little white gate from the lane." She -imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects -half seen. So much of glamour she could allow herself. - -Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they -would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, -talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but -with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh. . . . -And then: long, circumspect years. . . . - - -Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer -sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the -stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud! - - - - -VI - - -Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned -out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the -best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, -won't corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a -great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the -young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon -as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it -lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket. Miss Wannop moved -off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the -left hand a ten foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms -just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On -the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. -The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: "Pink! pink!": the -young woman had an agreeable back. - -This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through -Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, -clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; -she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that -each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably -appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their -promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church--two clergy--the State: -two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids. . . . Each -knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, -greenfinch, yellow-ammer (_not_, my dear, hammer! _ammer_ from the -Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, -pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher." (These _charming_ local dialect -names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white -blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, -wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that -the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture -on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our Lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle: -bachelor's button (but in _Sussex_ they call it ragged robin, my dear): -So interesting! cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French _pasque_, -meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not -burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; -black briony; wild clematis: later it's old man's beard; purple -loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal -shepherds give a grosser name. _So_ racy of the soil!) . . . Walk, then, -through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with -all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets! -Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably -extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, -to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid -potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (_No_! _Not_ -genuine willow-pattern, of _course_, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce -with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also -preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on -opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port . . . for the -_gentleman_! . . . and the jaws hardly able to open after the too -enormous breakfast at 10.15. Mid-day now! - -"God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. -"'Land of Hope and Glory!'--F natural descending to tonic, C major: -chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C -major. . . . All absolutely correct! Double basses, 'cellos, all -violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special -_vox humana_ and key-bugle effect. . . . Across the counties came the -sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Pipe exactly right. It must -be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young -woman's back. English mid-day midsummer. Best climate in the world! No -day on which man may not go abroad!" Tietjens paused and aimed with his -hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its -undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe -lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman -killed among crinolines! - -"Now I'm a bloody murderer!" Tietjens said. "Not gory! Green-stained -with vital fluid of innocent plant . . . And by God! Not a woman in the -country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!" He -slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the -sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and -marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass! - -"By God," he said, "Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition; -H.M. City Man. . . . All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God -we've got a navy! . . . But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows! -Britannia needs no bulwarks . . . Then thank God for the upright young -man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories -as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here in -earth . . . as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of -the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! -Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's -helmets. . . . No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss! . . . -Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of -Sodom. All splendid! I bet she's virtuous. But you don't have to bet. It -isn't done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! -Attractive back. Virginal cockiness. . . . Yes, better occupation for -mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till -you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat. . . . You could see it in -her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em! Thank God then for the -Tory, upright young married man and the Suffragette kid . . . Backbone -of England! . . ." - -He killed another flower. - -"But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both! . . . That kid and I! And -General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, -M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale. . . . And forty toothless fogies in -the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your -names cut out of them, my boy! . . . My dear boy: I so regret: your -father's oldest friend. . . . By Jove, the pistachio nut of that -galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought -I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich. . . . But no! Gloomy -reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same -reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters -over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of -pills . . . _Das Pillen-Land_, the Germans call us. Very properly . . . -And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life . . . -and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day -long! . . . Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as -Duchemin! . . . I'd never have thought that . . . No wonder meat's -turned to uric acid . . . prime cause of neurasthenia. . . . What a -beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He's finished. Poor devil: he'd better -have ogled this kid. He could have sung: 'Highland Mary' a better tune -than 'This is the end of every man's desire' . . . You can cut it on his -tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a -paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute. . . ." - -He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought -not to be walking with this girl! - -"But damn it all," he said to himself, "she makes a good screen for -Sylvia . . . who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off -all their beastly visiting lists already . . . as a suffragette!" - -Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: -left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the -other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt -had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him. . . . Her nimble -foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. -To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: -the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the -sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside this thistle-tops. No; damn -it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier -does, the eyes of a chaffinch. . . . Infinitely pathetic! - -Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: "Pink! pink!" - -The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird: - -"Damn your eyes! _Have_ them put out, then!" The beastly bird that made -the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like -any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, -botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: "Damn -your eyes! _Have_ your chastity impugned them? What do you speak to -strange men in public for! You know you can't do it in this country. If -it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each -other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot. . . . well, you -could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to -every man you met. . . . 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore . . .' To -every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth: -_that_ would deflower you!" He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. -"Well! _be_ deflowered then: _lose_ your infantile reputation. You've -spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled . . . with the benefit of -Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids -of England. . . . They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man, -in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia -or other. . . . Then _be_ a screen for Sylvia: _get_ struck off the -visiting books! The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I -am! I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it. . . ." - -Nevertheless, when at the road-side he stood level with Miss Wannop who -did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left -with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her: - -"Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads!" She pointed with her -chin along the opposite hedgerow. "Fifty yards!" she said. - -"Come along!" he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come -into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would -happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach -all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one -alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected. He said to -himself: - -"By God! If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee!" and -he hastened. "Just the beastly thing that _would_ happen." The road -probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby! - -Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most -extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they're -going to hurry--but _why_ hurry!--do it in the shade of field hedgerows, -not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead. -In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn't -intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly -noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she cool and -denunciatory in her pretty blouse. . . . - -There was a dog-cart coming behind them! - -Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had -said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the -breakfast-table. . . . The dog-cart contained the police: after them! -She didn't waste time looking round: she wasn't a fool like Atalanta in -the egg race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a -yard and a half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked: -breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn't the sense -to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, -panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being -made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops -cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshireman didn't -know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. -Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol. . . . Oh hang. . . . - -The voice of Mrs. Wannop--of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on -high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good, round face like a -peony--said: - -"Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her . . . but she gave you -seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father's -ambition!" She thought of them as children running races. She beamed -down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who -had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St. Peter. - -"My dear boy!" she said, "my dear boy; it's such a satisfaction to have -you under my roof!" - -The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs. -Wannop said unconcernedly: "Stephen Joel! I haven't done talking." - -Tietjens was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse's -sweat-smeared stomach. - -"You soon will have," he said, "with the girth in that state. Your neck -will be broken." - -"Oh, I don't think so," Mrs. Wannop said. "Joel only bought the turn-out -yesterday." - -Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity: - -"Here; get down, you," he said. He held, himself, the head of the horse -whose nostrils were wide with emotion: it rubbed its forehead almost -immediately against his chest. He said: "Yes! yes! There! there!" Its -limbs lost their tautness. The aged driver scrambled down from the high -seat, trying to come down at first forward and then backwards. Tietjens -fired indignant orders at him: - -"Lead the horse into the shade of that tree. Don't touch his bit: his -mouth's sore. Where did you get this job lot? Ashford market: thirty -pounds: it's worth more. . . . But, blast you, don't you see you've got -a thirteen hands pony's harness for a sixteen and a half hands horse. -Let the bit out: three holes: it's cutting the animal's tongue in half. -. . . This animal's a rig. Do you know what a rig is? If you give it -corn for a fortnight it will kick you and the cart and the stable to -pieces in five minutes one day." He led the conveyance, Mrs. Wannop -triumphantly complacent and all, into a patch of shade beneath elms. - -"Loosen that bit, confound you," he said to the driver. "Ah! you're -afraid." - -He loosened the bit himself, covering his fingers with greasy harness -polish which he hated. Then he said: - -"Can you hold his head or are you afraid of that too? You _deserve_ to -have him bite your hands off." He addressed Miss Wannop: "Can _you_?" -She said: "No! I'm afraid of horses. I can drive any sort of car: but -I'm afraid of horses." He said: "Very proper!" He stood back and looked -at the horse: it had dropped its head and lifted its near hind foot, -resting the toe on the ground: an attitude of relaxation. - -"He'll stand now!" he said. He undid the girth, bending down -uncomfortably, perspiring and greasy: the girth-strap parted in his -hand. - -"It's true," Mrs. Wannop said. "I'd have been dead in three minutes if -you hadn't seen that. The cart would have gone over backwards . . ." - -Tietjens took out a large, complicated, horn-handled knife like a -schoolboy's. He selected a punch and pulled it open. He said to the -driver: - -"Have you got any cobbler's thread? Any string? Any copper wire? A -rabbit wire, now? Come, you've got a rabbit wire or you're not a handy -man." - -The driver moved his slouch hat circularly in negation. This seemed to -be Quality who summons you for poaching if you own to possessing rabbit -wires. - -Tietjens laid the girth along the shaft and punched into it with his -punch. - -"Woman's work!" he said to Mrs. Wannop, "but it'll take you home and -last you six months as well . . . But I'll sell this whole lot for you -to-morrow." - -Mrs. Wannop sighed: - -"I suppose it'll fetch a ten pound note . . ." She said: "I ought to -have gone to market myself." - -"No!" Tietjens answered: "I'll get you fifty for it or I'm no -Yorkshireman. This fellow hasn't been swindling you. He's got you deuced -good value for money, but he doesn't know what's suited for ladies; a -white pony and a basket-work chaise is what you want." - -"Oh, I like a bit of spirit," Mrs. Wannop said. - -"Of course you do," Tietjens answered: "but this turn-out's too much." - -He sighed a little and took out his surgical needle. - -"I'm going to hold this band together with this," he said. "It's so -pliant it will make two stitches and hold for ever. . . ." - -But the handy man was beside him, holding out the contents of his -pockets: a greasy leather pouch, a ball of beeswax, a knife, a pipe, a -bit of cheese and a pale rabbit wire. He had made up his mind that -_this_ Quality was benevolent and he made offering of all his -possessions. - -Tietjens said: "Ah," and then, while he unknotted the wire: - -"Well! Listen . . . you bought this turn-out of a higgler at the back -door of the Leg of Mutton Inn." - -"Saracen's 'Ed!" the driver muttered. - -"You got it for thirty pounds because the higgler wanted money bad. _I_ -know. And dirt cheap. . . . But a rig isn't everybody's driving. All -right for a vet or a horse-coper. Like the cart that's too tall! . . . -But you did damn well. Only you're not what you were, are you, at -thirty? And the horse looked to be a devil and the cart so high you -couldn't get out once you were in. And you kept it in the sun for two -hours waiting for your mistress." - -"There wer' a bit o' lewth 'longside stable wall," the driver muttered. - -"Well! He didn't like waiting," Tietjens said placably. "You can be -thankful your old neck's not broken. Do this band up, one hole less for -the bit I've taken in." - -He prepared to climb into the driver's seat, but Mrs. Wannop was there -before him, at an improbable altitude on the sloping watch-box with -strapped cushions. - -"Oh, no, you don't," she said, "no one drives me and my horse but me or -my coachman when I'm about. Not even you, dear boy." - -"I'll come with you then," Tietjens said. - -"Oh, no, you don't," she answered. "No one's neck's to be broken in this -conveyance but mine and Joel's," she added: "perhaps to-night if I'm -satisfied the horse is fit to drive." - -Miss Wannop suddenly exclaimed: - -"Oh, _no_, mother." But the handy man having climbed in, Mrs. Wannop -flirted her whip and started the horse. She pulled up at once and leaned -over to Tietjens: - -"_What_ a life for that poor woman," she said. "We must _all_ do all we -can for her. She could have her husband put in a lunatic asylum -to-morrow. It's sheer self-sacrifice that she doesn't." - -The horse went off at a gentle, regular trot. - -Tietjens addressed Miss Wannop: - -"What hands your mother's got," he said, "it isn't often one sees a -woman with hands like that on a horse's mouth. . . . Did you see how she -pulled up? . . ." - -He was aware that, all this while, from the road-side, the girl had been -watching him with shining eyes: intently even: with fascination. - -"I suppose you think that a mighty fine performance," she said. - -"I didn't make a very good job of the girth," he said. "Let's get off -this road." - -"Setting poor, weak women in their places," Miss Wannop continued. -"Soothing the horse like a man with a charm. I suppose you soothe women -like that too. I pity your wife. . . . The English country male! And -making a devoted vassal at sight of the handy man. The feudal system all -complete. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Well, you know, it'll make him all the better servant to you if he -thinks you've friends in the know. The lower classes are like that. -Let's get off this road." - -She said: - -"You're in a mighty hurry to get behind the hedge. Are the police after -us or aren't they? Perhaps you were lying at breakfast: to calm the -hysterical nerves of a weak woman." - -"I wasn't lying," he said, "but I hate roads when there are -field-paths . . ." - -"That's a phobia, like any woman's," she exclaimed. - -She almost ran through the kissing-gate and stood awaiting him: - -"I suppose," she said, "if you've stopped off the police with your high -and mighty male ways you think you've destroyed my romantic young dream. -You haven't. I don't _want_ the police after me. I believe I'd _die_ if -they put me in Wandsworth . . . I'm a coward." - -"Oh, no, you aren't," he said, but he was following his own train of -thought, just as she wasn't in the least listening to him. "I daresay -you're a heroine all right. _Not_ because you persevere in actions the -consequences of which you fear. But I daresay you can touch pitch and -not be defiled." - -Being too well brought up to interrupt she waited till he had said all -he wanted to say, then she exclaimed: - -"Let's settle the preliminaries. It's obvious mother means us to see a -great deal of you. _You're_ going to be a mascot too, like your father. -I suppose you think you are: you saved me from the police yesterday, you -appear to have saved mother's neck to-day. You appear, too, to be going -to make twenty pounds profit on a horse deal. You say you will and you -seem to be that sort of a person . . . Twenty pounds is no end in a -family like ours . . . Well, then, you appear to be going to be the -regular _bel ami_ of the Wannop family . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"I hope not." - -"Oh, I don't mean," she said, "that you're going to rise to fame by -making love to all the women of the Wannop family. Besides, there's only -me. But mother will press you into all sorts of odd jobs: and there will -always be a plate for you at the table. Don't shudder! I'm a regular -good cook--_cuisine bourgeoise_ of course. I learned under a real -professed cook, though a drunkard. That meant I used to do half the -cooking and the family was particular. Eating people are: county -councillors, half of them, and the like. So I know what men are . . ." -She stopped and said good-naturedly: "But do, for goodness' sake, get it -over. I'm sorry I was rude to you. But it _is_ irritating to have to -stand like a stuffed rabbit while a man is acting like a regular -Admirable Crichton, and cool and collected, with the English country -gentleman air and all." - -Tietjens winced. The young woman had come a little too near the knuckle -of his wife's frequent denunciations of himself. And she exclaimed: - -"No! That's not fair! I'm an ungrateful pig! You didn't show a bit more -side really than a capable workman must who's doing his job in the midst -of a crowd of incapable duffers. But just get it out, will you? Say once -and for all that--you know the proper, pompous manner: you are not -without sympathy with our aims: but you disapprove--oh, immensely, -strongly--of our methods." - -It struck Tietjens that the young woman was a good deal more interested -in the cause--of votes for women--than he had given her credit for. He -wasn't much in the mood for talking to young women, but it was with -considerably more than the surface of his mind that he answered: - -"I don't. I approve entirely of your methods: but your aims are -idiotic." - -She said: - -"You don't know, I suppose, that Gertie Wilson, who's in bed at our -house, is wanted by the police: not only for yesterday, but for putting -explosives in a whole series of letter-boxes?" - -He said: - -"I didn't . . . but it was a perfectly proper thing to do. She hasn't -burned any of my letters or I might be annoyed: but it wouldn't -interfere with my approval." - -"You don't think," she asked earnestly, "that we . . . mother and -I . . . are likely to get heavy sentences for shielding her. It would be -beastly bad luck on mother. Because she's an anti. . ." - -"I don't know about the sentence," Tietjens said, "but we'd better get -the girl off your premises as soon as we can. . . ." - -She said: - -"Oh, you'll _help_?" - -He answered: - -"Of course, your mother can't be incommoded. She's written the only -novel that's been fit to read since the eighteenth century." - -She stopped and said earnestly: - -"Look here. _Don't_ be one of those ignoble triflers who say the vote -won't do women any good. Women have a rotten time. They do, really. If -you'd seen what I've seen, I'm not talking through my hat." Her voice -became quite deep: she had tears in her eyes: "_Poor_ women _do_!" she -said, "little insignificant creatures. We've _got_ to change the divorce -laws. We've _got_ to get better conditions. _You_ couldn't stand it if -you knew what I know." - -Her emotion vexed him, for it seemed to establish a sort of fraternal -intimacy that he didn't at the moment want. Women do not show emotion -except before their familiars. - -He said drily: - -"I daresay I shouldn't. But I don't know, so I can!" - -She said with deep disappointment: - -"Oh, you _are_ a beast! And I shall never beg your pardon for saying -that. I don't believe you mean what you say, but merely to say it is -heartless." - -This was another of the counts of Sylvia's indictment and Tietjens -winced again. She explained: - -"You don't know the case of the Pimlico army clothing factory workers or -you wouldn't say the vote would be no use to women." - -"I know the case perfectly well," Tietjens said: "It came under my -official notice, and I remember thinking that there never was a more -signal instance of the uselessness of the vote to anyone." - -"We can't be thinking of the same case," she said. - -"We are," he answered. "The Pimlico army clothing factory is in the -constituency of Westminster; the Under-Secretary for War is member for -Westminster; his majority at the last election was six hundred. The -clothing factory employed seven hundred men at 1s. 6d. an hour, all -these men having votes in Westminster. The seven hundred men wrote to -the Under-Secretary to say that if their screw wasn't raised to two bob -they'd vote solid against him at the next election. . . ." - -Miss Wannop said: "Well then!" - -"So," Tietjens said: "The Under-Secretary had the seven hundred men at -eighteenpence fired and took on seven hundred women at tenpence. What -good did the vote do the seven hundred men? What good did a vote ever do -anyone?" - -Miss Wannop checked at that and Tietjens prevented her exposure of his -fallacy by saying quickly: - -"Now, if the seven hundred women, backed by all the other ill-used, -sweated women of the country, had threatened the Under-Secretary, burned -the pillar-boxes, and cut up all the golf greens round his -country-house, they'd have had their wages raised to half-a-crown next -week. That's the only straight method. It's the feudal system at work." - -"Oh, but we couldn't cut up _golf_ greens," Miss Wannop said. "At least -the W.S.P.U. debated it the other day, and decided that anything so -unsporting would make us _too_ unpopular. I was for it personally." - -Tietjens groaned: - -"It's maddening," he said, "to find women, as soon as they get in -Council, as muddle-headed and as afraid to face straight issues as -men! . . ." - -"You won't, by-the-by," the girl interrupted, "be able to sell our horse -to-morrow. You've forgotten that it will be Sunday." - -"I shall have to on Monday, then," Tietjens said. "The point about the -feudal system . . ." - -Just after lunch--and it was an admirable lunch of the cold lamb, new -potatoes and mint-sauce variety, the mint-sauce made with white wine -vinegar and as soft as kisses, the claret perfectly drinkable and the -port much more than that, Mrs. Wannop having gone back to the late -professor's wine merchants--Miss Wannop herself went to answer the -telephone. . . . - -The cottage had no doubt been a cheap one, for it was old, roomy and -comfortable; but effort had no doubt, too, been lavished on its low -rooms. The dining-room had windows on each side and a beam across; the -dining silver had been picked up at sales, the tumblers were old -cut-glass; on each side of the ingle was a grandfather's chair. The -garden had red brick paths, sunflowers, hollyhocks and scarlet gladioli. -There was nothing to it all, but the garden-gate was well hung. - -To Tietjens all this meant effort. Here was a woman who, a few years -ago, was penniless, in the most miserable of circumstances, supporting -life with the most exiguous of all implements. What effort hadn't it -meant! and what effort didn't it mean? There was a boy at Eton . . . a -senseless, but a gallant effort. - -Mrs. Wannop sat opposite him in the other grandfather's chair; an -admirable hostess, an admirable lady. Full of spirit in dashes; but -tired. As an old horse is tired that, taking three men to harness it in -the stable yard, starts out like a stallion, but soon drops to a -jog-trot. The face tired, really; scarlet-cheeked with the good air, but -seamed downward. She could sit there at ease, the plump hands covered -with a black lace shawl, and descending on each side of her lap, as much -at ease as any other Victorian great lady. But at lunch she had let drop -that she had written for eight hours every day for the last four -years--till that day--without missing a day. To-day being Saturday, she -had no leader to write: - -"And, my darling boy," she had said to him. "I'm giving it to you. I'd -give it to no other soul but your father's son. Not even to . . ." And -she had named the name that she most respected. "And that's the truth," -she had added. Nevertheless, even over lunch, she had fallen into -abstractions, heavily and deeply, and made fantastic mis-statements, -mostly about public affairs. . . . It all meant a tremendous -record. . . . - -And there he sat, his coffee and port on a little table beside him; the -house belonging to him. . . . - -She said: - -"My dearest boy . . . you've so much to do. Do you think you ought -really to drive the girls to Plimsoll to-night? They're young and -inconsiderate; work comes first." - -Tietjens said: - -"It isn't the distance . . ." - -"You'll find that it is," she answered humorously. "It's twenty miles -beyond Tenterden. If you don't start till ten when the moon sets, you -won't be back till five, even if you've no accidents. . . . The horse is -all right, though . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Mrs. Wannop, I ought to tell you that your daughter and I are being -talked about. Uglily!" - -She turned her head to him; rather stiffly. But she was only coming out -of an abstraction. - -"Eh?" she said, and then: "Oh! About the golf-links episode. . . . It -must have looked suspicious. I daresay you made a fuss, too, with the -police, to head them off her." She remained pondering for a moment, -heavily, like an old pope: - -"Oh, you'll live it down," she said. - -"I ought to tell you," he persisted, "that it's more serious than you -think. I fancy I ought not to be here." - -"Not here!" she exclaimed. "Why, where else in the world should you be? -You don't get on with your wife; I know. She's a regular wrong 'un. Who -else could look after you as well as Valentine and I?" - -In the acuteness of that pang, for, after all, Tietjens cared more for -his wife's reputation than for any other factor in a complicated world, -Tietjens asked rather sharply why Mrs. Wannop had called Sylvia a wrong -'un. She said in rather a protesting, sleepy way: - -"My dear boy, nothing! I've guessed that there are differences between -you; give me credit for some perception. Then, as you're perfectly -obviously a right 'un, she must be a wrong 'un. That's all, I assure -you." - -In his relief Tietjens' obstinacy revived. He liked this house; he liked -this atmosphere; he liked the frugality, the choice of furniture, the -way the light fell from window to window; the weariness after hard work; -the affection of mother and daughter; the affection, indeed, that they -both had for himself, and he was determined, if he could help it, not to -damage the reputation of the daughter of the house. - -Decent men, he held, don't do such things, and he recounted with some -care the heads of the conversation he had had with General Campion in -the dressing-room. He seemed to see the cracked wash-bowls in their -scrubbed oak settings. Mrs. Wannop's face seemed to grow greyer, more -aquiline; a little resentful! She nodded from time to time; either to -denote attention or else in sheer drowsiness: - -"My dear boy," she said at last, "it's pretty damnable to have such -things said about you. I can see that. But I seem to have lived in a -bath of scandal all my life. Every woman who has reached my age has that -feeling. . . Now it doesn't seem to matter . . ." She really nodded -nearly off: then she started. "I don't see . . . I really don't see how -I can help you as to your reputation. I'd do it if I could: believe me. -. . . But I've other things to think of. . . . I've this house to keep -going and the children to keep fed and at school. I can't give all the -thought I ought to to other people's troubles. . . ." - -She started into wakefulness and right out of her chair. - -"But what a beast I am!" she said, with a sudden intonation that was -exactly that of her daughter; and, drifting with a Victorian majesty of -shawl and long skirt behind Tietjens' high-backed chair, she leaned over -it and stroked the hair on his right temple: - -"My dear boy," she said. "Life's a bitter thing. I'm an old novelist and -know it. There you are working yourself to death to save the nation with -a wilderness of cats and monkeys howling and squalling your personal -reputation away. . . . It was Dizzy himself said these words to me at -one of our receptions. 'Here I am, Mrs. Wannop,' he said. . . And . . ." -She drifted for a moment. But she made another effort: "My dear boy," -she whispered, bending down her head to get it near his ear: "My dear -boy; it doesn't matter; it doesn't really matter. You'll live it down. -The only thing that matters is to do good work. Believe an old woman -that has lived very hard; 'Hard lying money' as they call it in the -navy. It sounds like cant, but it's the only real truth. . . . You'll -find consolation in that. And you'll live it all down. Or perhaps you -won't; that's for God in His mercy to settle. But it won't matter; -believe me, as thy day so shall thy strength be." She drifted into other -thoughts; she was much perturbed over the plot of a new novel and much -wanted to get back to the consideration of it. She stood gazing at the -photograph, very faded, of her husband in side-whiskers and an immense -shirt-front, but she continued to stroke Tietjens' temple with a -subliminal tenderness. - -This kept Tietjens sitting there. He was quite aware that he had tears -in his eyes; this was almost too much tenderness to bear, and, at bottom -his was a perfectly direct, simple and sentimental soul. He always had -bedewed eyes at the theatre, after tender love scenes and so avoided the -theatre. He asked himself twice whether he should or shouldn't make -another effort, though it was almost beyond him. He wanted to sit still. - -The stroking stopped; he scrambled on to his feet: - -"Mrs. Wannop," he said, facing her, "it's perfectly true. I oughtn't to -care what these swine say about me, but I do. I'll reflect about what -you say till I get it into my system . . ." - -She said: - -"Yes, yes! My dear," and continued to gaze at the photograph: - -"But," Tietjens said; he took her mittened hand and led her back to her -chair: "What I'm concerned for at the moment is not my reputation, but -your daughter Valentine's." - -She sank down into the high chair, balloon-like and came to rest. - -"Val's reputation!" she said, "Oh! you mean they'll be striking _her_ -off their visiting lists. It hadn't struck me. So they will!" She -remained lost in reflection for a long time. - -Valentine was in the room, laughing a little. She had been giving the -handy man his dinner, and was still amused at his commendations of -Tietjens. - -"You've got one admirer," she said to Tietjens. "'Punched that rotten -strap,' he goes on saying, 'like a gret ol' yaffle punchin' a 'ollow -log!'" He's had a pint of beer and said it between each gasp. She -continued to narrate the quaintnesses of Joel which appealed to her; -informed Tietjens that "yaffle" was Kentish for great green woodpecker; -and then said: - -"You haven't got any friends in Germany, have you?" She was beginning to -clear the table. - -Tietjens said: - -"Yes; my wife's in Germany; at a place called Lobscheid." - -She placed a pile of plates on a black japanned tray. - -"I'm so sorry," she said, without an expression of any deep regret. -"It's the ingenious clever stupidities of the telephone. I've got a -telegraph message for you then. I thought it was the subject for -mother's leader. It always comes through with the initials of the paper -which are not unlike Tietjens, and the girl who always sends it is -called Hopside. It seemed rather inscrutable, but I took it to have to -do with German politics and I thought mother would understand it. . . . -You're not both asleep, are you?" - -Tietjens opened his eyes; the girl was standing over him, having -approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which -she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the -letters of the message ran together. The message was: - -"Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia -Hopside Germany." - -Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed -meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the -table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities -on the telephone. - -"Of course if I'd had any sense," the girl said, "I should have known it -couldn't have been mother's leader note; she never gets one on a -Saturday." - -Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each -word a pause: - -"It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me." - -"Lucky you!" the girl said, "I wish I was you. I've never been in the -Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg." She went off with her great -tray load, the table cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she -had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was -extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That -was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would -have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her -words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realised -that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it -was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil . . . though the devil of -course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is -probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of -mental oppressions . . . if God then desired (and one couldn't object -but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a -cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness. . . . But He had done it; no -doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are -heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just? . . . Perhaps -God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences. - -There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their -breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, -toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile -inefficiency; with gross piles of hot-house flowers--that he detested -for their exotic waxennesses!--with white enamelled panels that he -disliked and framed, weak prints--quite genuine of course, my dear, -guaranteed so by Sotheby--pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, -selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs. -Satterthwaite, in négligé, but with an immense hat; reading the -_Times_ with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could settle -down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she could -not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands behind -her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as cruel as -the usual degenerate Derby winner. In-bred for generations for one -purpose: to madden men of one type. . . . Pacing backwards and forwards, -exclaiming: "I'm bored! Bored!"; sometimes even breaking the breakfast -plates . . . And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with -imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and -clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife's -questions. . . . And in his forehead the continual pressure; the -determination to sit put; the _décor_ of the room seeming to burn into -his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon -his forehead. . . . - -Mrs. Wannop was talking to him now; he did not know what she said; he -never knew afterwards what he had answered. - -"God!" he said within himself, "if it's sexual sins God punishes, He -indeed is just and inscrutable!" . . . Because he had had physical -contact with this woman before he married her; in a railway carriage; -coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl! - -Where was the physical attraction of her gone to now? Irresistible; -reclining back as the shires rushed past. . . . His mind said that she -had lured him on. His intellect put the idea from him. No gentleman -thinks such things of his wife. - -No gentleman thinks. . . . By God; she must have been with child by -another man. . . . He had been fighting the conviction down all the last -four months. . . . He knew now that he had been fighting the conviction -all the last four months whilst, anæsthetised, he had bathed in figures -and wave-theories. . . . Her last words had been: her very last words: -late: all in white she had gone up to her dressing-room, and he had -never seen her again; her last words had been about the child . . . -"Supposing," she had begun . . . He didn't remember the rest. But he -remembered her eyes. And her gesture as she peeled off her long white -gloves. . . . - -He was looking at Mrs. Wannop's ingle; he thought it a mistake in taste, -really, to leave logs in an ingle during the summer. But then what are -you to do with an ingle in summer? In Yorkshire cottages they shut the -ingles up with painted doors. But that is stuffy, too! - -He said to himself: - -"By God! I've had a stroke!" and he got out of his chair to test his -legs. . . . But he hadn't had a stroke. It must then, he thought, be -that the pain of his last consideration must be too great for his mind -to register, as certain great physical pains go unperceived. Nerves, -like weighing machines, can't register more than a certain amount, then -they go out of action. A tramp who had had his leg cut off by a train -had told him that he had tried to get up, feeling nothing at all. . . . -The pain comes back though . . . - -He said to Mrs. Wannop, who was still talking: - -"I beg your pardon. I really missed what you said." - -Mrs. Wannop said: - -"I was saying that that's the best thing I can do for you." - -He said: - -"I'm really very sorry: it was that that I missed. I'm a little in -trouble you know." - -She said: - -"I know: I know. The mind wanders; but I wish you'd listen. I've got to -go to work, so have you. I said: after tea you and Valentine will walk -into Rye to fetch your luggage." - -Straining his intelligence, for, in his mind, he felt a sudden strong -pleasure: sunlight on pyramidal red roof in the distance: themselves -descending in a long diagonal, a green hill: God, yes, he wanted open -air. Tietjens said: - -"I see. You take us both under your protection. You'll bluff it out." - -Mrs. Wannop said rather coolly: - -"I don't know about you both. It's you I'm taking under my protection -(it's _your_ phrase!) As for Valentine: she's made her bed; she must lie -on it. I've told you all that already. I can't go over it again." - -She paused, then made another effort: - -"It's disagreeable," she said, "to be cut off the Mountby visiting list. -They give amusing parties. But I'm too old to care and they'll miss my -conversation more than I do theirs. Of course, I back my daughter -against the cats and monkeys. Of course, I back Valentine through thick -and thin. I'd back her if she lived with a married man or had -illegitimate children. But I don't approve, I don't approve of the -suffragettes: I despise their aims: I detest their methods. I don't -think young girls ought to talk to strange men. Valentine spoke to you -and look at the worry it has caused you. I disapprove. I'm a woman: but -I've made my own way: other women could do it if they liked or had the -energy. I disapprove! But don't believe that I will ever go back on any -suffragette, individual, in gangs; my Valentine or any other. Don't -believe that I will ever say a word against them that's to be -repeated--_you_ won't repeat them. Or that I will ever write a word -against them. No, I'm a woman and I stand by my sex!" She got up -energetically: - -"I must go and write my novel," she said. "I've Monday's instalment to -send off by train to-night. You'll go into my study: Valentine will give -you paper; ink; twelve different kinds of nibs. You'll find Professor -Wannop's books all round the room. You'll have to put up with Valentine -typing in the alcove. I've got two serials running, one typed, the other -in manuscript." - -Tietjens said: - -"But _you_!" - -"I," she exclaimed, "I shall write in my bedroom on my knee. I'm a woman -and can. You're a man and have to have a padded chair and sanctuary. . . . -You feel fit to work? Then: you've got till five, Valentine will get -tea then. At half-past five you'll set off to Rye. You'll be back with -your luggage and your friend and your friend's luggage at seven." - -She silenced him imperiously with: - -"Don't be foolish. Your friend will certainly prefer this house and -Valentine's cooking to the pub and the pub's cooking. And he'll save on -it. . . . It's _no_ extra trouble. I suppose your friend won't inform -against that wretched little suffragette girl upstairs." She paused and -said: "You're _sure_ you can do your work in the time and drive -Valentine and her to that place . . . Why it's necessary is that the -girl daren't travel by train and we've relations there who've never been -connected with the suffragettes. The girl can live hid there for a bit. -. . . But sooner than you shouldn't finish your work I'd drive them -myself . . ." - -She silenced Tietjens again: this time sharply: - -"I tell you it's _no_ extra trouble. Valentine and I _always_ make our -own beds. We don't like servants among our intimate things. We can get -three times as much help in the neighbourhood as we want. We're liked -here. The extra work you give will be met by extra help. We could have -servants if we wanted. But Valentine and I like to be alone in the house -together at night. We're very fond of each other." - -She walked to the door and then drifted back to say: - -"You know I can't get out of my head that unfortunate woman and her -husband. We must _all_ do what we can for them." Then she started and -exclaimed: "But, good heavens, I'm keeping you from your work . . . The -study's in there, through that door." - -She hurried through the other doorway and no doubt along a passage, -calling out: - -"Valentine! Valentine! Go to Christopher in the study. At once . . . at -. . ." Her voice died away. - - - - -VII - - -Jumping down from the high step of the dog-cart the girl completely -disappeared into the silver: she had on an otter-skin toque, dark, that -should have been visible. But she was gone more completely than if she -had dropped into deep water, into snow--or through tissue paper. More -suddenly, at least! In darkness or in deep water a moving paleness would -have been visible for a second: snow or a paper hoop would have left an -opening. Here there had been nothing. - -The constation interested him. He had been watching her intently and -with concern for fear she should miss the hidden lower step, in which -case she would certainly bark her shins. But she had jumped clear of the -cart: with unreasonable pluckiness, in spite of his: "Look out how you -get down." He wouldn't have done it himself: he couldn't have faced -jumping down into that white solidity . . . - -He would have asked: "Are you all right?" but to express more concern -than the "look out," which he had expended already, would have detracted -from his stolidity. He was Yorkshire and stolid: she south country and -soft: emotional: given to such ejaculations as "I hope you're not hurt," -when the Yorkshireman only grunts. But soft because she was south -country. She was as good as a man--a south country man. She was ready to -acknowledge the superior woodenness of the north. . . . That was their -convention: so he did not call down: "I hope you're all right," though -he had desired to. - -Her voice came, muffled, as if from the back of the top of his head: the -ventriloquial effect was startling: - -"Make a noise from time to time. It's ghostly down here and the lamp's -no good at all. It's almost out." - -He returned to his constations of the concealing effect of water vapour. -He enjoyed the thought of the grotesque appearance he must present in -that imbecile landscape. On his right an immense, improbably brilliant -horn of a moon, sending a trail as if down the sea, straight to his -neck: beside the moon a grotesquely huge star: in an extravagant -position above them the Plough, the only constellation that he knew; -for, though a mathematician, he despised astronomy. It was not -theoretical enough for the pure mathematician and not sufficiently -practical for daily life. He had of course calculated the movements of -abstruse heavenly bodies: but only from given figures: he had never -looked for the stars of his calculations. . . . Above his head and all -over the sky were other stars: large and weeping with light, or as the -dawn increased, so paling that at times, you saw them; then missed them. -Then the eye picked them up again. - -Opposite the moon was a smirch or two of cloud; pink below, dark purple -above; on the more pallid, lower blue of the limpid sky. - -But the absurd thing was this mist! . . . It appeared to spread from his -neck, absolutely level, absolutely silver, to infinity on each side of -him. At great distances on his right black tree-shapes, in groups--there -were four of them--were exactly like coral islands on a silver sea. He -couldn't escape the idiotic comparison: there wasn't any other. - -Yet it didn't actually spread from his neck: when he now held his hands, -nipple-high, like pallid fish they held black reins which ran downwards -into nothingness. If he jerked the rein, the horse threw its head up. -Two pricked ears were visible in greyness: the horse being sixteen two -and a bit over, the mist might be ten foot high. Thereabouts. . . . He -wished the girl would come back and jump out of the cart again. Being -ready for it he would watch her disappearance more scientifically. He -couldn't of course ask her to do it again: that was irritating. The -phenomenon would have proved--or it might of course disprove--his idea -of smoke screens. The Chinese of the Ming dynasty were said to have -approached and overwhelmed their enemies under clouds of--of course, not -acrid--vapour. He had read that the Patagonians, hidden by smoke, were -accustomed to approach so near to birds or beasts as to be able to take -them by hand. The Greeks under Paleologus the . . . - -Miss Wannop's voice said--from beneath the bottom board of the cart: - -"I wish you'd make some noise. It's lonely down here, besides being -possibly dangerous. There might be dicks on each side of the road." - -If they were on the marsh there certainly would be dykes--why did they -call ditches "dykes," and why did she pronounce it "dicks"?--on each -side of the road. He could think of nothing to say that wouldn't express -concern and he couldn't do that by the rules of the game. He tried to -whistle "John Peel"! But he was no hand at whistling. He sang: - -"D'ye ken, John Peel at the break of day . . ." and felt like a fool. -But he kept on at it, the only tune that he knew. It was the Yorkshire -Light Infantry quick-step: the regiment of his brothers in India. He -wished he had been in the army: but his father hadn't approved of having -more than two younger sons in the army. He wondered if he would ever run -with John Peel's hounds again: he had once or twice. Or with any of the -trencher-fed foot packs of the Cleveland district, of which there had -been still several when he had been a boy. He had been used to think of -himself as being like John Peel with his coat so grey . . . Up through -the heather, over Wharton's place; the pack running wild; the heather -dripping; the mist rolling up . . . another kind of mist than this south -country silver sheet. Silly stuff! Magical! That was the word. A silly -word. . . . South country . . . In the north the old grey mists rolled -together, revealing black hillsides! - -He didn't suppose he'd have the wind now: this rotten bureaucratic life! -. . . If he had been in the army like the two brothers, Ernest and -James, next above him . . . But no doubt he would not have liked the -army. Discipline! . . . He supposed he would have put up with the -discipline: a gentleman had to. Because _noblesse oblige_: not for fear -of consequences . . . But army officers seemed to him pathetic. They -spluttered and roared: to make men jump smartly: at the end of -apoplectic efforts the men jumped smartly. But there was the end -of it. . . . - -Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: -if you looked at it with the eye of the artist . . . With the exact eye! -It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; of orange: delicate -reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts -like snow. . . . The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work. -The only work for a man. Why then, were artists soft: effeminate: not -men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the -school-teacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an -old woman! - -And the bureaucrat then? Growing fat and soft like himself, or dry and -stringy like Macmaster or old Ingleby? They did men's work: exact -observation: return no. 17642 with figures exact. Yet they grew -hysterical: they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells, -asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand -and two wasn't ready. Nevertheless men liked the bureaucratic life: his -own brother, Mark, head of the family: heir to Groby. . . . Fifteen -years older: a quiet stick: wooden: brown: always in a bowler hat, as -often as not with his racing-glasses hung around him. Attending his -first-class office when he liked: too good a man for any administration -to lose by putting on the screw. . . . But heir to Groby: what would -that stick make of the place? . . . Let it, no doubt, and go on -pottering from the Albany to race meetings--where he never betted--to -Whitehall, where he was said to be indispensable. . . . Why -indispensable? Why in heaven's name? That stick who had never hunted, -never shot: couldn't tell coulter from plough-handle and lived in his -bowler hat! . . . A "sound" man: the archetype of all sound men. Never -in his life had anyone shaken his head at Mark and said: - -"You're _brilliant_!" Brilliant! That stick! No, he was indispensable! - -"Upon my soul!" Tietjens said to himself, "that girl down there is the -only intelligent living soul I've met for years." . . . A little -pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite -intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was -wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both -sides! . . . But, positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human -beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer -efficiency in killing: the other for having the constructive desire and -knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If -you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure -faith that she would kill it: emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and -sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she'd -find something to do for it . . . The two types of mind: remorseless -enemy: sure screen: dagger . . . sheath! - -Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hadn't in -years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to--as you talk down to a -child: as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse . . . -as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their -way. . . . - -But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd? -Not artist: not soldier: not bureaucrat: not certainly indispensable -anywhere: apparently not even sound in the eyes of these dim-minded -specialists . . . An exact observer. . . . - -Hardly even that for the last six and a half hours: - - -"Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethan -Das war ein schweigsams Reiten . . ." - - -he said aloud. - -How could you translate that: you couldn't translate it: no one could -translate Heine: - - -"It was the summer night came over me: -That was silent riding . . ." - - -A voice cut into his warm, drowsy thought: - -"Oh, you _do_ exist. But you've spoken too late. I've run into the -horse." He must have been speaking aloud. He had felt the horse -quivering at the end of the reins. The horse, too, was used to her by -now. It had hardly stirred . . . He wondered when he had left off -singing "John Peel." . . . He said: - -"Come along, then: have you found anything?" - -The answer came: - -"Something . . . But you can't talk in this stuff . . . I'll just . . ." - -The voice died away as if a door had shut. He waited: consciously -waiting: as an occupation! Contritely and to make a noise he rattled the -whip-stock in its bucket. The horse started and he had to check in -quickly: a damn fool he was. Of course a horse would start if you -rattled a whip-stock. He called out: - -"Are you all right?" The cart might have knocked her down. He had, -however, broken the convention. Her voice came from a great distance: - -"I'm all right. Trying the other side . . ." - -His last thought came back to him. He had broken their convention: he -had exhibited concern: like any other man. . . . He said to himself: - -"By God! Why not take a holiday: why not break all conventions?" - -They erected themselves intangibly and irrefragably. He had not known -this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to: and already the -convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she -warm and clinging. . . . Yet she was obviously as cool a hand as -himself: cooler no doubt, for at bottom he was certainly a -sentimentalist. - -A convention of the most imbecile type . . . Then break all conventions: -with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight -hours . . . almost exactly forty-eight hours till he started for -Dover. . . . - - -"And I must to the greenwood go, -Alone: a banished man!" - - -By the descending moon: it being then just after cockcrow of midsummer -night--what sentimentality!--it must be half-past four on Sunday. He had -worked out that to catch the morning Ostend boat at Dover he must leave -the Wannops' at 5.15 on Tuesday morning, in a motor for the -junction. . . . What incredible cross-country train connections! Five hours -for not forty miles, He had then forty-eight and three-quarter hours! Let -them be a holiday! A holiday from himself above all: a holiday from his -standards: from his convention with himself. From clear observation: -from exact thought: from knocking over all the skittles of the -exactitudes of others: from the suppression of emotions. . . . From all -the wearinesses that made him intolerable to himself. . . . He felt his -limbs lengthen, as if they too had relaxed. - - -Well, already he had had six and a half hours of it. They had started at -10 and, like any other man, he had enjoyed the drive, though it had been -difficult to keep the beastly cart balanced, the girl had had to sit -behind with her arm round the other girl who screamed at every oak -tree. . . . - -But he had--if he put himself to the question--mooned along under the -absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven: to the scent of -hay: to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of course--in June he -changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a heron twice, overhead. -They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn stacks, of heavy, rounded -oaks, of hop oasts that are half church tower, half finger-post. And the -road silver grey, and the night warm. . . . It was midsummer night that -had done that to him. . . . - - -_Hat mir's angethan. -Das war ein schweigsames Reiten._ . . . - - -Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the -parson's, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had -talked very little. . . . Not unpleasant people the parson's: an uncle -of the girl's: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but -without the individuality . . . A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly -meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a -man. All in candlelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat -up some stairs . . . a great deal of laughter of girls . . . then a -re-start an hour later than had been scheduled. . . . Well, it hadn't -mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them: the good -horse--_really_ it was a good horse!--putting its shoulders into the -work. . . . - -They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl -from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her -in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train. . . . - -There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near -their off-lamp. - -"What a large bat!" she had said. "_Noctilux major_. . ." - -He said: - -"Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn't it -_phalœna_ . . ." She had answered: - -"From White . . . The _Natural History of Selborne_ is the only natural -history I ever read. . . ." - -"He's the last English writer that could write," said Tietjens. - -"He calls the downs 'those majestic and amusing mountains,'" she said. -"Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? -Phal . . . i . . . i . . . na! To rhyme with Dinah!" - -"It's '_sublime_ and amusing mountains,' not 'majestic and amusing,'" -Tietjens said. "I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys -of to-day, from the German." - -She answered: - -"You would! Father used to say it made him sick." - -"Cæsar equals Kaiser," Tietjens said. . . . - -"Bother your Germans," she said, "they're no ethnologists; they're -rotten at philology!" She added: "Father used to say so," to take away -from an appearance of pedantry. - -A silence then! She had right over her head a rug that her aunt had lent -her; a silhouette beside him, with a cocky nose turned up straight out -of the descending black mass. But for the square toque she would have -had the silhouette of a Manchester cotton-hand: the toque gave it a -different line; like the fillet of Diana. It was piquant and agreeable -to ride beside a quite silent lady in the darkness of the thick Weald -that let next to no moonlight through. The horse's hoofs went clock, -clock: a good horse. The near lamp illuminated the russet figure of a -man with a sack on his back, pressed into the hedge, a blinking lurcher -beside him. - -"Keeper between the blankets!" Tietjens said to himself: "All these -south country keepers sleep all night. . . . And then you give them a -five quid tip for the week-end shoot. . . ." He determined that, as to -that, too he would put his foot down. No more week-ends with Sylvia in -the mansions of the Chosen People. . . . - -The girl said suddenly; they had run into a clearing of the deep -underwoods: - -"I'm not stuffy with you over that Latin, though you were unnecessarily -rude. And I'm not sleepy. I'm loving it all." - -He hesitated for a minute. It was a silly-girl thing to say. She didn't -usually say silly-girl things. He ought to snub her for her own -sake. . . . - -He had said: - -"I'm rather loving it too!" She was looking at him; her nose had -disappeared from the silhouette. He hadn't been able to help it; the -moon had been just above her head; unknown stars all round her; the -night was warm. Besides, a really manly man may condescend at times! He -rather owes it to himself. . . . - -She said: - -"That was nice of you! You might have hinted that the rotten drive was -taking you away from your so important work. . . ." - -"Oh, I can think as I drive," he said. She said: - -"Oh!" and then: "The reason why I'm unconcerned over your rudeness about -my Latin is that I know I'm a much better Latinist than you. You can't -quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in. . . . It's -_vastum_, not _longum_ . . . 'Terra tribus scopulis vastum -procurrit' . . . It's _alto_, not _caelo_ . . . 'Uvidus ex alto -desilientis. . . .' How could Ovid have written _ex caelo_? The 'c' -after the 'x' sets your teeth on edge." - -Tietjens said: - -"_Excogitabo_!" - -"That's purely canine!" she said with contempt. - -"Besides," Tietjens said, "_longum_ is much better than _vastum_. I hate -cant adjectives like 'vast.' . . ." - -"It's like your modesty to correct Ovid," she exclaimed. "Yet you say -Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets to _be_ poets. That's -because they _were_ sentimental and used adjectives like _vastum_. . . . -What's 'Sad tears mixed with kisses' but the sheerest sentimentality!" - -"It ought, you know," Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, "to be -'Kisses mingled with sad tears' . . . 'Tristibus et lacrimis oscula -mixta dabis. . . .'" - -"I'm hanged if I ever could," she exclaimed explosively. "A man like you -could die in a ditch and I'd never come near. You're desiccated even for -a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans." - -"Oh, well, I'm a mathematician," Tietjens said. "Classics is not my -line!" - -"It _isn't_," she answered tartly. - -A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words: - -"You used 'mingled' instead of 'mixed' to translate _mixta_. I shouldn't -think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they're as rotten at -that as at everything else, father used to say." - -"Your father was Balliol, of course," Tietjens said with the snuffy -contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived -most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment -and an olive branch. - -Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still -between him and the moon, remarked: - -"I don't know if you know that for some minutes we've been running -nearly due west. We ought to be going south-east by a bit south. I -suppose you _do_ know this road. . . ." - -"Every inch of it," she said, "I've been on it over and over again on my -motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross road is called -Grandfather's Wantways. We've got eleven miles and a quarter still to -do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it -goes in and out amongst them; hundreds of them. You know the exports of -the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles and -chimney backs. The railings round St. Paul's are made of Sussex iron." - -"I knew that, of course," Tietjens said: "I come of an iron county -myself. . . . Why didn't you let me run the girl over in the side-car, -it would have been quicker?" - -"Because," she said, "three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the -milestone at Hog's Corner: doing forty." - -"It must have been a pretty tidy smash!" Tietjens said. "Your mother -wasn't aboard?" - -"No," the girl said, "suffragette literature. The side-car was full. It -_was_ a pretty tidy smash. Hadn't you observed I still limp a -little?" . . . - -A few minutes later she said: - -"I haven't the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to -notice the road. And I don't care. . . . Here's a signpost though; pull -into it. . . ." - -The lamps would not, however, shine on the arms of the post; they were -burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens -gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and, -going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering -ghostlinesses. . . . - -The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs -clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was -astonishing; it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it: -ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly. -The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket. - -"Did you do that on purpose?" he asked the girl. "Or can't you hold a -horse?" - -"I can't drive a horse," the girl said; "I'm afraid of them. I can't -drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I _knew_ you'd say -you'd rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with -me." - -"Then do you mind," Tietjens said, "telling me if you know this road at -all?" - -"Not a bit!" she answered cheerfully. "I never drove it in my life. I -looked it up on the map before we started because I'm sick to death of -the road we went by. There's a one-horse 'bus from Rye to Tenterden, and -I've walked from Tenterden to my uncle's over and over again. . . ." - -"We shall probably be out all night then," Tietjens said. "Do you mind? -The horse may be tired. . . ." - -She said: - -"Oh, the poor horse! . . . I _meant_ us to be out all night. . . . But -the poor horse. . . . What a brute I was not to think of it." - -"We're thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter -from a place whose name I couldn't read; six and three-quarters from -somewhere called something like Uddlemere. . . ." Tietjens said. "This -is the road to Uddlemere." - -"Oh, that was Grandfather's Wantways all right," she declared. "I know -it well. It's called 'Grandfather's' because an old gentleman used to -sit there called Gran'fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to -sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden -market was abolished in 1845--the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, -you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that." - -Tietjens sat patiently: He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a -heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had -not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would. - -"Would you mind," he said then, "telling me . . ." - -"If," she interrupted, "that was really Gran'fer Wantways: midland -English. 'Vent' equals four cross-roads: high French _carrefour_. . . . -Or, perhaps, that isn't the right word. But it's the way your mind -works. . . ." - -"You have, of course, often walked from your uncle's to Gran'fer's -Wantways," Tietjens said, "with your cousins, taking brandy to the -invalid in the old toll-gate house. That's how you know the story of -Grand'fer. You said you had never driven it; but you _have_ walked it. -That's the way _your_ mind works, isn't it?" - -She said: "_Oh_!" - -"Then," Tietjens went on, "would you mind telling me--for the sake of -the poor horse--whether Uddlemere is or isn't on our road home. I take -it you don't know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is -the right road." - -"The touch of pathos," the girl said, "is a wrong note. It's you who're -in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn't. . . ." - -Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said: - -"It _is_ the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You -wouldn't let the horse go another five steps if it wasn't. You're as -soppy about horses as . . . as I am." - -"There's at least that bond of sympathy between us," she said drily. -"Gran'fer's Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore; -Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; -twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name -is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from -'O'er the mere.' Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to -put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: 'O'er -the mere.' Obviously absurd! . . . Putrid! '_O'er the_' by Grimm's law -impossible as '_Udi_'; '_mere_' not a middle Low German word -at all. . . ." - -"Why," Tietjens said, "are you giving me all this information?" - -"Because," the girl said, "it's the way your mind works. . . . It picks -up useless facts as silver after you've polished it picks up sulphur -vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent -patterns and makes Toryism out of them. . . . I've never met a Cambridge -Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up -again out of bones. That's what father used to say; he was an Oxford -Disraelian Conservative Imperialist. . . ." - -"I know of course," Tietjens said. - -"Of course you know," the girl said. "You know everything. . . . And -you've worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was -unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. _You_ want to be a -Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and -the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you'll never -stir a finger except to say I told you so." - -She touched him suddenly on the arm: - -"_Don't_ mind me!" she said. "It's reaction. I'm so happy. I'm so -happy." - -He said: - -"That's all right! That's all right!" But for a minute or two it wasn't -really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; -but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of -the defects of your qualities--even merely with the velvet. He added: -"Your mother works you very hard." - -She exclaimed: - -"How you _understand_. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a -sea-anemone!" She said: "Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for -four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the -movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her -day's work for slips of the pen. . . . And on the top of it the raid and -the anxiety. . . . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother _had_ gone -to prison. . . . Oh, I'd have gone mad. . . . Week-days and Sundays. . . ." -She stopped: "I'm apologising, really," she went on. "Of course I -ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; -saving the country with your statistics and all. . . . It _did_ make you -a rather awful figure, you know . . . and the relief to find you're . . . -oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. . . . I'd dreaded this -drive. . . . I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been in such a -dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn't let off steam I -should have had to jump out and run beside the cart. . . . I could -still . . ." - -"You couldn't," Tietjens said. "You couldn't see the cart." - -They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them -with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to -sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its -romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they -could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to -a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing -the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse -would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man -that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale. . . . They agreed that -they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured -hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more -luminous. . . . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the -stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged -into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical -sea. . . . Tietjens had said: - -"You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a -milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the -horse. . . ." She had plunged in . . . - -And he had sat, feeling he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the -light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts--intent, like Miss -Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday -morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; -a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a -horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the -horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man -in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of -stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler's epigrams. You -couldn't have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or -if not that, the claret. . . . The claret in south country inns was -often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept. . . . - -On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his -wife's maid at Dover. . . . - -He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like -other men; free of his conventions, his strait waist-coatings. . . . - -The girl said: - -"I'm coming up now! I've found out something. . . ." He watched intently -the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the -impenetrability of mist to the eye. - -Her otter skin cap had beads of dew: beads of dew were on her hair -beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with -fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the -wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight. - -Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but -irresistible impulse! He exclaimed: - -"Steady, the Buffs!" in his surprise. - -She said: - -"Well, you might as well have given me a hand." "I found," she went on, -"a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and then the lamp went out. We're not -on the marsh because we're between quick hedges. That's all I've found. -. . . But I've worked out what makes me so tart with you. . . ." - -He couldn't believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of -that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to -catch her to him and had been foiled by her. . . . She ought to be -indignant, amused, even pleased. . . . She ought to show some -emotion. . . . - -She said: - -"It was your silencing me with that absurd non-sequitur about the -Pimlico clothing factory. It was an insult to my intelligence." - -"You recognised that it was a fallacy!" Tietjens said. He was looking -hard at her. He didn't know what had happened to him. She took a long -look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was as if for a moment -destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him. -"Can't," he argued with destiny, "a man want to kiss a schoolgirl in a -scuffle. . . ." His own voice, a caricature of his own voice, seemed to -come to him: "Gentlemen don't . . ." He exclaimed: - -"Don't gentlemen? . . ." and then stopped because he realised that he -had spoken aloud. - -She said: - -"Oh, _gentlemen_ do!" she said, "use fallacies to glide over tight -places in arguments. And they browbeat schoolgirls with them. It's that, -that underneath, has been exasperating me with you. You regarded me at -that date--three-quarters of a day ago--as a schoolgirl." - -Tietjens said: - -"I don't now!" He added: "Heaven knows I don't now!" - -She said: "No; you don't now!" - -He said: - -"It didn't need your putting up all that blue stocking erudition to -convince me. . . ." - -"Blue stocking!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "There's nothing of the -blue stocking about me. I know Latin because father spoke it with us. It -was your pompous blue socks I was pulling." - -Suddenly she began to laugh. Tietjens was feeling sick, physically sick. -She went on laughing. He stuttered: - -"What is it?" - -"The sun!" she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun; not -a red sun: shining, burnished. - -"I don't see . . ." Tietjens said. - -"What there is to laugh at?" she asked. "It's the day! . . . The longest -day's begun . . . and to-morrow's as long. . . . The summer solstice, -you know. . . . After to-morrow the days shorten towards winter. But -to-morrow's as long. . . . I'm so glad . . ." - -"That we've got through the night? . . ." Tietjens asked. - -She looked at him for a long time. "You're not so dreadfully ugly, -really," she said. - -Tietjens said: - -"What's that church?" - -Rising out of the mist on a fantastically green knoll, a quarter of a -mile away, was an unnoticeable place of worship: an oak shingle tower -roof that shone grey like lead: an impossibly bright weathercock, -brighter than the sun. Dark elms all round it, holding wetnesses of -mist. - -"Icklesham!" she cried softly. "Oh, we're nearly home. Just above -Mountby . . . That's the Mountby drive. . . ." - -Trees existed, black and hoary with the dripping mist. Trees in the -hedgerow and the avenue that led to Mountby: it made a right-angle just -before coming into the road and the road went away at right-angles -across the gate. - -"You'll have to pull to the left before you reach the avenue," the girl -said. "Or as like as not the horse will walk right up to the house. The -higgler who had him used to buy Lady Claudine's eggs. . . ." - -Tietjens exclaimed barbarously: - -"Damn Mountby. I wish we'd never come near it," and he whipped the horse -into a sudden trot. The hoofs sounded suddenly loud. She placed her hand -on his gloved driving hand. Had it been his flesh she wouldn't have done -it. - -She said: - -"My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever . . . But you're a good man. -And very clever. . . . You will get through. . . ." - -Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a -black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them: mathematically straight, -just rising from the mist. He shouted: mad: the blood in his head. His -shout was drowned by the scream of the horse: he had swung it to the -left. The cart turned up: the horse emerged from the mist: head and -shoulders: pawing. A stone sea-horse from the fountain of Versailles! -Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity: the girl looking at it, -leaning slightly forward. - -The horse didn't come over backwards: he had loosened the reins. It -wasn't there any more. The damndest thing that _could_ happen! He had -known it would happen. He said: - -"We're all right now!" There was a crash and scraping: like twenty -tea-trays: a prolonged sound. They must be scraping along the mud-guard -of the invisible car. He had the pressure of the horse's mouth: the -horse was away: going hell for leather. He increased the pressure. The -girl said: - -"I know I'm all right with you." - -They were suddenly in bright sunlight: cart: horse: commonplace -hedgerows. They were going uphill: a steep brae. He wasn't certain she -hadn't said: "Dear!" or "My dear!" Was it possible after so short . . .? -But it had been a long night. He was, no doubt, saving her life too. He -increased his pressure on the horse's mouth gently: up to all his twelve -stone: all his strength. The hill told too. Steep, white road between -shaven grass banks! - -Stop; damn you! Poor beast . . . The girl fell out of the cart. No! -jumped clear! Out to the animal's head. It threw its head up. Nearly off -her feet: she was holding the bit. . . . She couldn't! Tender -mouth . . . afraid of horses. . . . He said: - -"Horse cut!" Her face like a little white blancmange! - -"Come quick," she said. - -"I must hold a minute," he said, "might go off if I let go to get down. -Badly cut?" - -"Blood running down solid! Like an apron," she said. - -He was at last at her side. It was true. But not so much like an apron. -More like a red, varnished stocking. He said: - -"You've a white petticoat on. Get over the hedge; jump it, and take it -off . . ." - -"Tear it into strips?" she asked. "Yes!" - -He called to her; she was suspended halfway up the bank: - -"Tear one half off first. The rest into strips." - -She said: "All right!" She didn't go over the quickset as neatly as he -had expected. No take off. But she was over. . . . - -The horse, trembling, was looking down, its nostrils distended, at the -blood pooling from its near foot. The cut was just on the shoulder. He -put his left arm right over the horse's eyes. The horse stood it, almost -with a sigh of relief. . . . A wonderful magnetism with horses. Perhaps -with women too? God knew. He was almost certain she had said "Dear." - -She said: "Here." He caught a round ball of whitish, stuff. He undid it. -Thank God: what sense! A long, strong, white band. . . . What the devil -was the hissing. . . . A small, closed car with crumpled mud-guards: -noiseless nearly: gleaming black . . . God curse it: it passed them: -stopped ten yards down . . . the horse rearing back: mad! Clean -mad . . . something like a scarlet and white cockatoo, fluttering out of -the small car door . . . a general. In full tog. White feathers! Ninety -medals! Scarlet coat! Black trousers with red stripe. Spurs too, by God! - -Tietjens said: - -"God damn you, you bloody swine. Go away!" - -The apparition, past the horse's blinkers, said: - -"I can, at least, hold the horse for you. I went past to get you out of -Claudine's sight." - -"Damn good-natured of you," Tietjens said as rudely as he could. "You'll -have to pay for the horse." - -The General exclaimed: - -"Damn it all! Why should I? You were driving your beastly camel right -into my drive." - -"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said. - -"I was on private ground," the General shouted. "Besides I did." An -enraged, scarlet scarecrow, very thin, he was holding the horse's -bridle. Tietjens was extending the half petticoat, with a measuring eye, -before the horse's chest. The General said: - -"Look here! I've got to take the escort for the Royal party at St. -Peter-in-Manor, Dover. They're laying the Buff's colours on the altar or -something." - -"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said. "Why didn't you bring your -chauffeur? He's a capable man. . . . You talk very big about the widow -and child. But when it comes to robbing them of fifty quid by -slaughtering their horse . . ." - -The General said: - -"What the devil were you doing coming into our drive at five in the -morning?" - -Tietjens, who had applied the half petticoat to the horse's chest, -exclaimed: - -"Pick up that thing and give it me." A thin roll of linen was at his -feet: it had rolled down from the hedge. - -"Can I leave the horse?" the General asked. - -"Of course you can," Tietjens said. "If I can't quiet a horse better -than you can run a car . . ." - -He bound the new linen strips over the petticoat: the horse dropped its -head, smelling his hand. The General, behind Tietjens, stood back on his -heels, grasping his gold-mounted sword. Tietjens went on twisting and -twisting the bandage. - -"Look here," the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens' -ear, "what am I to tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl." - -"Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter -hounds," Tietjens said; "that's a matutinal job. . . ." - -The General's voice had a really pathetic intonation: - -"On a Sunday!" he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: "I shall -tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin's church at -Pett." - -"If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession, -do," Tietjens said. "But you'll have to pay for the horse." - -"I'm damned if I will," the General shouted. "I tell you you were -driving into my drive." - -"Then I _shall_," Tietjens said, "and you know the construction you'll -put on _that_." - -He straightened his back to look at the horse. - -"Go away," he said, "say what you like. Do what you like! But as you go -through Rye send up the horse-ambulance from the vet's. Don't forget -that. I'm going to save this horse. . . ." - -"You know, Chris," the General said, "you're the most wonderful hand -with a horse . . . There isn't another man in England . . ." - -"I know it," Tietjens said. "Go away. And send up that ambulance. . . . -There's your sister getting out of your car. . . ." - -The General began: - -"I've an awful lot to get explained . . ." But, at a thin scream of: -"General! General!" he pressed on his sword hilt to keep it from between -his long, black, scarlet-striped legs, and running to the car pushed -back into its door a befeathered, black bolster. He waved his hand to -Tietjens: - -"I'll send the ambulance," he called. - -The horse, its upper leg swathed with criss-crosses of white through -which a purple stain was slowly penetrating, stood motionless, its head -hanging down, mule-like, under the blinding sun. To ease it Tietjens -began to undo the trace. The girl hopped over the hedge and, scrambling -down, began to help him. - -"Well. _My_ reputation's gone," she said cheerfully. - -"I know what Lady Claudine is. . . . Why did you try to quarrel with the -General? . . ." - -"Oh, you'd better," Tietjens said wretchedly, "have a law-suit with him. -It'll account for . . . for your not going to Mountby . . ." - -"You think of everything," she said. - -They wheeled the cart backwards off the motionless horse. Tietjens moved -it two yards forward--to get it out of sight of its own blood. Then they -sat down side by side on the slope of the bank. - -"Tell me about Groby," the girl said at last. - -Tietjens began to tell her about his home. . . . There was, in front of -it, an avenue that turned into the road at right angles. Just like the -one at Mountby. - -"My great-great-grandfather made it," Tietjens said. "He liked privacy -and didn't want the house visible by vulgar people on the road . . . -just like the fellow who planned Mountby, no doubt. . . . But it's -beastly dangerous with motors. We shall have to alter it . . . just at -the bottom of a dip. We can't have horses hurt. . . . You'll see . . ." -It came suddenly into his head that he wasn't perhaps the father of the -child who was actually the heir to that beloved place over which -generation after generation had brooded. Ever since Dutch William! A -damn Nonconformist swine! - -On the bank his knees were almost level with his chin. He felt himself -slipping down. - -"If I ever take you there . . ." he began. - -"Oh, but you never will," she said. - -The child wasn't his. The heir to Groby! All his brother's were -childless . . . There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant -to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count -twenty-three. And there came up a whispering roar. . . . But not his -child! Perhaps he hadn't even the power to beget children. His married -brothers hadn't. . . . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury -to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility -were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss -Wannop had her arm over his shoulder. - -"My dear!" she said, "you won't ever take me to Groby . . . It's -perhaps . . . oh . . . short acquaintance; but I feel you're the -splendidest . . ." - -He thought: "It _is_ rather short acquaintance." - -He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall, -eel-skin, blonde figure of his wife. . . . - -The girl said: - -"There's a fly coming!" and removed her arm. - -A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General -Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted -a pound to take them to Mrs. Wannop's, waked out of his beauty sleep and -all. The knacker's cart was following. - -"You'll take Miss Wannop home at once," Tietjens said, "she's got her -mother's breakfast to see to. . . . I shan't leave the horse till the -knacker's van comes." - -The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip. - -"Aye," he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket. -"Always the gentleman . . . a merciful man is merciful also to his -beast. . . . But I wouldn't leave my little wooden 'ut, nor miss my -breakfast, for no beast. . . . Some do and some . . . do not." - -He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique conveyance. - -Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight, -beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at -last, a lot of blood. - -Tietjens said: - -"I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want -the money. . . ." - -He said: - -"But it wouldn't be playing the game!" - -A long time afterwards he said: - -"Damn all principles!" And then: - -"But one has to keep on going. . . . Principles are like a skeleton map -of a country--you know whether you're going east or north." - -The knacker's cart lumbered round the corner. - - - - -PART II - - - - -I - - -Sylvia Tietjens rose from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along -it, carrying her plate. She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her -skirts as long as she possibly could: she didn't, she said, with her -height, intend to be taken for a girl guide. She hadn't, in complexion, -in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute. You -couldn't discover in the skin of her face any deadness: in her eyes the -shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had -purposely increased her air of scornful insolence. That was because she -felt that her hold over men increased to the measure of her coldness. -Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she -entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was -Sylvia's pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all -the women in it realised with mortification--that they needn't! For if -coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: "Nothing doing!" as -barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn't more plainly have -conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured -rubbish. - -Once, on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire, where the moors come above -the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a -man had bidden her observe the demeanour of the herring gulls below. -They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with -none of the dignity of gulls. Some of them even let fall the herrings -that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the -blue motion. The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing -for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a -pale flame against the sky was a bird. The man told her that that was -some sort of fish-eagle or hawk. Its normal habit was to chase the gulls -which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon -the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water. At the moment -the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it -had been. - -Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle. It -pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet -screamed and dropped their herrings . . . The whole affair reminded her -of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard. . . . -Not that there was the breath of a scandal against herself; that she -very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice -men--the "really nice men" of commerce--was her hobby. - -She practiced every kind of "turning down" on these creatures: the -really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal's brown eyes, -the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and -the admirable records--as long as you didn't enquire _too_ closely. -Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man--she _had_ -smiled at him in mistake for some one more trustable--had followed in a -taxi, hard on her motor, and flushed with wine, glory and the firm -conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common -property, had burst into her door from the public stairs. . . . She had -overtopped him by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she -seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that -scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: a -_chaud-froid_ effect. He had come in like a stallion, red eyed, and all -his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned -rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other. - -Yet she hadn't really told him more than the way one should behave to -the wives of one's brother officers then actually in the line, a point -of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh. But it -must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother--when his mother -had been much younger, of course--speaking from paradise, and his -conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness. This, however, -had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn't, therefore, -interested her. She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains. - -She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressement which -a man would develop about herself at the first glance--the amount and -the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of -the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on -introduction couldn't conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a -measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner, -diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket, -diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so, -rather more quickly away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow -stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong--from the milder note to the -more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of "turnings down." The poor -fellows next day would change their bootmakers, their sock merchants, -their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts: they would -sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with -their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that -calamity came from the fact that she hadn't deigned to look into their -eyes. . . . Perhaps hadn't dared was the right word! - -Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have -been. She knew that, like her intimates--all the Elizabeths, Alixs, and -Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly journals--she -was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their intimacy as of their -eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed paper. They went about in -bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather boas floating above them, -though to be sure no one _wore_ feather boas; they shortened their hairs -and their skirts and flattened, as far as possible, their chest -developments, which _does_ give, oh, you know . . . a _certain_ . . . -They adopted demeanours as like as possible--and yet how unlike--to -those of waitresses in tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads -in police court reports of raids what _those_ are! Probably they were, -in action, as respectable as any body of women; _more_ respectable, -probably, than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly -spotless by comparison with their own upper servants whose morals, -merely as recorded in the divorce court statistics--_that_ she had from -Tietjens--would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch -villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that she was sure her butler -would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an -angel--and, as such, delicately minded--wouldn't have the face to put -down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan's offences. . . . - -And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn't really even -believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn't -believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call -the _maîtresse en tître_ of any particular man. Passion wasn't, at -least, their strong suit: they left that to more--or to less--august -circles. The Duke of A . . . and all the little A's . . . might be the -children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B . . . instead of -the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A . . . Mr. C, -the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the -father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E . . . The Whig -front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes -trading off these--again French--_collages sérieux_ against the -matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and Mr. G. . . . But those -amorous of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august -politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the -parties to them didn't, for one thing, photograph well, being old, -uglyish and terribly, badly dressed. They were matter rather for the -memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for -fifty years. . . . - -The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other -as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their -affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the -country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard -of such country houses, but she didn't know of any. She imagined that -they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had -patronymics ending in schen . . . stein . . . and baum. There were -getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She -had in her that much of the papist. - -Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden -marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in -the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord -mayors and common councilmen. They were the product usually of -the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne--of -champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual -circumstances--fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty -marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental -lewdness. - -In her own case--years ago now--she had certainly been taken advantage -of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she -acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed: -intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When; in a scare -that had been as much her mother's as her own, she had led Tietjens on -and married him in Paris to be out of the way--though it was fortunate -that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the scene -of her mother's marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an -ostensible reason!--there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very -night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see -the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with -grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and -the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been -very near death. She had wanted death. - -And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper--her -mother's influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House, -her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were -recorded in gazettes--nay, she had only involuntarily to think of that -night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into -her palms and groan slightly. . . . She had to invent a chronic stitch -in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and -seemed to herself to degrade her. . . . - -The miserable memory would come, ghost-like, at any time, anywhere. She -would see Drake's face, dark against the white things; she would feel -the thin night-gown lipping off her shoulder; but most of all she would -seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might -be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the -longing for the brute who had mangled her: the dreadful pain of the -mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had -seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely -without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him. . . . She -had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to -experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake. . . . - -Her "turnings down" then of the really nice men, if it were a sport, was -a sport not without a spice of danger. She imagined that, after a -success, she must feel much of the exhilaration that men told her they -felt after bringing off a clean right and left, and no doubt she felt -some of the emotions that the same young men felt when they were out -shooting with beginners. Her personal chastity she now cherished much as -she cherished her personal cleanliness and persevered in her Swedish -exercises after her baths before an open window, her rides afterwards, -and her long nights of dancing which she would pursue in any room that -was decently ventilated. Indeed, the two sides of life were, in her -mind, intimately connected: she kept herself attractive by her skilfully -selected exercises and cleanlinesses: and the same fatigues, healthful -as they were, kept her in the mood for chastity of life. She had done so -ever since her return to her husband; and this not because of any -attachment to her husband or to virtue as such, as because she had made -the pact with herself out of caprice and meant to keep it. She _had_ to -have men at her feet: that was, as it were, the price of her--purely -social--daily bread: as it was the price of the daily bread of her -intimates. She was, and had been for many years, absolutely continent. -And so very likely were, and had been, all her Moiras, and Megs, and -Lady Marjories--but she was perfectly aware that they had to have, above -their assemblies as it were, a light vapour of the airs and habits of -the brothel. The public demanded that . . . a light vapour, like the -slight traces of steam that she had seen, glutinously adhering to the -top of the water in the crocodile-houses of the Zoo. - -It was, indeed, the price; and she was aware that she had been lucky. -Not many of the hastily-married young women of her set really kept their -heads above water _in_ her set: for a season you would read that Lady -Marjorie and Captain Hunt, after her presentation at Court on the -occasion of her marriage, were to be seen at Roehampton, at Goodwood and -the like: photographs of the young couple, striding along with the -palings of the Row behind them, would appear for a month or so. Then the -records of their fashionable doings would transfer themselves to the -lists of the attendants and attachés of distant vice-regal courts in -tropics bad for the complexion. "And then no more of he and she," as -Sylvia put it. - -In her case it hadn't been so bad, but it had been nearish. She had had -the advantage of being an only daughter of a very rich woman: her -husband wasn't just any Captain Hunt to stick on a vice-regal staff. He -was in a first-class office and when Angélique wrote notes on the young -menage she could--Angélique's ideas of these things being hazy--always -refer to the husband as the future Lord Chancellor or Ambassador to -Vienna. And their little, frightfully expensive establishment--to which -her mother, who had lived with them had very handsomely contributed--had -floated them over the first dangerous two years. They had entertained -like mad, and two much-canvassed scandals had had their beginnings in -Sylvia's small drawing-room. She had been quite established when she had -gone off with Perowne. . . . - -And coming back had not been so difficult. She had expected it would be, -but it hadn't. Tietjens had stipulated for large rooms in Gray's Inn. -That hadn't seemed to her to be reasonable; but she imagined that he -wanted to be near his friend and, though she had no gratitude to -Tietjens for taking her back and nothing but repulsion from the idea of -living in his house, as they were making a bargain, she owed it to -herself to be fair. She had never swindled a railway company, brought -dutiable scent past a custom-house or represented to a second-hand -dealer that her clothes were less worn than they were, though with her -prestige she could actually have done this. It was fair that Tietjens -should live where he wished and live there they did, their very tall -windows looking straight into those of Macmaster across the Georgian -quadrangle. - -They had two floors of a great building, and that gave them a great deal -of space, the breakfast-room, in which during the war they also lunched, -was an immense room, completely lined with books that were nearly all -calf-backed, with an immense mirror over an immense, carved, yellow and -white marble mantelpiece, and three windows that, in their great height, -with the spideriness of their divisions and their old, bulging -glass--some of the panes were faintly violet in age--gave to the room an -eighteenth century distinction. It suited, she admitted, Tietjens, who -was an eighteenth century figure of the Dr. Johnson type--the only -eighteenth century type of which she knew, except for that of the beau -something who wore white satin and ruffles, went to Bath and must have -been indescribably tiresome. - -Above, she had a great white drawing-room, with fixings that she knew -were eighteenth century and to be respected. For Tietjens--again she -admitted--had a marvellous gift for old furniture: he despised it as -such, but he knew it down to the ground. Once when her friend Lady Moira -had been deploring the expense of having her new, little house furnished -from top to toe under the advice of Sir John Robertson, the specialist -(the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some -American), Tietjens, who had come in to tea and had been listening -without speaking, had said, with the soft good nature, rather -sentimental in tone, that once in a blue moon he would bestow on her -prettiest friends: - -"You had better let me do it for you." - -Taking a look round Sylvia's great drawing-room, with the white panels, -the Chinese lacquer screens, the red lacquer and ormolu cabinets and the -immense blue and pink carpet (and Sylvia knew that if only for the three -panels by a fellow called Fragonard, bought just before Fragonards had -been boomed by the late King, her drawing-room was something -remarkable). Lady Moira had said to Tietjens, rather flutteringly and -almost with the voice with which she began one of her affairs: - -"Oh, if you only _would_." - -He had done it, and he had done it for a quarter of the estimate of Sir -John Robertson. He had done it without effort, as if with a roll or two -of his elephantine shoulders, for he seemed to know what was in every -dealer's and auctioneer's catalogue by looking at the green halfpenny -stamp on the wrapper. And, still more astonishingly, he had made love to -Lady Moira--they had stopped twice with the Moiras in Gloucestershire -and the Moiras had three times week-ended with Mrs. Satterthwaite as the -Tietjens' _invités_. . . . Tietjens had made love to Lady Moira quite -prettily and sufficiently to tide Moira over until she was ready to -begin her affair with Sir William Heathly. - -For the matter of that, Sir John Robertson, the specialist in old -furniture, challenged by Lady Moira to pick holes in her beautiful -house, had gone there, poked his large spectacles against cabinets, -smelt the varnish of table tops and bitten the backs of chairs in his -ancient and short-sighted way, and had then told Lady Moira that -Tietjens had bought her nothing that wasn't worth a bit more than he had -given for it. This increased their respect for the old fellow: it -explained his several millions. For, if the old fellow proposed to make -out of a friend like Moira a profit of 300 per cent.--limiting it to -that out of sheer affection for a pretty woman--what wouldn't he make -out of a natural--and national--enemy like a United States senator! - -And the old man took a great fancy to Tietjens himself--which Tietjens, -to Sylvia's bewilderment, did not resent. The old man would come in to -tea and, if Tietjens were present, would stay for hours talking about -old furniture. Tietjens would listen without talking. Sir John would -expatiate over and over again about this to Mrs. Tietjens. It was -extraordinary. Tietjens went purely by instinct: by taking a glance at a -thing and chancing its price. According to Sir John one of the most -remarkable feats of the furniture trade had been Tietjens' purchase of -the Hemingway bureau for Lady Moira. Tietjens, in his dislikeful way, -had bought this at a cottage sale for £3 10s., and had told Lady Moira -it was the best piece she would ever possess: Lady Moira had gone to the -sale with him. Other dealers present had hardly looked at it: Tietjens -certainly hadn't opened it. But at Lady Moira's, poking his spectacles -into the upper part of the glazed piece, Sir John had put his nose -straight on the little bit of inserted yellow wood by a hinge, bearing -signature, name and date: "Jno. Hemingway, Bath, 1784." Sylvia -remembered them because Sir John told her so often. It was a lost -"piece" that the furnishing world had been after for many years. - -For that exploit the old man seemed to love Tietjens. That he loved -Sylvia herself, she was quite aware. He fluttered round her tremulously, -gave fantastic entertainments in her honour and was the only man she had -never turned down. He had a harem, so it was said, in an enormous house -at Brighton or somewhere. But it was another sort of love he bestowed on -Tietjens: the rather pathetic love that the aged bestow on their -possible successors in office. - -Once Sir John came into tea and quite formally and with a sort of -portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and -that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should -come into partnership with him with the reversion of the business--not, -of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking -a detail or two of Sir John's proposed arrangement. Then he had said, -with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a -pretty woman, that he didn't think it would do. There would be too much -beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him -than his office . . . but there was too much beastly money about it. - -Once more, a little to Sylvia's surprise--but men are queer -creatures!--Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable, -though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with -a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn't have Tietjens he couldn't; -and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going -to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce -on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had -entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that -Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old -furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia -a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens _did_ come to be in want -of money . . . - -Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people--as they sometimes -did--told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely -unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of -caprice--like her own and, since she knew that most of her own -manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of -thinking much about him. - -But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a -consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This -came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of -Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had -discussed the change at Lobscheid--or rather when Sylvia had -unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!--he had -predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the -affair of her mother's cousin's opera box that had most impressed her. -He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering -with her social level, and he was convinced that he was not going to. He -had thought about it a good deal. - -She hadn't much listened to him. She had thought, firstly, that he was a -fool and, secondly, that he _did_ mean to hurt her. And she acknowledged -that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with another -man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his name -and the shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms. -Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such -equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure. - -But at Lobscheid he had talked a lot of nonsense, as it had seemed to -her: a mixture of prophecy and politics. The Chancellor of the Exchequer -of that date had been putting pressure on the great landlords: the great -landlords had been replying by cutting down their establishments and -closing their town houses--not to any great extent, but enough to make a -very effective gesture of it, and so as to raise a considerable clamour -from footmen and milliners. The Tietjens--both of them--were of the -great landowning class: they could adopt that gesture of shutting up -their Mayfair house and going to live in a wilderness. All the more if -they made their wilderness a thoroughly comfortable affair! - -He had counselled her to present this aspect of the matter to her -mother's cousin, the morosely portentous Rugeley. Rugeley was a great -landowner--almost the greatest of all; and he was a landowner obsessed -with a sense of his duties both to his dependants and his even remote -relatives. Sylvia had only, Tietjens said, to go to the Duke and tell -him that the Chancellor's exactions had forced them to this move, but -that they had done it partly as a protest, and the Duke would accept it -almost as a personal tribute to himself. _He_ couldn't, even as a -protest, be expected to shut up Mexborough or reduce his expenses. But, -if his humbler relatives spiritedly did, he would almost certainly make -it up to them. And Rugeley's favours were on the portentous scale of -everything about him. "I shouldn't wonder," Tietjens had said, "if he -didn't lend you the Rugeley box to entertain in." - -And that is exactly what had happened. - -The Duke--who must have kept a register of his remotest cousins--had, -shortly before their return to London, heard that this young couple had -parted with every prospect of a large and disagreeable scandal. He had -approached Mrs. Satterthwaite--for whom he had a gloomy affection--and -he had been pleased to hear that the rumour was a gross libel. So that, -when the young couple actually turned up again--from Russia!--Rugeley, -who perceived that they were not only together, but to all appearances -quite united, was determined not only to make it up to them, but to -show, in order to abash their libellers as signal a mark of his favour -as he could without inconvenience to himself. He, therefore, -twice--being a widower--invited Mrs. Satterthwaite to entertain for him, -Sylvia to invite the guests, and then had Mrs. Tietjens' name placed on -the roll of those who could have the Rugeley box at the opera, on -application at the Rugeley estate office, when it wasn't wanted. This -was a very great privilege and Sylvia had known how to make the most if -it. - -On the other hand, on the occasion of their conversation at Lobscheid, -Tietjens had prophesied what at the time seemed to her a lot of tosh. It -had been two or three years before, but Tietjens had said that about the -time grouse-shooting began, in 1914, a European conflagration would take -place which would shut up half the houses in Mayfair and beggar their -inhabitants. He had patiently supported his prophecy with financial -statistics as to the approaching bankruptcy of various European powers -and the growingly acquisitive skill and rapacity of the inhabitants of -Great Britain. She had listened to that with some attention: it had -seemed to her rather like the usual nonsense talked in country -houses--where, irritatingly, he never talked. But she liked to be able -to have a picturesque fact or two with which to support herself when she -too, to hold attention, wanted to issue moving statements as to -revolutions, anarchies and strife in the offing. And she had noticed -that when she magpied Tietjens' conversations more serious men in -responsible positions were apt to argue with her and to pay her more -attention than before. . . . - -And now, walking along the table with her plate in her hand, she could -not but acknowledge that, triumphantly--and very comfortably for -her!--Tietjens had been right! In the third year of the war it was very -convenient to have a dwelling, cheap, comfortable, almost august and so -easy to work that you could have, at a pinch, run it with one maid, -though the faithful Hullo Central had not let it come to that yet. . . . - -Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold -cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad: she wavered a little to -one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents -fly at Tietjens' head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted -slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace. - -"I'm bored," she said. "Bored! Bored!" - -Tietjens had moved slightly as she had thrown: the cutlets and most of -the salad leaves had gone over his shoulder. But one, couched, very -green leaf was on his shoulder-strap, and the oil and vinegar from the -plate--Sylvia _knew_ that she took too much of all condiments--had -splashed from the revers of his tunic to his green staff-badges. She was -glad that she had hit him as much as that: it meant that her -marksmanship had not been quite rotten. She was glad, too, that she had -missed him. She was also supremely indifferent. It had occurred to her -to do it and she had done it. Of that she was glad! - -She looked at herself for some time in the mirror of bluish depths. She -pressed her immense bandeaux with both hands on to her ears. She was all -right: high-featured: alabaster complexion--but that was mostly the -mirror's doing--beautiful, long, cool hands--what man's forehead -wouldn't long for them? . . . And that hair! What man wouldn't think of -it, unloosed on white shoulders! . . . Well, Tietjens wouldn't! Or, -perhaps, he did . . . she hoped he did, curse him, for he never saw that -sight. Obviously sometimes, at night, with a little whisky taken he must -want to! - -She rang the bell and bade Hullo Central sweep the plateful from the -carpet; Hullo Central, tall and dark, looking with wide-open eyes, -motionlessly at nothing. - -Sylvia went along the bookshelves, pausing over a book back, "_Vitae -Hominum Notiss_ . . ." in gilt, irregular capitals pressed deep into the -old leather. At the first long window she supported herself by the -blind-cord. She looked out and back into the room. - -"There's that veiled woman!" she said, "going into eleven. . . . It's -two o'clock, of course. . . ." - -She looked at her husband's back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was -getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn't going to miss a motion or -a stiffening. - -"I've found out who it is!" she said, "and who she goes to. I got it out -of the porter." She waited. Then she added: - -"It's the woman you travelled down from Bishop's Auckland with. On the -day war was declared." - -Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that -out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing. - -His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since -he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust -heaps. He said: - -"So you saw me!" But that, too, was mere politeness. - -She said: - -"Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine's saw you! It was old -Campion who said she was a Mrs. . . . I've forgotten the name." - -Tietjens said: - -"I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the corridor!" - -She said: - -"Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster's, or the mistress of both of -you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common. . . . She's got -a mad husband, hasn't she? A clergyman." - -Tietjens said: - -"She hasn't!" - -Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in -these discussions never manœuvred for position, said: - -"She has been Mrs. Macmaster over six months." - -Sylvia said: - -"She married him then the day after her husband's death." - -She drew a long breath and added: - -"I don't care. . . . She has been coming here every Friday for three -years. . . . I tell you I shall expose her unless that little beast pays -you to-morrow the money he owes you. . . . God knows you need it!" She -said then hurriedly, for she didn't know how Tietjens might take that -proposition: - -"Mrs. Wannop rang up this morning to know who was . . . oh! . . . the -evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. Who, by the by, is Mrs. Wannop's -secretary? She wants to see you this afternoon. About war babies!" - -Tietjens said: - -"Mrs. Wannop hasn't got a secretary. It's her daughter who does her -ringing-up." - -"The girl," Sylvia said, "you were so potty about at that horrible -afternoon Macmaster gave. Has she had a war baby by you? They all say -she's your mistress." - -Tietjens said: - -"No, Miss Wannop isn't my mistress. Her mother has had a commission to -write an article about war babies. I told her yesterday there weren't -any war babies to speak of, and she's upset because she won't be able to -make a sensational article. She wants to try and make me change my -mind." - -Sylvia said: - -"It _was_ Miss Wannop at that beastly affair of your friend's?" Sylvia -asked. "And I suppose the woman who received was Mrs. What's-er-name: -your other mistress. An unpleasant show. I don't think much of your -taste. The one where all the horrible geniuses in London were? There was -a man like a rabbit talked to me about how to write poetry." - -"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 -not _that_! 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. "It _reeked_ of -rabbit's food." - -"You're quite mistaken," Tietjens said; "that is the Russian leather of -the backs of the specially bound presentation copies in the _large_ -bookcase." - -"I don't know what you're talking about," Sylvia said. "What _are_ -presentation 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: - -"_That_ sort 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 patronage _is_ distributed 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. And _she_ is 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 ask _somebody_ for 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. "_Do_ bankers 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 probably -_would_ bitch my career. . . ." He went on, with a little more animation -and a little more of his mind: - -"Ah! _that_ will 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 with _them_ and 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 called _Somewhere_? 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 for _him_. 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 that _I'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 say _Metternich_ . . . 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; I -_shan't_ be 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! there _isn't_ a marked increase of the -illegitimacy rate, except in patches. The rate's appallingly high in the -lowlands of Scotland; but it always _is_ appallingly 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. Why -_shouldn't_ he, 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: - -"But _you_! . . . 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 I _don't_ know 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." - -"You _mean_ that?" 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: they _couldn't_ have 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: - -"What _was_ the 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 know _that_ name, I was as ignorant, as -_uninstructed_, 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. "_You_ read 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. I _try_ to 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 you _really_," 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. I _know_ she -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 used -_me_!" - -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. _You_ know 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 of _this_ mare'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's_ be 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--those _should_ be--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 have _got_ to plunder the French -or millions of our people must starve: they have _got_ to 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: - -"You _don'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: - -"A _Roman_ Catholic. . . . 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 . . ." - -"It _is_," 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." - - - - -II - - -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 . . ." - -Lord 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!" _That_ wouldn'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 that _that_ -explained 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 you _can't_ be . . . 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 of _all_ the 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. There _could_ not 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 General -_hadn't_ sounded 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: "_What_ a 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 the -_asticoteries_, 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. . . . - -Remembering the clear sunlight of those naïvetés--though in his blue -gloom he had abated no jot of the ambition--Tietjens sighed deeply as he -came back for a moment to regard his dining-room. Really, it was to see -how much time he had left in which to think out what to say to Port -Scatho. . . . Port Scatho had moved his chair over to beside Sylvia and, -almost touching her, was leaning over and recounting the griefs of his -sister who was married to a lunatic. Tietjens gave himself again for a -moment to the luxury of self-pity. He considered that he was -dull-minded, heavy, ruined, and so calumniated that at times he believed -in his own infamy, for it is impossible to stand up for ever against the -obloquy of your land and remain unhurt in the mind. If you hunch your -shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. . . . - -His mind stopped for a moment and his eyes gazed dully at Sylvia's -letter which lay open on the tablecloth. His thoughts came together, -converging on the loosely-written words: - -"For the last nine months a woman . . ." - -He wondered swiftly what he had already said to Port Scatho: only that -he had known of his wife's letter; not when! And that he approved! Well, -on principle! He sat up. To think that one could be brought down to -thinking so slowly! - -He ran swiftly over what had happened in the train from Scotland and -before. . . . - -Macmaster had turned up one morning beside their breakfast table in the -farm house, much agitated, looking altogether too small in a cloth cap -and a new grey tweed suit. He had wanted £50 to pay his bill with: at -some place up the line above . . . above . . . Berwick suddenly flashed -into Tietjens' mind. . . . - -That was the geographic position. Sylvia was at Bamborough on the coast -(junction Wooler); he, himself, to the north-west, on the moors. -Macmaster to the north-east of him, just over the border: in some -circumspect beauty spot where you did not meet people. Both Macmaster -and Mrs. Duchemin would know that country and gurgle over its beastly -literary associations. . . . The Shirra! Maida! Pet Marjorie . . . -Faugh! Macmaster would, no doubt, turn an honest penny by writing -articles about it and Mrs. Duchemin would hold his hand. . . . - -She had become Macmaster's mistress, as far as Tietjens knew, after a -dreadful scene in the rectory, Duchemin having mauled his wife like a -savage dog, and Macmaster in the house. . . . It was natural: a Sadic -reaction as it were. But Tietjens rather wished they hadn't. Now it -appeared they had been spending a week together . . . or more. Duchemin -by that time was in an asylum. . . . - -From what Tietjens had made out they had got out of bed early one -morning to take a boat and see the sunrise on some lake and had passed -an agreeable day together quoting, "Since when we stand side by side -only hands may meet" and other poems of Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, -no doubt to justify their sin. On coming home they had run their boat's -nose into the tea-table of the Port Scathos with Mr. Brownlie, the -nephew, just getting out of a motor to join them. The Port Scatho group -were spending the night at the Macmasters' hotel which backed on to the -lake. It was the ordinary damn sort of thing that must happen in these -islands that are only a few yards across. - -The Macmasters appear to have lost their heads frightfully, although -Lady Port Scatho had been as motherly as possible to Mrs. Duchemin; so -motherly, indeed, that if they had not been unable to observe anything, -they might have recognised the Port Scathos as backers rather than spies -upon themselves. It was, no doubt, however, Brownlie who had upset them: -he wasn't very civil to Macmaster, whom he knew as a friend of Tietjens. -He had dashed up from London in his motor to consult his uncle, who was -dashing down from the west of Scotland, about the policy of the bank in -that moment of crisis. . . . - -Macmaster, anyhow, did not spend the night in the hotel, but went to -Jedburgh or Melrose or some such place, turning up again almost before -it was light to have a frightful interview about five in the morning -with Mrs. Duchemin, who, towards three, had come to a disastrous -conclusion as to her condition. They had lost their nerves for the first -time in their association, and they had lost them very badly indeed, the -things that Mrs. Duchemin said to Macmaster seeming almost to have -passed belief. . . . - -Thus, when Macmaster turned up at Tietjens' breakfast, he was almost out -of his mind. He wanted Tietjens to go over in the motor he had brought, -pay the bill at the hotel, and travel down to town with Mrs. Duchemin, -who was certainly in no condition to travel alone. Tietjens was also to -make up the quarrel with Mrs. Duchemin and to lend Macmaster £50 in -cash, as it was then impossible to change cheques anywhere. Tietjens got -the money from his old nurse, who, because she distrusted banks, carried -great sums in £5 notes in a pocket under her under-petticoat. - -Macmaster, pocketing the money, had said: - -"That makes exactly two thousand guineas that I owe you. I'm making -arrangements to repay you next week. . . ." - -Tietjens remembered that he had rather stiffened and had said: "For -God's sake don't. I beg you not to. Have Duchemin properly put under -trustees in lunacy, and leave his capital alone. I really beg you. You -don't know what you'll be letting yourselves in for. You don't owe me -anything and you can always draw on me." - -Tietjens never knew what Mrs. Duchemin had done about her husband's -estate over which she had at that date had a power of attorney; but he -had imagined that, from that time on, Macmaster had felt a certain -coldness for himself and that Mrs. Duchemin had hated him. During -several years Macmaster had been borrowing hundreds at a time from -Tietjens. The affair with Mrs. Duchemin had cost her lover a good deal: -he had week-ended almost continuously in Rye at the expensive hostel. -Moreover, the famous Friday parties for geniuses had been going on for -several years now, and these had meant new furnishings, bindings, -carpets, and loans to geniuses--at any rate before Macmaster had had the -ear of the Royal Bounty. So the sum had grown to £2,000, and now to -guineas. And, from that date, the Macmasters had not offered any -repayment. - -Macmaster had said that he dare not travel with Mrs. Duchemin because -all London would be going south by that train. All London had. It pushed -in at every conceivable and inconceivable station all down the line--it -was the great rout of the 3-8-14. Tietjens had got on board at Berwick, -where they were adding extra coaches, and by giving a £5 note to the -guard, who hadn't been able to promise isolation for any distance, had -got a locked carriage. It hadn't remained locked for long enough to let -Mrs. Duchemin have her cry out--but it had apparently served to make -some mischief. The Sandbach party had got on, no doubt at Wooler; the -Port Scatho party somewhere else. Their petrol had run out somewhere and -sales were stopped, even to bankers. Macmaster, who after all had -travelled by the same train, hidden beneath two bluejackets, had picked -up Mrs. Duchemin at King's Cross and that had seemed the end of it. - -Tietjens, back in his dining-room, felt relief and also anger. He said: - -"Port Scatho. Time's getting short. I'd like to deal with this letter if -you don't mind." - -Port Scatho came as if up out of a dream. He had found the process of -attempting to convert Mrs. Tietjens to divorce law reform very -pleasant--as he always did. He said: - -"Yes! . . . Oh, yes!" - -Tietjens said slowly: - -"If you can listen. . . . Macmaster has been married to Mrs. Duchemin -exactly nine months. . . . Have you got that? Mrs. Tietjens did not know -this till this afternoon. The period Mrs. Tietjens complains of in her -letter is nine months. She did perfectly right to write the letter. As -such I approve of it. If she had known that the Macmasters were married -she would not have written it. I didn't know she was going to write it. -If I had known she was going to write it I should have requested her not -to. If I had requested her not to she would, no doubt, not have done so. -I did know of the letter at the moment of your coming in. I had heard of -it at lunch only ten minutes before. I should, no doubt, have heard of -it before, but this is the first time I have lunched at home in four -months. I have to-day had a day's leave as being warned for foreign -service. I have been doing duty at Ealing. To-day is the first -opportunity I have had for serious business conversation with Mrs. -Tietjens. . . . Have you got all that? . . ." - -Port Scatho was running towards Tietjens, his hand extended, and over -his whole shining personage the air of an enraptured bridegroom. -Tietjens moved his right hand a little to the right, thus eluding the -pink, well-fleshed hand of Port Scatho. He went on frigidly: - -"You had better, in addition, know as follows: The late Mr. Duchemin was -a scathological--afterwards a homicidal--lunatic. He had recurrent fits, -usually on a Saturday morning. That was because he fasted--not abstained -merely--on Fridays. On Fridays he also drank. He had acquired the -craving for drink when fasting, from finishing the sacramental wine -after communion services. That is a not unknown occurrence. He behaved -latterly with great physical violence to Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin, -on the other hand, treated him with the utmost consideration and -concern: she might have had him certified much earlier, but, considering -the pain that confinement must cause him during his lucid intervals, she -refrained. I have been an eye-witness of the most excruciating heroisms -on her part. As for the behaviour of Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin, I am -ready to certify--and I believe society accepts--that it has been -most . . . oh, circumspect and right! . . . There has been no secret of -their attachment to each other. I believe that their determination to -behave with decency during their period of waiting has not been -questioned. . . ." - -Lord Port Scatho said: - -"No! no! Never . . . Most . . . as you say . . . circumspect and, -yes . . . right!" - -"Mrs. Duchemin," Tietjens continued, "has presided at Macmaster's -literary Fridays for a long time; of course since long before they were -married. But, as you know, Macmaster's Fridays have been perfectly open: -you might almost call them celebrated. . . ." - -Lord Port Scatho said: - -"Yes! yes! indeed . . . I sh'd be only too glad to have a ticket for -Lady Port Scatho. . . ." - -"She's only got to walk in," Tietjens said. "I'll warn them: they'll be -pleased. . . . If, perhaps, you would look in to-night! They have a -special party. . . . But Mrs. Macmaster was always attended by a young -lady who saw her off by the last train to Rye. Or I very frequently saw -her off myself, Macmaster being occupied by the weekly article that he -wrote for one of the papers on Friday nights. . . . They were married on -the day after Mr. Duchemin's funeral. . . ." - -"You can't blame 'em!" Lord Port Scatho proclaimed. - -"I don't propose to," Tietjens said. "The really frightful tortures Mrs. -Duchemin had suffered justified--and indeed necessitated--her finding -protection and sympathy at the earliest possible moment. They have -deferred this announcement of their union partly out of respect for the -usual period of mourning, partly because Mrs. Duchemin feels very -strongly that, with all the suffering that is now abroad, wedding feasts -and signs of rejoicing on the part of non-participants are eminently to -be deprecated. Still, the little party of to-night is by way of being an -announcement that they are married. . . ." He paused to reflect for a -moment. - -"I perfectly understand!" Lord Port Scatho exclaimed. "I perfectly -approve. Believe me, I and Lady Port Scatho will do everything. . . . -Everything! . . . Most admirable people. . . . Tietjens, my dear fellow, -your behaviour . . . most handsome. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Wait a minute. . . . There was an occasion in August, '14. In a place -on the border. I can't remember the name. . . ." - -Lord Port Scatho burst out: - -"My dear fellow . . . I beg you won't. . . . I beseech you not to . . ." - -Tietjens went on: - -"Just before then Mr. Duchemin had made an attack of an unparalleled -violence on his wife. It was that that caused his final incarceration. -She was not only temporarily disfigured, but she suffered serious -internal injuries and, of course, great mental disturbance. It was -absolutely necessary that she should have change of scene. . . . But I -think you will bear me out that, in that case too, their behaviour -was . . . again, circumspect and right. . . ." - -Port Scatho said: - -"I know; I know . . . Lady Port Scatho and I agreed--even without -knowing what you have just told me--that the poor things almost -exaggerated it. . . . He slept, of course, at Jedburgh? . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Yes! They almost exaggerated it. . . . I had to be called in -to take Mrs. Duchemin home. . . . It caused, apparently, -misunderstandings. . . ." - -Port Scatho--full of enthusiasm at the thought that at least two unhappy -victims of the hateful divorce laws had, with decency and -circumspectness, found the haven of their desires--burst out: - -"By God, Tietjens, if I ever hear a man say a word against you. . . . -Your splendid championship of your friend. . . . Your . . . your -unswerving devotion . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Wait a minute, Port Scatho, will you?" He was unbottoning the flap of -his breast pocket. - -"A man who can act so splendidly in one instance," Port Scatho -said. . . . "And your going to France. . . . If any one . . . if -_any_ one . . . dares . . ." - -At the sight of a vellum-cornered, green-edged book in Tietjens' hand -Sylvia suddenly stood up; as Tietjens took from an inner flap a cheque -that had lost its freshness she made three great strides over the carpet -to him. - -"Oh, Chrissie! . . ." she cried out. "He hasn't . . . That beast -hasn't . . ." - -Tietjens answered: - -"He has . . ." He handed the soiled cheque to the banker. Port Scatho -looked at it with slow bewilderment. - -"'Account overdrawn,'" he read. "Brownie's . . . my nephew's -handwriting. . . . To the club . . . It's . . ." - -"You aren't going to take it lying down?" Sylvia said. "Oh, thank -goodness, you aren't going to take it lying down." - -"No! I'm not going to take it lying down," Tietjens said. "Why should -I?" A look of hard suspicion came over the banker's face. - -"You appear," he said, "to have been overdrawing your account. People -should not overdraw their accounts. For what sum are you overdrawn?" - -Tietjens handed his pass-book to Port Scatho. - -"I don't understand on what principle you work," Sylvia said to -Tietjens. "There are things you take lying down; this you don't." - -Tietjens said: - -"It doesn't matter, really. Except for the child." - -Sylvia said: - -"I guaranteed an overdraft for you up to a thousand pounds last -Thursday. You can't be overdrawn over a thousand pounds." - -"I'm not overdrawn at all," Tietjens said. "I was for about fifteen -pounds yesterday. I didn't know it." - -Port Scatho was turning over the pages of the pass-book, his face -completely blank. - -"I simply don't understand," he said. "You appear to be in credit. . . . -You appear always to have been in credit except for a small sum now and -then. For a day or two." - -"I was overdrawn," Tietjens said, "for fifteen pounds yesterday. I -should say for three or four hours: the course of a post, from my army -agent to your head office. During these two or three hours your bank -selected two out of six of my cheques to dishonour--both being under two -pounds. The other one was sent back to my mess at Ealing, who won't, of -course, give it back to me. That also is marked "account overdrawn," and -in the same handwriting." - -"But good God," the banker said. "That means your ruin." - -"It certainly means my ruin," Tietjens said. "It was meant to." - -"But," the banker said--a look of relief came into his face which had -begun to assume the aspect of a broken man's--"you must have other -accounts with the bank . . . a speculative one, perhaps, on which you -are heavily down. . . . I don't myself attend to client's accounts, -except the very huge ones, which affect the bank's policy." - -"You ought to," Tietjens said. "It's the very little ones you ought to -attend to, as a gentleman making his fortune out of them. I have no -other account with you. I have never speculated in anything in my life. -I have lost a great deal in Russian securities--a great deal for me. But -so, no doubt, have you." - -"Then . . . betting!" Port Scatho said. - -"I never put a penny on a horse in my life," Tietjens said. "I know too -much about them." - -Port Scatho looked at the faces first of Sylvia, then of Tietjens. -Sylvia, at least, was his very old friend. She said: - -"Christopher never bets and never speculates. His personal expenses are -smaller than those of any man in town. You could say he had no personal -expenses." - -Again the swift look of suspicion came into Port Scatho's open face. - -"Oh," Sylvia said, "you couldn't suspect Christopher and me of being in -a plot to blackmail you." - -"No; I couldn't suspect that," the banker said. "But the other -explanation is just as extraordinary. . . . To suspect the bank . . . -the _bank_. . . . How do _you_ account? . . ." He was addressing -Tietjens; his round head seemed to become square, below; emotion worked -on his jaws. - -"I'll tell you simply this," Tietjens said. "You can then repair the -matter as you think fit. Ten days ago I got my marching orders. As soon -as I had handed over to the officer who relieved me I drew cheques for -everything I owed--to my military tailor, the mess--for one pound twelve -shillings. I had also to buy a compass and a revolver, the Red Cross -orderlies having annexed mine when I was in hospital. . . ." - -Port Scatho said: "Good God!" - -"Don't you know they annex things?" Tietjens asked. He went on: "The -total, in fact, amounted to an overdraft of fifteen pounds, but I did -not think of it as such because my army agents ought to have paid my -month's army pay over to you on the first. As you perceive, they have -only paid it over this morning, the 13th. But, as you will see from my -pass-book, they have always paid about the 13th, not the 1st. Two days -ago I lunched at the club and drew that cheque for one pound fourteen -shillings and sixpence: one ten for personal expenses and the four and -six for lunch. . . ." - -"You were, however, actually overdrawn," the banker said sharply. - -Tietjens said: - -"Yesterday, for two hours." - -"But then," Port Scatho said, "what do you want done? We'll do what we -can." - -Tietjens said: - -"I don't know. Do what you like. You'd better make what explanation you -can to the military authority. If they court-martialled me it would hurt -you more than me. I assure you of that. There _is_ an explanation." - -Port Scatho began suddenly to tremble. - -"What . . . what . . . what explanation?" he said. "You . . . damn -it . . . you draw this out. . . . Do you dare to say my bank. . . ." He -stopped, drew his hand down his face and said: "But yet . . . you're a -sensible, sound man. . . . I've heard things against you. But I don't -believe them. . . . Your father always spoke very highly of you. . . . I -remember he said if you wanted money you could always draw on him -through us for three or four hundred. . . . That's what makes it so -incomprehensible. . . . It's . . . it's . . ." His agitation grew on -him. "It seems to strike at the very heart. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Look here, Port Scatho. . . . I've always had a respect for you. Settle -it how you like. Fix the mess up for both our sakes with any formula -that's not humiliating for your bank. I've already resigned from the -club. . . ." - -Sylvia said: "Oh, _no_, Christopher . . . not from the _club_!" - -Port Scatho started back from beside the table. - -"But if you're in the right!" he said. "You _couldn't_ . . . Not resign -from the club. . . . I'm on the committee. . . . I'll explain to them, -in the fullest, in the most generous . . ." - -"You couldn't explain," Tietjens said. "You can't get ahead of -rumour. . . . It's half over London at this moment. You know what -the toothless old fellows of your committee are. . . . Anderson! -ffolliott. . . And my brother's friend, Ruggles. . . ." - -Port Scatho said: - -"Your brother's friend Ruggles. . . . But look here. . . . He's -something about the Court, isn't he? But look here. . . ." His mind -stopped. He said: "People shouldn't overdraw. . . . But if your father -said you could draw on him I'm really much concerned. . . . You're a -first-rate fellow. . . . I can tell that from your pass-book alone. . . . -Nothing but cheques drawn to first-class tradesmen for reasonable -amounts. The sort of pass-book I liked to see when I was a junior clerk -in the bank. . . ." At that early reminiscence feelings of pathos -overcame him and his mind once more stopped. - -Sylvia came back into the room; they had not perceived her going. She in -turn held in her hand a letter. - -Tietjens said: - -"Look here, Port Scatho, don't get into this state. Give me your word to -do what you can when you've assured yourself the facts are as I say. I -wouldn't bother you at all, it's not my line, except for Mrs. Tietjens. -A man alone can live that sort of thing down, or die. But there's no -reason why Mrs. Tietjens should live, tied to a bad hat, while he's -living it down or dying." - -"But that's not _right_" Port Scatho said, "it's not the right way to -look at it. You can't pocket . . . I'm simply bewildered. . . ." - -"You've no right to be bewildered," Sylvia said. "You're worrying your -mind for expedients to save the reputation of your bank. We know your -bank is more to you than a baby. You should look after it better, then." - -Port Scatho, who had already fallen two paces away from the table, now -fell two paces back, almost on top of it. Sylvia's nostrils were -dilated. - -She said: - -"Tietjens shall not resign from your beastly club. He shall not! Your -committee will request him formally to withdraw his resignation. You -understand? He will withdraw it. Then he will resign for good. He is too -good to mix with people like you. . . ." She paused, her chest working -fast. "Do you understand what you've got to do?" she asked. - -An appalling shadow of a thought went through Tietjens' mind: he would -not let it come into words. - -"I don't know . . ." the banker said. "I don't know that I can get the -committee . . ." - -"You've got to," Sylvia answered. "I'll tell you why . . . Christopher -was never overdrawn. Last Thursday I instructed your people to pay a -thousand pounds to my husband's account. I repeated the instruction by -letter and I kept a copy of the letter witnessed by my confidential -maid. I also registered the letter and have the receipt for it. . . . -You can see them." - -Port Scatho mumbled from over the letter: - -"It's to Brownie . . . Yes, a receipt for a letter to Brownie . . ." -She examined the little green slip on both sides. He said: "Last -Thursday. . . . To-day's Monday. . . . An instruction to sell -North-Western stock to the amount of one thousand pounds and -place to the account of . . . Then . . ." - -Sylvia said: - -"That'll do. . . . You can't angle for time any more. . . . Your nephew -has been in an affair of this sort before. . . . I'll tell you. Last -Thursday at lunch your nephew told me that Christopher's brother's -solicitors had withdrawn all the permissions for overdrafts on the books -of the Groby estate. There were several to members of the family. Your -nephew said that he intended to catch Christopher on the hop--that's his -own expression--and dishonour the next cheque of his that came in. He -said he had been waiting for the chance ever since the war and the -brother's withdrawal had given it him. I begged him not to . . ." - -"But, good God," the banker said, "this is unheard of . . ." - -"It isn't," Sylvia said. "Christopher has had five snotty, little, -miserable subalterns to defend at court-martials for exactly similar -cases. One was an exact reproduction of this. . . ." - -"But, good God," the banker exclaimed again, "men giving their lives for -their country. . . . Do you mean to say Brownie did this out of revenge -for Tietjens' defending at court-martials. . . . And then . . . your -thousand pounds is not shown in your husband's pass-book. . . ." - -"Of course it's not," Sylvia said. "It has never been paid in. On Friday -I had a formal letter from your people pointing out that North-Westerns -were likely to rise and asking me to reconsider my position. The same -day I sent an express telling them explicitly to do as I said. . . . -Ever since then your nephew has been on the 'phone begging me not to -save my husband. He was there, just now, when I went out of the room. He -was also beseeching me to fly with him." - -Tietjens said: - -"Isn't that enough, Sylvia? It's rather torturing." - -"Let them be tortured," Sylvia said. "But it appears to be enough." - -Port Scatho had covered his face with both his pink hands. He had -exclaimed: - -"Oh, my God! Brownie again. . . ." - -Tietjens' brother Mark was in the room. He was smaller, browner and -harder than Tietjens and his blue eyes protruded more. He had in one -hand a bowler hat, in the other an umbrella, wore a pepper-and-salt suit -and had race-glasses slung across him. He disliked Port Scatho, who -detested him. He had lately been knighted. He said: - -"Hullo, Port Scatho," neglecting to salute his sister-in-law. His eyes, -whilst he stood motionless, rolled a look round the room and rested on a -miniature bureau that stood on a writing-table, in a recess, under and -between bookshelves. - -"I see you've still got that cabinet," he said to Tietjens. - -Tietjens said: - -"I haven't. I've sold it to Sir John Robertson. He's waiting to take it -away till he has room in his collection." - -Port Scatho walked, rather unsteadily, round the lunch-table and stood -looking down from one of the long windows. Sylvia sat down on her chair -beside the fireplace. The two brothers stood facing each other, -Christopher suggesting wheat-sacks, Mark, carved wood. All round them, -except for the mirror that reflected bluenesses, the gilt backs of -books. Hullo Central was clearing the table. - -"I hear you're going out again to-morrow," Mark said. "I want to settle -some things with you." - -"I'm going at nine from Waterloo," Christopher said. "I've not much -time. You can walk with me to the War Office if you like." - -Mark's eyes followed the black and white of the maid round the table. -She went out with the tray. Christopher suddenly was reminded of -Valentine Wannop clearing the table in her mother's cottage. Hullo -Central was no faster about it. Mark said: - -"Port Scatho! As you're there we may as well finish one point. I have -cancelled my father's security for my brother's overdraft." - -Port Scatho said, to the window, but loud enough: - -"We all know it. To our cost." - -"I wish you, however," Mark Tietjens went on, "to make over from my own -account a thousand a year to my brother as he needs it. Not more than a -thousand in any one year." - -Port Scatho said: - -"Write a letter to the bank. I don't look after clients' accounts on -social occasions." - -"I don't see why you don't," Mark Tietjens said. "It's the way you make -your bread and butter, isn't it?" - -Tietjens said: - -"You may save yourself all this trouble, Mark. I am closing my account -in any case." - -Port Scatho spun round on his heel. - -"I beg that you won't," he exclaimed. "I beg that we . . . that we may -have the honour of continuing to have you draw upon us." He had the -trick of convulsively working jaws: his head against the light was like -the top of a rounded gate-post. He said to Mark Tietjens: "You may tell -your friend, Mr. Ruggles, that your brother is empowered by me to draw -on my private account . . . on my personal and private account up to any -amount he needs. I say that to show my estimate of your brother; because -I know he will incur no obligations he cannot discharge." - -Mark Tietjens stood motionless; leaning slightly on the crook of his -umbrella on the one side; on the other displaying, at arm's length, the -white silk lining of his bowler hat, the lining being the brightest -object in the room. - -"That's your affair," he said to Port Scatho. "All I'm concerned with is -to have a thousand a year paid to my brother's account till further -notice." - -Christopher Tietjens said, with what he knew was a sentimental voice, to -Port Scatho. He was very touched; it appeared to him that with the -spontaneous appearance of several names in his memory, and with this -estimate of himself from the banker, his tide was turning and that this -day might indeed be marked by a red stone: - -"Of course, Port Scatho, I won't withdraw my wretched little account -from you if you want to keep it. It flatters me that you should." He -stopped and added: "I only wanted to avoid these . . . these family -complications. But I suppose you can stop my brother's money being paid -into my account. I don't want his money." - -He said to Sylvia: - -"You had better settle the other matter with Port Scatho." - -To Port Scatho: - -"I'm intensely obliged to you, Port Scatho. . . . You'll get Lady Port -Scatho round to Macmaster's this evening if only for a minute; before -eleven. . . ." And to his brother: - -"Come along, Mark. I'm going down to the War Office. We can talk as we -walk." - -Sylvia said very nearly with timidity--and again a dark thought went -over Tietjens' mind: - -"Do we meet again then? . . . I know you're very busy. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"Yes. I'll come and pick you out from Lady Job's, if they don't keep me -too long at the War Office. I'm dining, as you know, at Macmaster's; I -don't suppose I shall stop late." - -"I'd come," Sylvia said, "to Macmaster's, if you thought it was -appropriate. I'd bring Claudine Sandbach and General Wade. We're only -going to the Russian dancers. We'd cut off early." - -Tietjens could settle that sort of thought very quickly. - -"Yes, do," he said hurriedly. "It would be appreciated." - -He got to the door: he came back: his brother was nearly through. He -said to Sylvia, and for him the occasion was a very joyful one: - -"I've worried out some of the words of that song. It runs: - - -'Somewhere or other there must surely be -The face not seen: the voice not heard . . .' - - -Probably it's 'the voice not ever heard' to make up the metre. . . . I -don't know the writer's name. But I hope I'll worry it all out during -the day." - -Sylvia had gone absolutely white. - -"Don't!" she said. "Oh . . . _don't_." She added coldly: "Don't take the -trouble," and wiped her tiny handkerchief across her lips as Tietjens -went away. - -She had heard the song at a charity concert and had cried as she heard -it. She had read, afterwards, the words in the programme and had almost -cried again. But she had lost the programme and had never come across -the words again. The echo of them remained with her like something -terrible and alluring: like a knife she would some day take out and with -which she would stab herself. - - - - -III - - -The two brothers walked twenty steps from the door along the empty Inn -pavements without speaking. Each was completely expressionless. To -Christopher it seemed like Yorkshire. He had a vision of Mark, standing -on the lawn at Groby, in his bowler hat and with his umbrella, whilst -the shooters walked over the lawn, and up the hill to the butts. Mark -probably never had done that; but it was so that his image always -presented itself to his brother. Mark was considering that one of the -folds of his umbrella was disarranged. He seriously debated with himself -whether he should unfold it at once and refold it--which was a great -deal of trouble to take!--or whether he should leave it till he got to -his club, where he would tell the porter to have it done at once. That -would mean that he would have to walk for a mile and a quarter through -London with a disarranged umbrella, which was disagreeable. - -He said: - -"If I were you I wouldn't let that banker fellow go about giving you -testimonials of that sort." - -Christopher said: - -"Ah!" - -He considered that, with a third of his brain in action, he was over a -match for Mark, but he was tired of discussions. He supposed that some -unpleasant construction would be put by his brother's friend, Ruggles, -on the friendship of Port Scatho for himself. But he had no curiosity. -Mark felt a vague discomfort. He said: - -"You had a cheque dishonoured at the club this morning?" Christopher -said: - -"Yes." - -Mark waited for explanations. Christopher was pleased at the speed with -which the news had travelled: it confirmed what he had said to Port -Scatho. He viewed his case from outside. It was like looking at the -smooth working of a mechanical model. - -Mark was more troubled. Used as he had been for thirty years to the -vociferous south he had forgotten that there were taciturnities still. -If at his Ministry he laconically accused a transport clerk of -remissness, or if he accused his French mistress--just as -laconically--of putting too many condiments on his nightly mutton-chop, -or too much salt in the water in which she boiled his potatoes, he was -used to hearing a great many excuses or negations, uttered with energy -and continued for long. So he had got into the habit of considering -himself almost the only laconic being in the world. He suddenly -remembered with discomfort--but also with satisfaction--that his brother -was his brother. - -He knew nothing about Christopher, for himself. He had seemed to look at -his little brother down avenues, from a distance, the child misbehaving -himself. Not a true Tietjens: born very late: a mother's child, -therefore, rather than a father's. The mother an admirable woman, but -from the South Riding. Soft, therefore, and ample. The elder Tietjens' -children, when they had experienced failures, had been wont to blame -their father for not marrying a woman of their own Riding. So, for -himself, he knew nothing of this boy. He was said to be brilliant: an -un-Tietjens-like quality. Akin to talkativeness! . . . Well, he wasn't -talkative. Mark said: - -"What have you done with all the brass our mother left you? Twenty -thousand, wasn't it?" - -They were just passing through a narrow way between Georgian houses. In -the next quadrangle Tietjens stopped and looked at his brother. Mark -stood still to be looked at. Christopher said to himself: - -"This man has the right to ask these questions!" - -It was as if a queer slip had taken place in a moving-picture. This -fellow had become the head of the house: he, Christopher, was the heir. -At that moment, their father, in the grave four months now, was for the -first time dead. - -Christopher remembered a queer incident. After the funeral, when they -had come back from the churchyard and had lunched, Mark--and Tietjens -could now see the wooden gesture--had taken out his cigar-case and, -selecting one cigar for himself, had passed the rest round the table. It -was as if people's hearts had stopped beating. Groby had never, till -that day, been smoked in: the father had had his twelve pipes filled and -put in the rose-bushes in the drive. . . . - -It had been regarded merely as a disagreeable incident: a piece of bad -taste. . . . Christopher, himself, only just back from France, would not -even have known it as such, his mind was so blank, only the parson had -whispered to him: "And Groby never smoked in till this day." - -But now! It appeared a symbol, and an absolutely right symbol. Whether -they liked it or not, here were the head of the house and the heir. The -head of the house must make his arrangements, the heir agree or -disagree; but the elder brother had the right to have his enquiries -answered. - -Christopher said: - -"Half the money was settled at once on my child. I lost seven thousand -in Russian securities. The rest I spent. . . ." - -Mark said: - -"Ah!" - -They had just passed under the arch that leads into Holborn. Mark, in -turn, stopped and looked at his brother and Christopher stood still to -be inspected, looking into his brother's eyes. Mark said to himself: - -"The fellow isn't at least afraid to look at you!" He had been convinced -that Christopher would be. He said: - -"You spent it on women? Or where do you get the money that you spend on -women?" - -Christopher said: - -"I never spent a penny on a woman in my life." - -Mark said: - -"Ah!" - -They crossed Holborn and went by the backways towards Fleet Street. - -Christopher said: - -"When I say 'woman' I'm using the word in the ordinary sense. Of course -I've given women of our own class tea or lunch and paid for their cabs. -Perhaps I'd better put it that I've never--either before or after -marriage--had connection with any woman other than my wife." - -Mark said: - -"Ah!" - -He said to himself: - -"Then Ruggles must be a liar." This neither distressed nor astonished -him. For twenty years he and Ruggles had shared a floor of a large and -rather gloomy building in Mayfair. They were accustomed to converse -whilst shaving in a joint toilet-room, otherwise they did not often meet -except at the club. Ruggles was attached to the Royal Court in some -capacity, possibly as sub-deputy gold-stick-in-waiting. Or he might have -been promoted in the twenty years. Mark Tietjens had never taken the -trouble to enquire. Enormously proud and shut in on himself, he was -without curiosity of any sort. He lived in London because it was -immense, solitary, administrative and apparently without curiosity as to -its own citizens. If he could have found, in the north, a city as vast -and as distinguished by the other characteristics, he would have -preferred it. - -Of Ruggles he thought little or nothing. He had once heard the phrase -"agreeable rattle," and he regarded Ruggles as an agreeable rattle, -though he did not know what the phrase meant. Whilst they shaved Ruggles -gave out the scandal of the day. He never, that is to say, mentioned a -woman whose virtue was not purchasable, or a man who would no: sell his -wife for advancement. This matched with Mark's ideas of the south. When -Ruggles aspersed the fame of a man of family from the north, Mark would -stop him with: - -"Oh, no. That's not true. He's a Craister of Wantley Fells," or another -name, as the case might be. Half Scotchman, half Jew, Ruggles was very -tall and resembled a magpie, having his head almost always on one side. -Had he been English Mark would never have shared his rooms with him: he -knew indeed few Englishmen of sufficient birth and position to have that -privilege, and, on the other hand, few Englishmen of birth and position -would have consented to share rooms so grim and uncomfortable, so -furnished with horse-hair seated mahogany, or so lit with ground-glass -skylights. Coming up to town at the age of twenty-five, Mark had taken -these rooms with a man called Peebles, long since dead, and he had never -troubled to make any change, though Ruggles had taken the place of -Peebles. The remote similarity of the names had been less disturbing to -Mark Tietjens than would have been the case had the names been more -different. It would have been very disagreeable, Mark often thought, to -share with a man called, say. Granger. As it was he still often called -Ruggles Peebles, and no harm was done. Mark knew nothing of Ruggles' -origins, then--so that, in a remote way, their union resembled that of -Christopher with Macmaster. But whereas Christopher would have given his -satellite the shirt off his back, Mark would not have lent Ruggles more -than a five pound note, and would have turned him out of their rooms if -it had not been returned by the end of the quarter. But, since Ruggles -never had asked to borrow anything at all, Mark considered him an -entirely honourable man. Occasionally Ruggles would talk of his -determination to marry some widow or other with money, or of his -influence with people in exalted stations, but, when he talked like -that, Mark would not listen to him and he soon returned to stories of -purchasable women and venial men. - -About five months ago Mark had said one morning to Ruggles: - -"You might pick up what you can about my youngest brother Christopher -and let me know." - -The evening before that Mark's father had called Mark to him from over -the other side of the smooking-room and had said: - -"You might find out what you can about Christopher. He may be in want of -money. Has it occurred to you that he's the heir to the estate! After -you, of course." Mr. Tietjens had aged a good deal after the deaths of -his children. He said: "I suppose you won't marry?" and Mark had -answered: - -"No; I shan't marry. But I suppose I'm a better life than Christopher. -He appears to have been a good deal knocked about out there." - -Armed then with this commission Mr. Ruggles appears to have displayed -extraordinary activity in preparing a Christopher Tietjens dossier. It -is not often that an inveterate gossip gets a chance at a man whilst -being at the same time practically shielded against the law of libel. -And Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of -the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips. And -Christopher Tietjens had displayed more than his usual insolence to -Ruggles. So Ruggles' coat-tails flashed round an unusual number of doors -and his top-hat gleamed before an unusual number of tall portals during -the next week. - -Amongst others he had visited the lady known as Glorvina. - -There is said to be a book, kept in a holy of holies, in which bad marks -are set down against men of family and position in England. In this book -Mark Tietjens and his father--in common with a great number of -hard-headed Englishmen of county rank--implicitly believed. Christopher -Tietjens didn't: he imagined that the activities of gentlemen like -Ruggles were sufficient to stop the careers of people whom they -disliked. On the other hand, Mark and his father looked abroad upon -English society and saw fellows, apparently with every qualification for -successful careers in one service or the other; and these fellows got no -advancements, orders, titles or preferments of any kind. Just, rather -mysteriously, they didn't make their marks. This they put down to the -workings of the book. - -Ruggles, too, not only believed in the existence of that compilation of -the suspect and doomed, but believed that his hand had a considerable -influence over the inscriptions in its pages. He believed that if, with -more moderation and with more grounds than usual, he uttered -denigrations of certain men before certain personages, it would at least -do those men a great deal of harm. And, quite steadily and with, indeed, -real belief in much of what he said, Ruggles had denigrated Tietjens -before these personages. Ruggles could not see why Christopher had taken -Sylvia back after her elopement with Perowne: he could not see why -Christopher had, indeed, married Sylvia at all when she was with child -by a man called Drake--just as he wasn't going to believe that -Christopher could get a testimonial out of Lord Port Scatho except by -the sale of Sylvia to the banker. He couldn't see anything but money or -jobs at the bottom of these things: he couldn't see how Tietjens -otherwise got the money to support Mrs. Wannop, Miss Wannop and her -child, and to maintain Mrs. Duchemin and Macmaster in the style they -affected, Mrs. Duchemin being the mistress of Christopher. He simply -could see no other solution. It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you -are more altruist than the society that surrounds you. - -Ruggles, however, hadn't any pointers as to whether or no or to what -degree he had really damaged his room-mate's brother. He had talked in -what he considered to be the right quarters, but he hadn't any evidence -that what he had said had got through. It was to ascertain that that he -had called on the great lady, for if anybody knew, she would. - -He hadn't definitely ascertained anything, for the great lady was--and -he knew it--a great deal cleverer than himself. The great lady, he was -allowed to discover, had a real affection for Sylvia, her daughter's -close friend, and she expressed real concern to hear that Christopher -Tietjens wasn't getting on. Ruggles had gone to visit her quite openly -to ask whether something better couldn't be done for the brother of the -man with whom he lived. Christopher had, it was admitted, great -abilities; yet neither in his office--in which he would surely have -remained had he been satisfied with his prospects--nor in the army did -he occupy anything but a very subordinate position. Couldn't, he asked, -Glorvina do anything for him? And he added: "It's almost as if he had a -bad mark against him. . . ." - -The great lady had said, with a great deal of energy, that she could not -do anything at all. The energy was meant to show how absolutely her -party had been downed, outed and jumped on by the party in power, so -that she had no influence of any sort anywhere. That was an -exaggeration; but it did Christopher Tietjens no good, since Ruggles -chose to take it to mean that Glorvina said she could do nothing because -there _was_ a black mark against Tietjens in the book of the inner -circle to which--if anyone had--the great lady must have had access. - -Glorvina, on the other hand, had been awakened to concern for Tietjens. -In the existence of a book she didn't believe: she had never seen it. -But that a black mark of a metaphorical nature might have been scored -against him she was perfectly ready to believe and, when occasion -served, during the next five months, she made enquiries about Tietjens. -She came upon a Major Drake, an intelligence officer, who had access to -the central depôt of confidential reports upon officers, and Major -Drake showed her, with a great deal of readiness, as a specimen, the -report on Tietjens. It was of a most discouraging sort and peppered over -with hieroglyphics, the main point being Tietjens' impecuniosity and his -predilection for the French; and apparently for the French Royalists. -There being at that date and with that Government a great deal of -friction with our Allies this characteristic which earlier had earned -him a certain number of soft jobs had latterly done him a good deal of -harm. Glorvina carried away the definite information that Tietjens had -been seconded to the French artillery as a liaison officer and had -remained with them for some time, but, having been shell-shocked, had -been sent back. After that a mark had been added against him: "Not to be -employed as liaison officer again." - -On the other hand, Sylvia's visits to Austrian officer-prisoners had -also been noted to Tietjens' account and a final note added: "Not to be -entrusted with any confidential work." - -To what extent Major Drake himself compiled these records the great lady -didn't know and didn't want to know. She was acquainted with the -relationships of the parties and was aware that in certain dark, -full-blooded men the passion for sexual revenge is very lasting, and she -let it go at that. She discovered, however, from Mr. Waterhouse--now -also in retreat--that he had a very high opinion of Tietjens' character -and abilities, and that just before Waterhouse's retirement he had -especially recommended Tietjens for very high promotion. That alone, in -the then state of Ministerial friendships and enmities, Glorvina knew to -be sufficient to ruin any man within range of Governmental influence. - -She had, therefore, sent for Sylvia and had put all these matters before -her, for she had too much wisdom to believe that, even supposing there -should be differences between the young people of which she had no -evidence at all, Sylvia could wish to do anything but promote her -husband's material interests. Moreover, sincerely benevolent as the -great lady was towards this couple, she also saw that here was a -possibility of damaging, at least, individuals of the party in power. A -person in a relatively unimportant official position can sometimes make -a very nasty stink if he is unjustly used, has determination and a small -amount of powerful backing. This Sylvia, at least, certainly had. - -And Sylvia had received the great lady's news with so much emotion that -no one could have doubted that she was utterly devoted to her husband -and would tell him all about it. This Sylvia had not as yet managed to -do. - -Ruggles in the meantime had collected a very full budget of news and -inferences to present to Mark Tietjens whilst shaving. Mark had been -neither surprised nor indignant. He had been accustomed to call all his -father's children, except the brother immediately next him, "the -whelps," and their concerns had been no concerns of his. They would -marry, beget unimportant children who would form collateral lines of -Tietjens and disappear as is the fate of sons of younger sons. And the -deaths of the intermediate brothers had been so recent that Mark was not -yet used to thinking of Christopher as anything but a whelp, a person -whose actions might be disagreeable but couldn't matter. He said to -Ruggles: - -"You had better talk to my father about this. I don't know that I could -keep all these particulars accurately in my head." - -Ruggles had been only too pleased to, and--with to give him weight, his -intimacy with the eldest son, who certified to his reliability in money -matters and his qualifications for amassing details as to personalities, -acts and promotions--that day, at tea at the club, in a tranquil corner, -Ruggles had told Mr. Tietjens senior that Christopher's wife had been -with child when he had married her; he had hushed up her elopement with -Perowne and connived at other love affairs of hers to his own dishonour, -and was suspected in high places of being a French agent, thus being -marked down as suspect in the great book. . . . All this in order to -obtain money for the support of Miss Wannop, by whom he had had a child, -and to maintain Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin on a scale unsuited to their -means, Mrs. Duchemin being his mistress. The story that Tietjens had had -a child by Miss Wannop was first suggested, and then supported, by the -fact that in Yorkshire he certainly had a son who never appeared in -Gray's Inn. - -Mr. Tietjens was a reasonable man: not reasonable enough to doubt -Ruggles' circumstantial history. He believed implicitly in the great -book--which has been believed in by several generations of country -gentlemen: he perceived that his brilliant son had made no advancement -commensurate with either his brilliance or his influence: he suspected -that brilliance was synonymous with reprehensible tendencies. Moreover, -his old friend, General ffolliott, had definitely told him some days -before that he ought to enquire into the goings on of Christopher. On -being pressed ffolliott had, also definitely, stated that Christopher -was suspected of very dishonourable dealings, both in money and women. -Ruggles' allegations came, therefore, as a definite confirmation of -suspicions that appeared only too well backed up. - -He bitterly regretted that, knowing Christopher to be brilliant, he had -turned the boy--as is the usual portion of younger sons--adrift, with -what of a competence could be got together, to sink or swim. He had, he -said to himself, always wished to keep at home and under his own eyes -this boy for whom he had had especial promptings of tenderness. His -wife, to whom he had been absolutely attached by a passionate devotion, -had been unusually wrapped up in Christopher, because Christopher had -been her youngest son, born very late. And, since his wife's death, -Christopher had been especially dear to him, as if he had carried about -his presence some of the radiance and illumination that had seemed to -attach to his mother. Indeed, after his wife's death, Mr. Tietjens had -very nearly asked Christopher and his wife to come and keep house for -him at Groby, making, of course, special testamentary provision for -Christopher in order to atone for his giving up his career at the -Department of Statistics. His sense of justice to his other children had -prevented him doing this. - -What broke his heart was that Christopher should not only have seduced -but should have had a child by Valentine Wannop. Very grand seigneur in -his habits, Mr. Tietjens had always believed in his duty to patronise -the arts and, if he had actually done little in this direction beyond -purchasing some chocolate-coloured pictures of the French historic -school, he had for long prided himself on what he had done for the widow -and children of his old friend. Professor Wannop. He considered, and -with justice, that he had made Mrs. Wannop a novelist, and he considered -her to be a very great novelist. And his conviction of the guilt of -Christopher was strengthened by a slight tinge of jealousy of his son: a -feeling that he would not have acknowledged to himself. For, since -Christopher, he didn't know how, for he had given his son no -introduction, had become an intimate of the Wannop household, Mrs. -Wannop had completely given up asking him, Mr. Tietjens, clamourously -and constantly for advice. In return she had sung the praises of -Christopher in almost extravagant terms. She had, indeed, said that if -Christopher had not been almost daily in the house or at any rate at the -end of the 'phone she would hardly have been able to keep on working at -full pressure. This had not overpleased Mr. Tietjens. Mr. Tietjens -entertained for Valentine Wannop an affection of the very deepest, the -same qualities appealing to the father as appealed to the son. He had -even, in spite of his sixty odd years, seriously entertained the idea of -marrying the girl. She was a lady: she would have managed Groby very -well; and, although the entail on the property was very strict indeed, -he would, at least, have been able to put her beyond the reach of want -after his death. He had thus no doubt of his son's guilt, and he had to -undergo the additional humiliation of thinking that not only had his son -betrayed this radiant personality, but he had done it so clumsily as to -give the girl a child and let it be known. That was unpardonable want of -management in the son of a gentleman. And now this boy was his heir with -a misbegotten brat to follow. Irrevocably! - -All his four tall sons, then, were down. His eldest tied for good to--a -quite admirable!--trollops: his two next dead: his youngest worse than -dead: his wife dead of a broken heart. - -A soberly but deeply religious man, Mr. Tietjens' very religion made him -believe in Christopher's guilt. He knew that it is as difficult for a -rich man to go to heaven as it is for a camel to go through the gate in -Jerusalem called the Needle's Eye. He humbly hoped that his Maker would -receive him amongst the pardoned. Then, since he was a rich--an -enormously rich--man, his sufferings on this earth must be very -great. . . . - -From tea-time that day until it was time to catch the midnight train for -Bishop's Auckland he had been occupied with his son Mark in the -writing-room of the club. They had made many notes. He had seen his son -Christopher, in uniform, looking broken and rather bloated, the result, -no doubt, of debauch. Christopher had passed through the other end of -the room and Mr. Tietjens had avoided his eye. He had caught the train -and reached Groby, travelling alone. Towards dusk he had taken out a -gun. He was found dead next morning, a couple of rabbits beside his -body, just over the hedge from the little churchyard. He appeared to -have crawled through the hedge, dragging his loaded gun, muzzle -forwards, after him. Hundreds of men, mostly farmers, die from that -cause every year in England. . . . - -With these things in his mind--or as much of them as he could keep at -once--Mark was now investigating his brother's affairs. He would have -let things go on longer, for his father's estate was by no means wound -up, but that morning Ruggles had told him that the club had had a cheque -of his brother's returned and that his brother was going out to France -next day. It was five months exactly since the death of their father. -That had happened in March, it was now August: a bright, untidy day in -narrow, high courts. - -Mark arranged his thoughts. - -"How much of an income," he said, "do you need to live in comfort? If a -thousand isn't enough, how much? Two?" - -Christopher said that he needed no money and didn't intend to live in -comfort. Mark said: - -"I am to let you have three thousand, if you'll live abroad. I'm only -carrying out our father's instructions. You could cut a hell of a splash -on three thousand in France." - -Christopher did not answer. - -Mark began again: - -"The remaining three thousand then: that was over from our mother's -money. Did you settle it on your girl, or just spend it on her?" - -Christopher repeated with patience that he hadn't got a girl. - -Mark said: - -"The girl who had a child by you. I'm instructed, if you haven't settled -anything already--but father took it that you would have--I was to let -her have enough to live in comfort. How much do you suppose she'll need -to live in comfort? I allow Charlotte four hundred. Would four hundred -be enough? I suppose you want to go on keeping her? Three thousand isn't -a great lot for her to live on with a child." - -Christopher said: - -"Hadn't you better mention names?" - -Mark said: - -"No! I never mention names. I mean a woman writer and her daughter. I -suppose the girl is father's daughter, isn't she?" - -Christopher said: - -"No. She couldn't be. I've thought of it. She's twenty-seven. We were -all in Dijon for the two years before she was born. Father didn't come -into the estate till next year. The Wannops were also in Canada at the -time. Professor Wannop was principal of a university there. I forget the -name." - -Mark said: - -"So we were. In Dijon! For my French!" He added: "Then she can't be -father's daughter. It's a good thing. I thought, as he wanted to settle -money on them, they were very likely his children. There's a son, too. -He's to have a thousand. What's he doing?" - -"The son," Tietjens said, "is a conscientious objector. He's on a -mine-sweeper. A bluejacket. His idea is that picking up mines is saving -life, not taking it." - -"Then he won't want the brass yet," Mark said, "it's to start him in any -business. What's the full name and address of your girl? Where do you -keep her?" - -They were in an open space, dusty, with half-timber buildings whose -demolition had been interrupted. Christopher halted close to a post that -had once been a cannon; up against this he felt that his brother could -lean in order to assimilate ideas. He said slowly and patiently: - -"If you're consulting with me as to how to carry out our father's -intentions, and as there's money in it you had better make an attempt to -get hold of the facts. I wouldn't bother you if it wasn't a matter of -money. In the first place, no money is wanted at this end. I can live on -my pay. My wife is a rich woman, relatively. Her mother is a very rich -woman. . . ." - -"She's Rugeley's mistress, isn't she?" Mark asked. - -Christopher said: - -"No, she isn't. I should certainly say she wasn't. Why should she be? -She's his cousin." - -"Then it's your wife who was Rugeley's mistress?" Mark asked. "Or why -should she have the loan of his box?" - -"Sylvia also is Rugeley's cousin, of course, a degree further removed," -Tietjens said. "She isn't anyone's mistress. You can be certain of -that." - -"They _say_ she is," Mark answered. "They say she's a regular -tart. . . . I suppose you think I've insulted you." - -Christopher said: - -"No, you haven't. . . . It's better to get all this out. We're -practically strangers, but you've a right to ask." - -Mark said: - -"Then you haven't got a girl and don't need money to keep her. . . . You -could have what you liked. There's no reason why a man shouldn't have a -girl, and if he has he ought to keep her decently. . . ." - -Christopher did not answer. Mark leaned against the half-buried cannon -and swung his umbrella by its crook. - -"But," he said, "if you don't keep a girl what do you do for . . ." He -was going to say "for the comforts of home," but a new idea had come -into his mind. "Of course," he said, "one can see that your wife's -soppily in love with you." He added: "Soppily . . . one can see that -with half an eye. . . ." - -Christopher felt his jaw drop. Not a second before--that very -second!--he had made up his mind to ask Valentine Wannop to become his -mistress that night. It was no good, any more, he said to himself. She -loved him, he knew, with a deep; an unshakable passion, just as his -passion for her was a devouring element that covered his whole mind as -the atmosphere envelopes the earth. Were they, then, to go down to death -separated by years, with no word ever spoken? To what end? For whose -benefit? The whole world conspired to force them together! To resist -became a weariness! - -His brother Mark was talking on. "I know all about women," he had -announced. Perhaps he did. He had lived with exemplary fidelity to a -quite unpresentable woman, for a number of years. Perhaps the complete -study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest! - -Christopher said: - -"Look here, Mark. You had better go through all my pass-books for the -last ten years. Or ever since I had an account. This discussion is no -good if you don't believe what I say." - -Mark said: - -"I don't want to see your pass-books. I believe you." - -He added, a second later: - -"Why the devil shouldn't I believe you? It's either believing you're a -gentleman or Ruggles a liar. It's only common-sense to believe Ruggles a -liar, in that case. I didn't before because I had no grounds to." -Christopher said: - -"I doubt if liar is the right word. He picked up things that were said -against me. No doubt he reported them faithfully enough. Things _are_ -said against me. I don't know why." - -"Because," Mark said with emphasis, "you treat these south country swine -with the contempt that they deserve. They're incapable of understanding -the motives of a gentleman. If you live among dogs they'll think you've -the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you?" He added: -"I thought you'd been buried so long under their muck that you were as -mucky as they!" - -Tietjens looked at his brother with the respect one has to give to a man -ignorant but shrewd. It was a discovery: that his brother was shrewd. - -But, of course, he would be shrewd. He was the indispensable head of a -great department. He had to have some qualities. . . . Not cultivated, -not even instructed. A savage! But penetrating! - -"We must move on," he said, "or I shall have to take a cab." Mark -detached himself from his half buried cannon. - -"What did you do with the other three thousand?" he asked. "Three -thousand is a hell of a big sum to chuck away. For a younger son." - -"Except for some furniture I bought for my wife's rooms," Christopher -said, "it went mostly in loans." - -"Loans!" Mark exclaimed. "To that fellow Macmaster?" - -"Mostly to him," Christopher answered. "But about seven hundred to Dicky -Swipes, of Cullercoats." - -"Good God! Why to him?" Mark ejaculated. - -"Oh, because he was Swipes, of Cullercoats," Christopher said, "and -asked for it. He'd have had more, only that was enough for him to drink -himself to death on." - -Mark said: - -"I suppose you don't give money to every fellow that asks for it?" - -Christopher said: - -"I do. It's a matter of principle." - -"It's lucky," Mark said, "that a lot of fellows don't know that. You -wouldn't have much brass left for long." - -"I didn't have it for long," Christopher said. - -"You know," Mark said, "you couldn't expect to do the princely patron on -a youngest son's portion. It's a matter of taste. I never gave a -ha'penny to a beggar myself. But a lot of the Tietjens were princely. -One generation to addle brass: one to keep: one to spend. That's all -right. . . . I suppose Macmaster's wife _is_ your mistress? That'll -account for it not being the girl. They keep an arm-chair for you." - -Christopher said: - -"No. I just backed Macmaster for the sake of backing him. Father lent -him money to begin with." - -"So he did," Mark exclaimed. - -"His wife," Christopher said, "was the widow of Breakfast Duchemin. -_You_ knew Breakfast Duchemin?" - -"Oh, _I_ knew Breakfast Duchemin," Mark said. "I suppose Macmaster's a -pretty warm man now. Done himself proud with Duchemin's money." - -"Pretty proud!" Christopher said. "They won't be knowing me long now." - -"But damn it all!" Mark said. "You've Groby to all intents and purposes. -_I'm_ not going to marry and beget children to hinder you." - -Christopher said: - -"Thanks. I don't want it." - -"Got your knife into me?" Mark asked. - -"Yes. I've got my knife into you," Christopher answered. "Into the whole -bloody lot of you, and Ruggles' and ffolliott's and our father!" - -Mark said: "Ah!" - -"You don't suppose I wouldn't have?" Christopher asked. - -"Oh, _I_ don't suppose you wouldn't have," Mark answered. "I thought you -were a soft sort of bloke. I see you aren't." - -"I'm as North Riding as yourself!" Christopher answered. - -They were in the tide of Fleet Street, pushed apart by foot passengers -and separated by traffic. With some of the imperiousness of the officer -of those days Christopher barged across through motor-buses and paper -lorries. With the imperiousness of the head of a department Mark said: - -"Here, policeman, stop these damn things and let me get over." But -Christopher was over much the sooner and waited for his brother in the -gateway of the Middle Temple. His mind was completely swallowed up in -the endeavour to imagine the embraces of Valentine Wannop. He said to -himself that he had burnt his boats. - -Mark, coming alongside him, said: - -"You'd better know what our father wanted." - -Christopher said: - -"Be quick then. I must get on." He had to rush through his War Office -interview to get to Valentine Wannop. They would have only a few hours -in which to recount the loves of two lifetimes. He saw her golden head -and her enraptured face. He wondered how her face would look, -enraptured. He had seen on it humour, dismay, tenderness, in the -eyes--and fierce anger and contempt for his, Christopher's, political -opinions. His militarism! - -Nevertheless they halted by the Temple fountain. That respect was due to -their dead father. Mark had been explaining. Christopher had caught some -of his words and divined the links. Mr. Tietjens had left no will, -confident that his desires as to the disposal of his immense fortune -would be carried out meticulously by his eldest son. He would have left -a will, but there was the vague case of Christopher to be considered. -Whilst Christopher had been a youngest son you arranged that he had a -good lump sum and went, with it, to the devil how he liked. He was no -longer a youngest son: by the will of God. - -"Our father's idea," Mark said by the fountain, "was that no settled sum -could keep you straight. His idea was that if you were a bloody pimp -living on women . . . You don't mind?" - -"I don't mind your putting it straightforwardly," Christopher said. He -considered the base of the fountain that was half full of leaves. This -civilisation had contrived a state of things in which leaves rotted by -August. Well, it was doomed! - -"If you were a pimp living on women," Mark repeated, "it was no good -making a will. You might need uncounted thousands to keep you straight. -You were to have 'em. You were to be as debauched as you wanted, but on -clean money. I was to see how much in all probability that would be and -arrange the other legacies to scale. . . . Father had crowds of -pensioners. . . ." - -"How much did father cut up for?" Christopher asked. Mark said: - -"God knows. . . . You saw we proved the estate at a million and a -quarter as far as ascertained. But it might be twice that. Or five -times! . . . With steel prices what they have been for the last three -years it's impossible to say what the Middlesbrough district property -won't produce. . . . The death duties even can't catch it up. And there -are all the ways of getting round _them_." - -Christopher inspected his brother with curiosity. This -brown-complexioned fellow with bulging eyes, shabby on the whole, -tightly buttoned into a rather old pepper-and-salt suit, with a badly -rolled umbrella, old race-glasses and his bowler hat the only neat thing -about him, was, indeed, a prince. With a rigid outline! All real princes -must look like that. He said: - -"Well! You won't be a penny the poorer by me." - -Mark was beginning to believe this. He said: - -"You won't forgive father?" - -Christopher said: - -"I won't forgive father for not making a will. I won't forgive him for -calling in Ruggles. I saw him and you in the writing-room the night -before he died. He never spoke to me. He could have. It was clumsy -stupidity. That's unforgiveable." - -"The fellow shot himself," Mark said. "You usually forgive a fellow who -shoots himself." - -"I don't," Christopher said. "Besides he's probably in heaven and don't -need my forgiveness. Ten to one he's in heaven. He was a good man." - -"One of the best," Mark said. "It was I that called in Ruggles though." - -"I don't forgive you either," Christopher said. - -"But you _must_," Mark said--and it was a tremendous concession to -sentimentality--"take enough to make you comfortable." - -"By God!" Christopher exclaimed. "I loathe your whole beastly buttered -toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as -I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, -hot-house aired beastliness of fornication. . . ." He was carried away, -as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine -Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without -draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. . . . "You won't," he -repeated, "be a penny the poorer by me." - -Mark said: - -"Well, you needn't get shirty about it. If you won't you won't. We'd -better move on. You've only just time. We'll say that settles it. . . . -Are you, or aren't you, overdrawn at your bank? I'll make that up, -whatever you damn well do to stop it." - -"I'm not overdrawn," Christopher said. "I'm over thirty pounds in -credit, and I've an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a -mistake of the bank's." - -Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a -bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England. - -They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious -umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis -lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved -like marionettes practising crucifixions. - -"By God!" he said, "this is the last of England. . . . There's only my -department where they never make mistakes. I tell you, if there were any -mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!" He added: "But -don't you think that I'm going to give up comfort, I'm not. My Charlotte -makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she's got a -tap of French rum that's saved my life over and over again after a -beastly wet day's racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give -her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a -Frenchwoman for managing. . . . By God, I'd marry the doxy if she wasn't -a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn't hurt me. But I couldn't -stomach marrying a Papist. They're not to be trusted." - -"You'll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby," Christopher said. -"My son's to be brought up as a Papist." - -Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground. - -"Eh, but that's a bitter one," he said. "Whatever made ye do that? . . . -I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you -married her." He added: "I'd not like to sleep with that wife of yours. -She's too athletic. It'd be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I -suppose though you're a pair of turtle doves. . . . Eh, but I'd not have -thought ye would have been so weak." - -"I only decided this morning," Christopher said, "when my cheque was -returned from the bank. You won't have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about -Groby." - -"I can't say I have," Mark answered. - -"It's no good trying to explain that side of it then," Christopher said, -"there isn't time. But you're wrong in thinking Sylvia made it a -condition of our marriage. Nothing would have made me consent then. It -has made her a happy woman that I have. The poor thing thought our house -was under a curse for want of a Papist heir." - -"What made ye consent now?" Mark asked. - -"I've told you," Christopher said, "it was getting my cheque returned to -the club; that on the top of the rest of it. A fellow who can't do -better than that had better let the mother bring up the child. . . . -Besides, it won't hurt a Papist boy to have a father with dishonoured -cheques as much as it would a Protestant. They're not quite English." - -"That's true too," Mark said. - -He stood still by the railings of the public garden near the Temple -station. - -"Then," he said, "if I'd let the lawyers write and tell you the -guarantee for your overdraft from the estate was stopped as they wanted -to, the boy wouldn't be a Papist? You wouldn't have overdrawn." - -"I didn't overdraw," Christopher said. "But if you had warned me I -should have made enquiries at the bank and the mistake wouldn't have -occurred. Why didn't you?" - -"I meant to," Mark said. "I meant to do it myself. But I hate writing -letters. I put it off. I didn't much like having dealings with the -fellow I thought you were. I suppose that's another thing you won't -forgive me for?" - -"No. I shan't forgive you for not writing to me," Christopher said. "You -ought to write business letters." - -"I hate writing 'em," Mark said. Christopher was moving on. "There's one -thing more," Mark said. "I suppose the boy is your son?" - -"Yes, he's my son," Christopher said. - -"Then that's all," Mark said. "I suppose if you're killed you won't mind -my keeping an eye on the youngster?" - -"I'll be glad," Christopher said. - -They strolled along the Embankment side by side, walking rather slowly, -their backs erected and their shoulders squared because of their -satisfaction of walking together, desiring to lengthen the walk by going -slow. Once or twice they stopped to look at the dirty silver of the -river, for both liked grim effects of landscape. They felt very strong, -as if they owned the land! - -Once Mark chuckled and said: - -"It's too damn funny. To think of our both being . . . what is it? . . . -monogamists? Well, it's a good thing to stick to one woman . . . you -can't say it isn't. It saves trouble. And you know where you are." - -Under the lugubrious arch that leads into the War Office quadrangle -Christopher halted. - -"No. I'm coming in," Mark said. "I want to speak to Hogarth. I haven't -spoken to Hogarth for some time. About the transport waggon parks in -Regent's Park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more." - -"They say you do it damn well," Christopher said. "They say you're -indispensable." He was aware that his; brother desired to stay with him -as long as possible. He desired it himself. - -"I damn well am!" Mark said. He added: "I suppose you couldn't do that -sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses." - -"I could," Christopher said, "but I suppose I shall go back to liaison -work." - -"I don't think you will," Mark said. "I could put in a word for you with -the transport people." - -"I wish you would," Christopher said. "I'm not fit to go back into the -front line. Besides I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry -officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of." - -They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and -expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that -hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a -tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to -save the ratepayers' money. - -With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an -expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and -distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed: - -"Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!" - -The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with -little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day. - -Tietjens had fallen a step back off the curb of the pavement that ran -round the quadrangle. He said: - -"I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have -to. They're two different patterns that we see." He added: "This is my -brother Mark." - -She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It -was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She -said to Mark: - -"I didn't know Mr. Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I've never heard -him speak of you." - -Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his -hat. - -"I don't suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of _him_," he said, "but -he's my brother all right!" - -She stepped on to the asphalte carriage-way and caught between her -fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher's khaki sleeve. - -"I must speak to you," she said; "I'm going then." - -She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard and -ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She -pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard, it was as -if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked -round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He -had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped -into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world. - -The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her -voice was hard between her little teeth. She said: - -"Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife -says you were." - -Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said -vaguely: - -"Ethel? Who's she?" In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr. -and Mrs. Macmaster called each other always "Guggums!" Christopher had -in all probability never heard Mrs. Duchemin's Christian names since his -disaster had swept all names out of his head. - -He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space -sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb. - -The girl said: - -"Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs. Macmaster that is!" She was obviously -waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness: - -"No! Certainly not! . . . What was said?" - -Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the -green-stained shelter, like a child over a brookside. He was obviously -waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared -to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when -she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any -preparation at all: the girl repeated, without any preparation at all: - -"You'd better keep off the grass if you're the Wannop girl. Mrs. -Duchemin is my husband's mistress already. You keep off!" - -Christopher said: - -"She said that, did she?" He was wondering how Mark kept his balance, -really. The girl said nothing more. She was waiting. With an insistence -that seemed to draw him: a sort of sucking in of his personality. It was -unbearable. He made his last effort of that afternoon. - -He said: - -"Damn it all. How could you ask such a tomfool question? _You_! I took -you to be an intelligent person. The only intelligent person I know. -Don't you _know_ me?" - -She made an effort to retain her stiffening. - -"Isn't Mrs. Tietjens a truthful person?" she asked. "I thought she -looked truthful when I saw her at Vincent and Ethel's." - -He said: - -"What she says she believes. But she only believes what she wants to, -for the moment. If you call that truthful, she's truthful. I've nothing -against her." He said to himself: "I'm not going to appeal to her by -damning my wife." - -She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out -of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water. - -"Oh," she said, "it _isn't_ true. I _knew_ it wasn't true." She began to -cry. - -Christopher said: - -"Come along. I've been answering tomfool questions all day. I've got -another tomfool to see here, then I'm through." - -She said: - -"I can't come with you, crying like this." - -He answered: - -"Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry." He added: "Besides -there's Mark. He's a comforting ass." - -He delivered her over to Mark. - -"Here, look after Miss Wannop," he said. "You want to talk to her -anyhow, don't you?" and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shopwalker -into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn't come soon to an -unemotional ass in red, green, blue or pink tabs, who would have -fishlike eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in -tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was -a place where men cried, too! - -He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of -corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person -with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair: not dustbins. - -The dark man said to him at once: - -"Look here! What's the matter with the Command Depôts? You've been -lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies -about? Is it the rotten old colonels in command?" - -Tietjens said amiably: - -"Look here! I'm not a beastly spy, you know? I've had hospitality from -the rotten old colonels." - -The dark man said: - -"I daresay you have. But that's what you were sent round for. General -Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He's gone out -now, worse luck. . . . What's the matter with the Command Depôts? Is it -the men? Or is it the officers? You needn't mention names." - -Tietjens said: - -"Kind of Campion. It isn't the officers and it isn't the men. It's the -foul system. You get men who think they've deserved well of their -country--and they damn well have!--and you crop their heads. . . ." - -"That's the M.O.s." the dark man said. "They don't want lice." - -"If they prefer mutinies . . ." Tietjens said. "A man wants to walk with -his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don't like being regarded -as convicts. That's how they are regarded." - -The dark man said: - -"All right. Go on. Why don't you sit down?" - -"I'm a little in a hurry," Tietjens said. "I'm going out to-morrow and -I've got a brother and people waiting below." - -The dark man said: - -"Oh, I'm sorry. . . . But damn. You're the sort of man we want at home. -Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don't." - -Tietjens hesitated for a moment. - -"Yes!" he said eventually. "Yes, I want to go." - -For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his -discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It -had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the -time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal -consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; -but, whether or no, the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out -as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night -with the girl who was crying downstairs. . . . - -He heard in his ear, perfectly distinctly, the lines: - - -"_The voice that never yet . . . -Made answer to my word_ . . ." - - -He said to himself: - -"That was what Sylvia wanted! I've got that much!" The dark man had said -something. Tietjens repeated: - -"I'd take it very unkindly if you stopped my going . . . I want to go." - -The dark man said: - -"Some do. Some do not. I'll make a note of your name in case you come -back . . . You won't mind going on with your cinder-sifting, if you do? -. . . Get on with your story as quick as you can. And get what fun you -can before you go. They say it's rotten out there. Damn awful! There's a -hell of a strafe on. That's why they want all you." - -For a moment Tietjens saw the grey dawn at rail-head with the distant -sound of a ceaselessly boiling pot, from miles away! The army feeling -re-descended upon him. He began to talk about Command Depôts, at great -length and with enthusiasm. He snorted with rage at the way men were -treated in these gloomy places. With ingenious stupidity! - -Every now and then the dark man interrupted him with: - -"Don't forget that a Command Depôt is a place where sick and wounded go -to get made fit. We've got to get 'em back as soon as we can." - -"And do you?" Tietjens would ask. - -"No, we don't," the other would answer. "That's what this enquiry is -about." - -"You've got," Tietjens would continue, "on the north side of a beastly -clay hill nine miles from Southampton three thousand men from the -Highlands, North Wales, Cumberland. . . . God knows where, as long as -it's three hundred miles from home to make them rather mad with -nostalgia. . . . You allow 'em out for an hour a day during the pub's -closing time: you shave their heads to prevent 'em appealing to local -young women who don't exist, and you don't let 'em carry the -swagger-canes! God knows why! To prevent their poking their eyes out, if -they fall down, I suppose. Nine miles from anywhere, with chalk down -roads to walk on and not a bush for shelter or shade . . . And, damn it, -if you get two men, chums, from the Seaforths or the Argylls you don't -let them sleep in the same hut, but shove 'em in with a lot of fat Buffs -or Welshmen, who stink of leeks and can't speak English. . . ." - -"That's the infernal medicals' orders to stop 'em talking all night." - -"To make 'em conspire all night not to turn-out for parade," Tietjens -said. "And there's a beastly mutiny begun. . . . And, damn it, they're -fine men. They're first-class fellows. Why don't you--as this is a -Christian land--let 'em go home to convalesce with their girls and pubs -and friends and a little bit of swank, for heroes? Why in God's name -don't you? Isn't there suffering enough?" - -"I wish you wouldn't say 'you,'" the dark man said. "It isn't me. The -only A.C.I. I've drafted was to give every Command Depôt a cinema and a -theatre. But the beastly medicals got it stopped . . . for fear -of infection. And, of course, the parsons and Nonconformist -magistrates . . ." - -"Well, you'll have to change it all," Tietjens said, "or you'll just -have to say: thank God we've got a navy. You won't have an army. The -other day three fellows--Warwicks--asked me at question time, after a -lecture, why they were shut up there in Wiltshire whilst Belgian -refugees were getting bastards on their wives in Birmingham. And when I -asked how many men made that complaint over fifty stood up. All from -Birmingham. . . ." - -The dark man said: - -"I'll make a note of that. . . . Go on." - -Tietjens went on; for as long as he stayed there he felt himself a man, -doing work that befitted a man, with the bitter contempt for fools that -a man should have and express. It was a letting up: a real last leave. - - - - -IV - - -Mark Tietjens, his umbrella swinging sheepishly, his bowler hat pushed -firmly down on to his ears to give him a sense of stability, walked -beside the weeping girl in the quadrangle. - -"I say," he said, "don't give it to old Christopher too beastly hard -about his militarist opinions. . . . Remember, he's going out to-morrow -and he's one of the best." - -She looked at him quickly, tears remaining upon her cheeks, and then -away. - -"One of the best," Mark said. "A fellow who never told a lie or did a -dishonourable thing in his life. Let him down easy, there's a good girl. -You ought to, you know." - -The girl, her face turned away, said: - -"I'd lay down my life for him!" - -Mark said: - -"I know you would. I know a good woman when I see one. And think! He -probably considers that he _is_ . . . offering his life, you know, for -you. And me, too, of course! . . . It's a different way of looking at -things." He gripped her awkwardly but irresistibly by the upper arm. It -was very thin under her blue cloth coat. He said to himself: - -"By Jove! Christopher likes them skinny. It's the athletic sort that -attracts him. This girl is as clean run as . . ." He couldn't think of -anything as clean run as Miss Wannop, but he felt a warm satisfaction at -having achieved an intimacy with her and his brother. He said: - -"You aren't going away? Not without a kinder word to him. You think! He -might be killed. . . . Besides. Probably he's never killed a German. He -was a liaison officer. Since then he's been in charge of a dump where -they sift army dustbins. To see how they can give the men less to eat. -That means that the civilians get more. You don't object to his giving -civilians more meat? . . . It isn't even helping to kill Germans. . . ." - -He felt her arm press his hand against her warm side. - -"What's he going to do now?" she asked. Her voice wavered. - -"That's what I'm here about," Mark said. "I'm going in to see old -Hogarth. You don't know Hogarth? Old General Hogarth? I think I can get -him to give Christopher a job with the transport. A safe job. Safeish! -No beastly glory business about it. No killing beastly Germans -either. . . . I beg your pardon, if you like Germans." - -She drew her arm from his hand in order to look him in the face. - -"Oh!" she said, "_you_ don't want him to have any beastly military -glory!" The colour came back into her face: she looked at him open eyed. - -He said: - -"No! Why the devil should he?" He said to himself: "She's got enormous -eyes: a good neck: good shoulders: good breasts: clean hips: small -hands. She isn't knock-kneed: neat ankles. She stands well on her feet. -Feet not too large! Five foot four, say! A real good filly!" He went on -aloud: "Why in the world should he want to be a beastly soldier? He's -the heir to Groby. That ought to be enough for one man." - -Having stood still sufficiently long for what she knew to be his -critical inspection, she put her hand in turn, precipitately, under his -arm and moved him towards the entrance steps. - -"Let's be quick then," she said. "Let's get him into your transport at -once. Before he goes to-morrow. Then we'll know he's safe." - -He was puzzled by her dress. It was very business-like, dark blue and -very short. A white blouse with a black silk, man's tie. A wideawake, -with, on the front of the band, a cipher. - -"You're in uniform yourself," he said. "Does your conscience let you do -war work?" - -She said: - -"No. We're hard up. I'm taking the gym classes in a great big school to -turn an honest penny. . . . _Do_ be quick!" - -Her pressure on his elbow flattered him. He resisted it a little, -hanging back, to make her more insistent. He liked being pleaded with by -a pretty woman: Christopher's girl at that. - -He said: - -"Oh, it's not a matter of minutes. They keep 'em weeks at the base -before they send 'em up. . . . We'll fix him up all right, I've no -doubt. We'll wait in the hall till he comes down." - -He told the benevolent commissionaire, one of two in a pulpit in the -crowded grim hall, that he was going up to see General Hogarth in a -minute or two. But not to send a bell-boy. He might be some time yet. - -He sat himself beside Miss Wannop, clumsily on a wooden bench, humanity -serging over their toes as if they had been on a beach. She moved a -little to make room for him and that, too, made him feel good. He said: - -"You said just now: 'we' are hard up. Does 'we' mean you and -Christopher?" - -She said: - -"I and Mr. Tietjens. Oh, no! I and mother! The paper she used to write -for stopped. When your father died, I believe. He found money for it, I -think. And mother isn't suited to free-lancing. She's worked too hard in -her life." - -He looked at her, his round eyes protruding. - -"I don't know what that is, free-lancing," he said. "But you've got to -be comfortable. How much do you and your mother need to keep you -comfortable? And put in a bit more so that Christopher could have a -mutton-chop now and then!" - -She hadn't really been listening. He said with some insistence: "Look -here! I'm here on business. Not like an elderly admirer forcing himself -on you. Though, by God, I do admire you too. . . . But my father wanted -your mother to be comfortable. . . ." - -Her face, turned to him, became rigid. - -"You don't mean . . ." she began. He said: - -"You won't get it any quicker by interrupting. I have to tell my stories -in my own way. My father wanted your mother to be comfortable. He said -so that she could write books, not papers. I don't know what the -difference is: that's what he said. He wants you to be comfortable too. -. . . You've not got any encumbrances? Not . . . oh, say a business: a -hat shop that doesn't pay? Some girls have. . . ." - -She said: "No. I just teach . . . oh, _do_ be quick. . . ." - -For the first time in his life he dislocated the course of his thoughts -to satisfy a longing in some one else. - -"You may take it to go on with," he said, "as if my father had left your -mother a nice little plum." He cast about to find his scattered -thoughts. - -"He has! He _has_! After all!" the girl said. "Oh, thank God!" - -"There'll be a bit for you, if you like," Mark said, "or perhaps -Christopher won't let you. He's ratty with me. And something for your -brother to buy a doctor's business with." He asked: "You haven't -fainted, have you?" She said: - -"No. I don't faint. I cry." - -"That'll be all right," he answered. He went on: "That's your side of -it. Now for mine. I want Christopher to have a place where he'll be sure -of a mutton-chop and an arm-chair by the fire. And someone to be good -for him. _You're_ good for him. I can see that. I know women!" - -The girl was crying, softly and continuously. It was the first moment of -the lifting of strain that she had known since the day before the -Germans crossed the Belgian frontier, near a place called Gemmenich. - -It had begun with the return of Mrs. Duchemin from Scotland. She had -sent at once for Miss Wannop to the rectory, late at night. By the light -of candles in tall silver stocks, against oak panelling she had seemed -like a mad block of marble, with staring, dark eyes and mad hair. She -had exclaimed in a voice as hard as a machine's: - -"How do you get rid of a baby? You've been a servant. You ought to -know!" - -That had been the great shock, the turning-point, of Valentine Wannop's -life. Her last years before that had been of great tranquillity, tinged -of course with melancholy because she loved Christopher Tietjens. But -she had early learned to do without, and the world as she saw it was a -place of renunciations, of high endeavour and sacrifice. Tietjens had to -be a man who came to see her mother and talked wonderfully. She had been -happy when he had been in the house--she in the housemaid's pantry, -getting the tea-things. She had, besides, been very hard worked for her -mother; the weather had been, on the whole, good, the corner of the -country in which they lived had continued to seem fresh and agreeable. -She had had excellent health, got an occasional ride on the _qui-tamer_ -with which Tietjens had replaced Joel's rig; and her brother had done -admirably at Eton, taking such a number of exhibitions and things that, -once at Magdalen, he had been nearly off his mother's hands. An -admirable, gay boy, not unlikely to run for, as well as being a credit -to, his university, if he didn't get sent down for his political -extravagances. He was a Communist! - -And at the rectory there had been the Duchemins, or rather Mrs. Duchemin -and, during most week-ends, Macmaster somewhere about. - -The passion of Macmaster for Edith Ethel and of Edith Ethel for -Macmaster had seemed to her one of the beautiful things of life. They -seemed to swim in a sea of renunciations, of beautiful quotations, and -of steadfast waiting. Macmaster did not interest her personally much, -but she took him on trust because of Edith Ethel's romantic passion and -because he was Christopher Tietjens' friend. She had never heard him say -anything original; when he used quotations they would be apt rather than -striking. But she took it for granted that he was the right man--much as -you take it for granted that the engine of an express train in which you -are is reliable. The right people have chosen it for you. . . . - -With Mrs. Duchemin, mad before her, she had the first intimation that -her idolised friend, in whom she had believed as she had believed in the -firmness of the great, sunny earth, had been the mistress of her -lover--almost since the first day she had seen him. . . . And that Mrs. -Duchemin had, stored somewhere, a character of an extreme harshness and -great vulgarity of language. She raged up and down in the candlelight, -before the dark oak panelling, screaming coarse phrases of the deepest -hatred for her lover. Didn't the oaf know his business better than -to . . .? The dirty little Port of Leith fish-handler. . . . - -What, then, were tall candles in silver sticks for? And polished -panelling in galleries? - -Valentine Wannop couldn't have been a little ash-cat in worn cotton -dresses, sleeping under the stairs, in an Ealing household with a -drunken cook, an invalid mistress and three over-fed men, without -acquiring a considerable knowledge of the sexual necessities and -excesses of humanity. But, as all the poorer helots of great cities -hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance, and -suave wealth, she had always considered that, far from the world of -Ealing and its county councillors who over-ate and neighed like -stallions, there were bright colonies of beings, chaste, beautiful in -thought, altruist and circumspect. - -And, till that moment, she had imagined herself on the skirts of such a -colony. She presupposed a society of beautiful intellects centring in -London round her friends. Ealing she just put out of her mind. She -considered: she had, indeed once heard Tietjens say that humanity was -made up of exact and constructive intellects on the one hand and on the -other of stuff to fill graveyards. . . . Now, what had become of the -exact and constructive intellects? - -Worst of all, what became of her beautiful inclination towards Tietjens, -for she couldn't regard it as anything more? Couldn't her heart sing any -more whilst she was in the housemaid's pantry and he in her mother's -study? And what became, still more, of what she knew to be Tietjens' -beautiful inclination towards her? She asked herself the eternal -question--and she knew it to be the eternal question--whether no man and -woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. And, looking at -Mrs. Duchemin, rushing backwards and forwards in the light of candles, -blue-white of face and her hair flying, Valentine Wannop said: "No! no! -The tiger lying in the reeds will always raise its head!" But tiger . . . -it was more like a peacock. . . . - -Tietjens, raising his head from the other side of the tea-table and -looking at her with his long, meditative glance from beside her mother: -ought he then, instead of blue and protruding, to have eyes divided -longitudinally in the blacks of them--that should divide, closing or -dilating, on a yellow ground, with green glowings of furtive light? - -She was aware that Edith Ethel had done her an irreparable wrong, for -you cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same. Or not for -years. Nevertheless she stayed with Mrs. Duchemin until far into the -small hours, when that lady fell, a mere parcel of bones in a peacock -blue wrapper, into a deep chair and refused to move or speak; nor did -she afterwards slacken in her faithful waiting on her friend. . . . - -On the next day came the war. That was a nightmare of pure suffering, -with never a let-up, day or night. It began on the morning of the fourth -with the arrival of her brother from some sort of Oxford Communist -Summer School on the Broads. He was wearing a German corps student's cap -and was very drunk. He had been seeing German friends off from Harwich. -It was the first time she had ever seen a drunken man, so that was a -good present to her. - -Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his -father, he had his mother's hooked nose and was always a little -imbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened -for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very -vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn't hitherto -mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper: her brother, when he -had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption. -But her mother had only chuckled. - -The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood -and to torture: neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as -if--so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived -with her--in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her -knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers -to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture, and flay off -all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner -of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling and vitriolic, one hand -clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British -soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting -from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom -Edward Wannop affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause -disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had -failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being -ducked in a horse-pond, shot or otherwise martyrised. That made it -obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war. -If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled -and terrorised millions would have thrown down their arms! - -Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was -in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother, -who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs. Wannop had said: - -"What does your wife think about it?" - -Tietjens had answered: - -"Oh, Mrs. Tietjens is a pro-German. . . . Or no, that isn't exact! She -has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly -all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war. -She can't bear the thought of physical suffering. I can't blame her." - -Mrs. Wannop was no longer listening: her daughter was. - -For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man -and far less of an inclination--the war and Mrs. Duchemin between them. -He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a -man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on. -She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him. - -One Friday afternoon at Macmaster's she had had a long talk with him: -the first she had had since the drive and the accident. - -Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons--and that had -been some time before the war--Valentine Wannop had accompanied Mrs. -Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the rectory. -Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs. Duchemin drifting about the large -book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists. - -On this occasion--a November day of very chilly, wet--there had been -next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually full. -Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin had taken a Mr. Spong, an architect, into -the dining-room to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi's _Views of -Rome_ that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster. -A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting close together in the far -window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr. Jegg -used the word "inhibition." Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he -had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea -over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat side by side on -the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire -warming their backs. He said: - -"Well, Miss Wannop. What have you been doing?" and they drifted into -talking of the war. You couldn't not. She was astonished not to find him -so loathsome as she had expected, for, just at that time, with the facts -that were always being driven into her mind by the pacifist friends of -her brother and with continual brooding over the morals of Mrs. -Duchemin, she had an automatic feeling that all manly men were -lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over -battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of -sadism. She knew that this view of Tietjens was wrong, but she cherished -it. - -She found him--as subconsciously she knew he was--astonishingly mild. -She had too often watched him whilst he listened to her mother's tirades -against the Kaiser, not to know that. He did not raise his voice, he -showed no emotion. He said at last: - -"You and I are like two people . . ." He paused and began again more -quickly: "Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read -differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read -'Monkey's Soap'; if you look back when you've passed it's 'Needs no -Rinsing.' . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we -both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we -stood side by side we should see yet a third. . . . But I hope we -respect each other. We're both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect -you and I hope you respect me." - -She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr. Jegg, across -the room, said: "The failure to co-ordinate . . ." and then dropped his -voice. - -Tietjens looked at her attentively. - -"You don't respect me?" he asked. She kept obstinately silent. - -"I'd have liked you to have said it," he repeated. - -"Oh," she cried out, "how can I respect you when there is all this -suffering? So much pain! Such torture . . . I can't sleep . . . Never . . . -I haven't slept a whole night since . . . Think of the immense -spaces, stretching out under the night . . . I believe pain and fear -must be worse at night. . . ." She knew she was crying out like that -because her dread had come true. When he had said: "I'd have liked you -to have said it," using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, -too, was going. - -And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she -confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would -say farewell to her: like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just -occasionally, using the word "we"--and perhaps without intention--he had -let her know that he loved her. - -Mr. Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs. Haviland was already at -the door. - -"We'll leave you to have your war talk out," Mr. Jegg said. He added: -"For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of -things that's preservable. I can't help saying that." - -She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself: - -"Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He _must_!" The deepest of -her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly -known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils -the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple, -but very faint. "You must! You _must_!" she said to herself. There came -back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the -moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog -into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body -towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden -lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall. . . . She saw the white -disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm -night. . . . - -Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing -on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they -had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for -its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great -dining-room at the Duchemins. He got down from the fire-seat with a -weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a -little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue: - -"Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the -office. That, too, won't be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor -Vinnie thinks matters." He added: "It's queer, dear . . ." In the tumult -of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said "dear." . . . -"Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have -just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep -at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at -night. . . . And she, too, said that she could not respect me. . . ." - -She sprang up. - -"Oh," she said, "she didn't mean it. _I_ didn't mean it. Almost every -man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don't you see it's a -desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can -we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?" She -added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned: -"Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from -your point of view? You're more useful--you know you're more useful to -your country here than . . ." - -He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great -gentleness and concern. - -"I can't reconcile it with my conscience," he said. "In this affair -there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don't -mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on. We -ought. But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul." - -The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of -the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were -speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as -soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit -heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil -resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his -conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again. - -That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing -straightforward: for him or for any man. One could have fought with a -clean heart for a civilisation: if you like for the eighteenth century -against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against -the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at -once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a -catspaw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was -nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was -just bearable. One could keep at one's job--which was faking statistics -against the other fellow--until you were sick and tired of faking and -your brain reeled. And then some! - -It was probably impolitic to fake--to overstate!--a case against enemy -nations. The chickens would come home to roost in one way or another, -probably. Perhaps they wouldn't. That was a matter for one's superiors. -Obviously! And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows. Stupid, -but relatively disinterested. But now! . . . What was one to do? . . . -He went on, almost mumbling. . . . - -She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily -clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own -so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily -unselfish. He didn't betray one thought of self-interest . . . not one! - -He was saying: - -"But now! . . . with this crowd of boodlers! . . . Supposing one's asked -to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to -force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to, -say, Salonika--when they and you and common-sense and everyone and -everything else, know it's disastrous? . . . And from that to monkeying -with our own forces. . . . Starving particular units for political . . ." -He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said: - -"I can't, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your -sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations." - -She said passionately: - -"They're not! They're not! How dare you say such a thing?" - -He answered: - -"It doesn't matter . . . No! I'm sure you're not . . . But, anyhow, -these things are official. One can't, if one's scrupulous, even talk -about them . . . And then . . . You see it means such infinite deaths of -men, such an infinite prolongation . . . all this interference for -side-ends! . . . I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over -their heads. . . . And then . . . I'm to carry out their orders because -they're my superiors. . . . But helping them means unnumbered -deaths. . . ." - -He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile: - -"You see!" he said, "we're perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn't -think you're the only one that sees all the deaths and all the -sufferings. All, you see: I, too, am a conscientious objector. My -conscience won't let me continue any longer with these fellows. . . ." - -She said: - -"But isn't there any other . . ." - -He interrupted: - -"No! There's no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these -affairs. I suppose I'm more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I'm -not. But my conscience won't let me use my brain in this service. So -I've a great, hulking body! I'll admit I'm probably not much good. But -I've nothing to live for: what I stand for isn't any more in this world -What I want, as you know, I can't have. So . . ." - -She exclaimed bitterly: - -"Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two -bullets in front of two small anæmic fellows. . . . And how can you say -you'll have nothing to live for? You'll come back. You'll do your good -work again. You know you did good work . . ." - -He said: - -"Yes! I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I've come to believe I -did. . . . But no! They'll never let me back. They've got me out, with -all sorts of bad marks against me. They'll pursue me, systematically. . . . -You see in such a world as this, an idealist--or perhaps it's only -a sentimentalist--must be stoned to death. He makes the others so -uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf. . . . No; they'll get me, -one way or the other. And some fellow--Macmaster here--will do my jobs. -He won't do them so well, but he'll do them more dishonestly. Or no. I -oughtn't to say dishonestly. He'll do them with enthusiasm and -righteousness. He'll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense -docility and unction. He'll fake figures against our allies with the -black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when _that_ war comes, he'll do the -requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priests -of Baal. And he'll be right. It's all we're fitted for. We ought never -to have come into this war. We ought to have snaffled other peoples' -colonies as the price of neutrality. . . ." - -"Oh!" Valentine Wannop said, "how can you so hate your country?" - -He said with great earnestness: - -"Don't say it! Don't believe it! Don't even for a moment think it! I -love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey, -mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a -grosser name . . . and all the rest of the rubbish--you remember the -field between the Duchemins and your mother's--and we have always been -boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so -we've built up the great tradition that we love. . . . But, for the -moment, it's painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than -Walpole's. But one's too near them. One sees of Walpole that he -consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt: one doesn't -see his methods. . . . My son, or his son, will only see the glory of -the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won't -know about the methods. They'll teach him at school that across the -counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Though -that was another discreditable affair. . . ." - -"But you!" Valentine Wannop exclaimed. "_You_! what will _you_ do! After -the war!" - -"I!" he said rather bewilderedly. "I! . . . Oh, I shall go into the old -furniture business. I've been offered a job. . . ." - -She didn't believe he was serious. He hadn't, she knew, ever thought -about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and -pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would -come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage -sale. She cried out: - -"Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once?" for -in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe. - -He said: - -"Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably -not itself for the minute. . . ." He was obviously thinking of something -else. - -"I've probably been a low cad," he said, "wringing your heart with my -doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always -been--or we've seemed always to me--so alike in our thoughts. I daresay -I wanted you to respect me. . . ." - -"Oh, I respect you! I respect you!" she said. "You're as innocent as a -child." - -He went on: - -"And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late -that one has had a quiet room and a fire and . . . you! To think in -front of. You _do_ make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very -muddled till to-day . . . till five minutes ago! Do you remember our -drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul. . . -But you see . . . Don't you see?" - -She said: - -"No! What am I to see? I remember . . ." - -He said: - -"That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the -gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for -me!" - -She said: - -"Did I say that? . . . Yes, I said that!" - -The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out -her arms. . . . She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly -visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for -tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both -hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word -of love or she would have held it; it began with: "Well, I must be . . ." -He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great -waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room. . . . - -The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and -unrelenting. Her mother's paper cut down her money; no orders for -serials came in: her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal -diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be -praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the -Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her -desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The -police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then -her brother went to prison: somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness -of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no -milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. -For three days Mrs. Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew -better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But -there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour -and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in -prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace, -after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being -the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let -his mother use her influence--of which she had still some--to get him -appointed as an A.B. on a mine-sweeper. Great winds became an agony to -Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that -came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better: she took -pride in having a son in a service. She was then the more able to -appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small -mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs. Wannop in effigy in front of -their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs. Wannop ran out and in -the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer -hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs. Wannop's grey hair in the -firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration -card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to -London. - -The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts: the air above it -filled with aeroplanes: the roads covered with military cars. There was -then no getting away from the sounds of the war. - -Just as they had decided to move Tietjens came back. It was for a moment -heaven to have him in this country. But when, a month later, Valentine -Wannop saw him for a minute, he seemed very heavy, aged and dull. It was -then almost as bad as before, for it seemed to Valentine as if he hardly -had his reason. - -On hearing that Tietjens was to be quartered--or, at any rate, -occupied--in the neighbourhood of Ealing, Mrs. Wannop at once took a -small house in Bedford Park, whilst, to make ends meet--for her mother -made terribly little--Valentine Wannop took a post as athletic mistress -in a great school in a not very near suburb. Thus, though Tietjens came -in for a cup of tea almost every afternoon with Mrs. Wannop in the -dilapidated little suburban house, Valentine Wannop hardly ever saw him. -The only free afternoon she had was the Friday, and on that day she -still regularly chaperoned Mrs. Duchemin: meeting her at Charing Cross -towards noon and taking her back to the same station in time to catch -the last train to Rye. On Saturdays and Sundays she was occupied all day -in typing her mother's manuscript. - -Of Tietjens, then, she saw almost nothing. She knew that his poor mind -was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said he was a great help -to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory -conclusions--or quite startling and attractive theories--with extreme -rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her -whenever--though it wasn't now very often--she had an article to write -for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her -failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing. . . . - -Mrs. Duchemin, then, Valentine Wannop still chaperoned, though there was -no bond any more between them. Valentine knew, for instance, perfectly -well that Mrs. Duchemin, after she had been seen off by train from -Charing Cross, got out at Clapham Junction, took a taxicab back to -Gray's Inn after dark and spent the night with Macmaster, and Mrs. -Duchemin knew quite well that Valentine knew. It was a sort of parade of -circumspection and rightness, and they kept it up even after, at a -sinister registry office, the wedding had taken place, Valentine being -the one witness and an obscure-looking substitute for the usual pew -opener another. There seemed to be, by then, no very obvious reason why -Valentine should support Mrs. Macmaster any more on these rather dreary -occasions, but Mrs. Macmaster said she might just as well, until they -saw fit to make the marriage public. There were, Mrs. Macmaster said, -censorious tongues, and even if these were confuted afterwards it is -difficult, if not impossible, to outrun scandal. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster -was of opinion that the Macmaster afternoons with these geniuses must be -a liberal education for Valentine. But, as Valentine sat most of the -time at the tea-table near the door, it was the backs and side faces of -the distinguished rather than their intellects with which she was most -acquainted. Occasionally, however, Mrs. Duchemin would show Valentine, -as an enormous privilege, one of the letters to herself from men of -genius: usually North British, written, as a rule, from the Continent or -more distant and peaceful climates, for most of them believed it their -duty in these hideous times to keep alive in the world the only -glimmering spark of beauty. Couched in terms so eulogistic as to -resemble those used in passionate love-letters by men more profane, -these epistles recounted, or consulted Mrs. Duchemin as to, their love -affairs with foreign princesses, the progress of their ailments or the -progresses of their souls towards those higher regions of morality in -which floated their so beautiful-souled correspondent. - -The letters entertained Valentine and, indeed, she was entertained by -that whole mirage. It was only the Macmaster's treatment of her mother -that finally decided Valentine that this friendship had died; for the -friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing -disillusionments, and Valentine Wannop was a woman of more than usual -loyalty. Indeed, if she couldn't respect Mrs. Duchemin on the old -grounds, she could very really respect her for her tenacity of purpose, -her determination to advance Macmaster and for the sort of ruthlessness -that she put into these pursuits. - -Valentine's affection had, indeed, survived even Edith Ethel's continued -denigrations of Tietjens--for Edith Ethel regarded Tietjens as a clog -round her husband's neck, if only because he was a very unpopular man, -grown personally rather unpresentable and always extremely rude to the -geniuses on Fridays. Edith Ethel, however, never made these complaints -that grew more and more frequent as more and more the distinguished -flocked to the Fridays, before Macmaster. And they ceased very suddenly -and in a way that struck Valentine as odd. - -Mrs. Duchemin's grievance against Tietjens was that, Macmaster being a -weak man, Tietjens had acted as his banker until, what with interest and -the rest of it, Macmaster owed Tietjens a great sum: several thousand -pounds. And there had been no real reason: Macmaster had spent most of -the money either on costly furnishings for his rooms or on his costly -journeys to Rye. On the one hand Mrs. Duchemin could have found -Macmaster all the bric-a-brac he could possibly have wanted from amongst -the things at the rectory, where no one would have missed them and, on -the other, she, Mrs. Duchemin, would have paid all Macmaster's -travelling expenses. She had had unlimited money from her husband, who -never asked for accounts. But, whilst Tietjens still had influence with -Macmaster, he had used it uncompromisingly against this course, giving -him the delusion--it enraged Mrs. Duchemin to think!--that it would have -been dishonourable. So that Macmaster had continued to draw upon him. - -And, most enraging of all, at a period when she had had a power of -attorney over all Mr. Duchemin's fortune and could, perfectly easily, -have sold out something that no one would have missed for the couple of -thousand or so that Macmaster owed, Tietjens had very forcibly refused -to allow Macmaster to agree to anything of the sort. He had again put -into Macmaster's weak head that it would be dishonourable. But Mrs. -Duchemin--and she closed her lips determinedly after she had said -it--knew perfectly well Tietjens' motive. So long as Macmaster owed him -money he imagined that they couldn't close their doors upon him. And -their establishment was beginning to be a place where you meet people of -great influence who might well get for a person as lazy as Tietjens a -sinecure that would suit him. Tietjens, in fact, knew which side his -bread was buttered. - -For what, Mrs. Duchemin asked, could there have been dishonourable about -the arrangement she had proposed? Practically the whole of Mr. -Duchemin's money was to come to her: he was by then insane; it was -therefore, morally, her own. But immediately after that, Mr. Duchemin -having been certified, the estate had fallen into the hands of the -Lunacy Commissioners and there had been no further hope of taking the -capital. Now, her husband being dead, it was in the hands of trustees, -Mr. Duchemin having left the whole of his property to Magdalen College -and merely the income to his widow. The income was very large; but -where, with their expenses, with the death duties and taxation, which -were by then merciless, was Mrs. Duchemin to find the money? She was to -be allowed, under her husband's will, enough capital to buy a pleasant -little place in Surrey, with rather a nice lot of land--enough to let -Macmaster know some of the leisures of a country gentleman's lot. They -were going in for shorthorns, and there was enough land to give them a -small golf-course and, in the autumn, a little--oh, mostly -rough!--shooting for Macmaster to bring his friends down to. It would -just run to that. Oh, no ostentation. Merely a nice little place. As an -amusing detail the villagers there already called Macmaster "squire" and -the women curtsied to him. But Valentine Wannop would understand that, -with all these expenses, they couldn't find the money to pay off -Tietjens. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster said she wasn't going to pay off -Tietjens. He had had his chance once: now he could go without, for her. -Macmaster would have to pay it himself and he would never be able to, -his contribution to their housekeeping being what it was. And there were -going to be complications. Macmaster wondered about their little place -in Surrey, saying that he would consult Tietjens about this and that -alteration. But over the doorsill of that place the foot of Tietjens was -never going to go! Never! It would mean a good deal of unpleasantness; -or rather it would mean one sharp: "C-r-r-unch!" And then: Napoo finny! -Mrs. Duchemin sometimes, and with great effect, condescended to use one -of the more picturesque phrases of the day. - -To all these diatribes Valentine Wannop answered hardly anything. It was -no particular concern of her's; even if, for a moment, she felt -proprietarily towards Christopher as she did now and then, she felt no -particular desire that his intimacy with the Macmasters should be -prolonged, because she knew he could have no particular desire for its -prolongation. She imagined him turning them down with an unspoken and -good-humoured gibe. And, indeed, she agreed on the whole with Edith -Ethel. It _was_ demoralising for a weak little man like Vincent to have -a friend with an ever-open purse beside him. Tietjens ought not to have -been princely: it was a defect, a quality that she did not personally -admire in him. As to whether it would or wouldn't have been -dishonourable for Mrs. Duchemin to take her husband's money and give it -to Macmaster, she kept an open mind. To all intents and purposes the -money _was_ Mrs. Duchemin's, and if Mrs. Duchemin had then paid -Christopher off it would have been sensible. She could see that later it -had become very inconvenient. There were, however, male standards to be -considered, and Macmaster, at least, passed for a man. Tietjens, who was -wise enough in the affairs of others, had, in that, probably been wise; -for there might have been great disagreeablenesses with trustees and -heirs-at-law had Mrs. Duchemin's subtraction of a couple of thousand -pounds from the Duchemin estate afterwards come to light. The Wannops -had never been large property owners as a family, but Valentine had -heard enough of collateral wranglings over small family dishonesties to -know how very disagreeable these could be. - -So she had made little or no comment; sometimes she had even faintly -agreed as to the demoralisation of Macmaster and that had sufficed. For -Mrs. Duchemin had been certain of her rightness and cared nothing at all -for the opinion of Valentine Wannop, or else took it for granted. - -And when Tietjens had been gone to France for a little time Mrs. -Duchemin seemed to forget the matter, contenting herself with saying -that he might very likely not come back. He was the sort of clumsy man -who generally got killed. In that case, since no I.O.U.s or paper had -passed, Mrs. Tietjens would have no claim. So that would be all right. - -But two days after the return of Christopher--and that was how Valentine -knew he had come back!--Mrs. Duchemin with a lowering brow exclaimed: - -"That oaf, Tietjens, is in England, perfectly safe and sound. And now -the whole miserable business of Vincent's indebtedness . . . Oh!" - -She had stopped so suddenly and so markedly that even the stoppage of -Valentine's own heart couldn't conceal the oddness from her. Indeed it -was as if there were an interval before she completely realised what the -news was and as if, during that interval, she said to herself: - -"It's very queer. It's exactly as if Edith Ethel has stopped abusing him -on my account . . . As if she _knew_!" But how could Edith Ethel know -that she loved the man who had returned? It was impossible! She hardly -knew herself. Then the great wave of relief rolled over her: he was in -England. One day she would see him, there: in the great room. For these -colloquies with Edith Ethel always took place in the great room where -she had last seen Tietjens. It looked suddenly beautiful and she was -resigned to sitting there, waiting for the distinguished. - -It was indeed a beautiful room: it had become so during the years. It -was long and high--matching the Tietjens'. A great cut-glass chandelier -from the rectory hung dimly coruscating in the centre, reflected and -re-reflected in convex gilt mirrors, topped by eagles. A great number of -books had gone to make place on the white panelled walls for the -mirrors, and for the fair orange and brown pictures by Turner, also from -the rectory. From the rectory had come the immense scarlet and lapis -lazuli carpet, the great brass fire-basket and appendages, the great -curtains that, in the three long windows, on their peacock blue Chinese -silk showed parti-coloured cranes ascending in long flights--and all the -polished Chippendale arm-chairs. Amongst all these, gracious, trailing, -stopping with a tender gesture to rearrange very slightly the crimson -roses in the famous silver bowls, still in dark blue silks, with an -amber necklace and her elaborate black hair, waved exactly like that of -Julia Domna of the Musée Lapidaire at Arles, moved Mrs. Macmaster--also -from the rectory. Macmaster had achieved his desire: even to the -shortbread cakes and the peculiarly scented tea that came every Friday -morning from Princes Street. And, if Mrs. Macmaster hadn't the pawky, -relishing humour of the great Scots ladies of past days, she had in -exchange her deep aspect of comprehension and tenderness. An -astonishingly beautiful and impressive woman: dark hair; dark, straight -eyebrows; a straight nose; dark blue eyes in the shadows of her hair and -bowed, pomegranate lips in a chin curved like the bow of a Greek -boat. . . . - -The etiquette of the place on Fridays was regulated as if by a royal -protocol. The most distinguished and, if possible, titled person was led -to a great walnut-wood fluted chair that stood askew by the fireplace, -its back and seat of blue velvet, heaven knows how old. Over him would -hover Mrs. Duchemin: or, if he were _very_ distinguished, both Mr. and -Mrs. Macmaster. The not so distinguished were led up by turns to be -presented to the celebrity and would then arrange themselves in a -half-circle in the beautiful arm-chairs; the less distinguished still, -in outer groups in chairs that had no arms: the almost undistinguished -stood, also in groups or languished, awestruck on the scarlet leather -window seats. When all were there Macmaster would establish himself on -the incredibly unique hearthrug and would address wise sayings to the -celebrity; occasionally, however, saying a kind thing to the youngest -man present--to give him a chance of distinguishing himself. Macmaster's -hair, at that date, was still black, but not quite so stiff or so well -brushed; his beard had in it greyish streaks and his teeth, not being -quite so white, looked less strong. He wore also a single eyeglass, the -retaining of which in his right eye gave him a slightly agonised -expression. It gave him, however, the privilege of putting his face very -close to the face of anyone upon whom he wished to make a deep -impression. He had lately become much interested in the drama, so that -there were usually several large--and, of course, very reputable and -serious actresses in the room. On rare occasions Mrs. Duchemin would say -across the room in her deep voice: - -"Valentine, a cup of tea for his highness," or "Sir Thomas," as the case -might be, and when Valentine had threaded her way through the chairs -with a cup of tea Mrs. Duchemin, with a kind, aloof smile, would say: -"Your highness, this is my little brown bird." But as a rule Valentine -sat alone at the tea-table, the guests fetching from her what they -wanted. - -Tietjens came to the Fridays twice during the five months of his stay at -Ealing. On each occasion he accompanied Mrs. Wannop. - -In earlier days--during the earliest Fridays--Mrs. Wannop, if she ever -came, had always been installed, with her flowing black, in the throne -and, like an enlarged Queen Victoria, had sat there whilst suppliants -were led up to this great writer. But now: on the first occasion Mrs. -Wannop got a chair without arms in the outer ring, whilst a general -officer commanding lately in chief somewhere in the East, whose military -success had not been considerable, but whose despatches were considered -very literary, occupied, rather blazingly, the throne. But Mrs. Wannop -had chatted very contentedly all the afternoon with Tietjens, and it had -been comforting to Valentine to see Tietjens' large, uncouth, but quite -collected figure, and to observe the affection that these two had for -each other. - -But, on the second occasion, the throne was occupied by a very young -woman who talked a great deal and with great assurance. Valentine didn't -know who she was. Mrs. Wannop, very gay and distracted, stood nearly the -whole afternoon by a window. And even at that, Valentine was contented, -quite a number of young men crowding round the old lady and leaving the -younger one's circle rather bare. - -There came in a very tall, clean run and beautiful, fair woman, -dressed in nothing in particular. She stood with extreme--with -noticeable--unconcern near the doorway. She let her eyes rest on -Valentine, but looked away before Valentine could speak. She must have -had an enormous quantity of fair tawny hair, for it was coiled in a -great surface over her ears. She had in her hand several visiting cards -which she looked at with a puzzled expression and then laid on a card -table. She was no one who had ever been there before. - -Edith Ethel--it was for the second time!--had just broken up the ring -that surrounded Mrs. Wannop, bearing the young men tributary to the -young women in the walnut chair and leaving Tietjens and the older woman -high and dry in a window: thus Tietjens saw the stranger, and there was -no doubt left in Valentine's mind. He came, diagonally, right down the -room to his wife and marched her straight up to Edith Ethel. His face -was perfectly without expression. - -Macmaster, perched on the centre of the hearthrug, had an emotion that -was extraordinarily comic to witness, but that Valentine was quite -unable to analyse. He jumped two paces forward to meet Mrs. Tietjens, -held out a little hand, half withdrew it, retreated half a step. The -eyeglass fell from his perturbed eye: this gave him actually an -expression less perturbed, but, in revenge, the hairs on the back of his -scalp grew suddenly untidy. Sylvia, wavering along beside her husband, -held out her long arm and careless hand. Macmaster winced almost at the -contact, as if his fingers had been pinched in a vice. Sylvia wavered -desultorily towards Edith Ethel, who was suddenly small, insignificant -and relatively coarse. As for the young woman celebrity in the -arm-chair, she appeared to be about the size of a white rabbit. - -A complete silence had fallen on the room. Every woman in it was -counting the pleats of Sylvia's skirt and the amount of material in it. -Valentine Wannop knew that because she was doing it herself. If one had -that amount of material and that number of pleats one's skirt might hang -like that. . . . For it was extraordinary: it fitted close round the -hips, and gave an effect of length and swing--yet it did not descend as -low as the ankles. It was, no doubt, the amount of material that did -that, like the Highlander's kilt that takes twelve yards to make. And -from the silence Valentine could tell that every woman and most of the -men--if they didn't know that this was Mrs. Christopher Tietjens--knew -that this was a personage of _Illustrated Weekly_, as who should say of -county family, rank. Little Mrs. Swan, lately married, actually got up, -crossed the room and sat down beside her bridegroom. It was a movement -with which Valentine could sympathise. - -And Sylvia, having just faintly greeted Mrs. Duchemin, and completely -ignored the celebrity in the arm-chair--in spite of the fact that Mrs. -Duchemin had tried half-heartedly to effect an introduction--stood -still, looking round her. She gave the effect of a lady in a -nurseryman's hot-house considering what flower should interest her, -collectedly ignoring the nurserymen who bowed round her. She had just -dropped her eyelashes, twice, in recognition of two staff officers with -a good deal of scarlet streak about them who were tentatively rising -from their chairs. The staff officers who came to the Macmasters were -not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such. - -Valentine was by that time beside her mother, who had been standing all -alone between two windows. She had dispossessed, in hot indignation, a -stout musical critic of his chair and had sat her mother in it. And, -just as Mrs. Duchemin's deep voice sounded, yet a little waveringly: - -"Valentine . . . a cup of tea for . . ." Valentine was carrying a cup of -tea to her mother. - -Her indignation had conquered her despairing jealousy, if you could call -it jealousy. For what was the good of living or loving when Tietjens had -beside him, for ever, the radiant, kind and gracious perfection. On the -other hand, of her two deep passions, the second was for her mother. - -Rightly or wrongly, Valentine regarded Mrs. Wannop as a great, an august -figure: a great brain, a high and generous intelligence. She had -written, at least, one great book, and if the rest of her time had been -frittered away in the desperate struggle to live that had taken both -their lives, that could not detract from that one achievement that -should last and for ever take her mother's name down time. That this -greatness should not weigh with the Macmasters had hitherto neither -astonished nor irritated Valentine. The Macmasters had their game to -play and, for the matter of that, they had their predilections. Their -game kept them amongst the officially influential, the semi-official and -the officially accredited. They moved with such C.B.s, knights, -presidents, and the rest as dabbled in writing or the arts: they went -upwards with such reviewers, art critics, musical writers and -archæologists as had posts in, if possible, first-class public offices -or permanent positions on the more august periodicals. If an imaginative -author seemed assured of position and lasting popularity Macmaster would -send out feelers towards him, would make himself humbly useful, and -sooner or later either Mrs. Duchemin would be carrying on with him one -of her high-souled correspondences--or she wouldn't. - -Mrs. Wannop they had formerly accepted as permanent leader writer and -chief critic of a great organ, but the great organ having dwindled and -now disappeared the Macmasters no longer wanted her at their parties. -That was the game--and Valentine accepted it. But that it should have -been done with such insolence, so obviously meant to be noted--for in -twice breaking up Mrs. Wannop's little circle Mrs. Duchemin had not even -once so much as said: "How d'ye do?" to the elder lady!--that was almost -more than Valentine could, for the moment, bear, and she would have -taken her mother away at once and would never have re-entered the house, -but for the compensations. - -Her mother had lately written and even found a publisher for a book--and -the book had showed no signs of failing powers. On the contrary, having -been perforce stopped off the perpetual journalism that had dissipated -her energies, Mrs. Wannop had turned out something that Valentine knew -was sound, sane and well done. Abstractions caused by failing attention -to the outside world are not necessarily in a writer signs of failing, -as a writer. It may mean merely that she is giving so much thought to -her work that her other contacts suffer. If that is the case her work -will gain. That this might be the case with her mother was Valentine's -great and secret hope. Her mother was barely sixty: many great works -have been written by writers aged between sixty and seventy. . . . - -And the crowding of youngish men round the old lady had given Valentine -a little confirmation of that hope. The book naturally, in the maelstrom -flux and reflux of the time, had attracted little attention, and poor -Mrs. Wannop had not succeeded in extracting a penny for it from her -adamantine publisher: she hadn't, indeed, made a penny for several -months, and they existed almost at starvation point in their little den -of a villa--on Valentine's earnings as athletic teacher. . . . But that -little bit of attention in that semi-public place had seemed, at least, -as a confirmation to Valentine: there probably was something sound, sane -and well done in her mother's work. That was almost all she asked of -life. - -And, indeed, whilst she stood by her mother's chair, thinking with a -little bitter pathos that if Edith Ethel had left the three or four -young men to her mother the three or four might have done her poor -mother a little good, with innocent puffs and the like--and heaven knew -they needed that little good badly enough!--a very thin and untidy young -man _did_ drift back to Mrs. Wannop and asked, precisely, if he might -make a note or two for publication as to what Mrs. Wannop was doing. -"Her book," he said, "had attracted so much attention. They hadn't known -that they had still writers among them. . . ." - -A singular, triangular drive had begun through the chairs from the -fireplace. That was how it had seemed to Valentine! Mrs. Tietjens had -looked at them, had asked Christopher a question and, immediately, as if -she were coming through waist-high surf, had borne down Macmaster and -Mrs. Duchemin, flanking her obsequiously, setting aside chairs and their -occupants, Tietjens and the two, rather bashfully following staff -officers, broadening out the wedge. - -Sylvia, her long arm held out from a yard or so away, was giving her -hand to Valentine's mother. With her clear, high, unembarrassed voice -she exclaimed, also from a yard or so away, so as to be heard by every -one in the room: - -"You're Mrs. Wannop. The great writer! I'm Christopher Tietjens' wife." - -The old lady, with her dim eyes, looked up at the younger woman towering -above her. - -"You're Christopher's wife!" she said. "I must kiss you for all the -kindness he has shown me." - -Valentine felt her eyes filling with tears. She saw her mother stand up, -place both her hands on the other woman's shoulders. She heard her -mother say: - -"You're a most beautiful creature. I'm sure you're good!" - -Sylvia stood, smiling faintly, bending a little to accept the embrace. -Behind the Macmasters, Tietjens and the staff officers, a little crowd -of goggle eyes had ranged itself. - -Valentine was crying. She slipped back behind the tea-urns, though she -could hardly feel the way. Beautiful! The most beautiful woman she had -ever seen! And good! Kind! You could see it in the lovely way she had -given her cheek to that poor old woman's lips. . . . And to live all -day, for ever, beside him . . . she, Valentine, ought to be ready to lay -down her life for Sylvia Tietjens. . . . - -The voice of Tietjens said, just above her head: - -"Your mother seems to be having a regular triumph," and, with his -good-natured cynicism, he added, "it seems to have upset some -apple-carts!" They were confronted with the spectacle of Macmaster -conducting the young celebrity from her deserted arm-chair across the -room to be lost in the horseshoe of crowd that surrounded Mrs. Wannop. - -Valentine said: - -"You're quite gay to-day. Your voice is different. I suppose you're -better?" She did not look at him. His voice came: - -"Yes! I'm relatively gay!" It went on: "I thought you might like to -know. A little of my mathematical brain seems to have come to life -again. I've worked out two or three silly problems. . . ." - -She said: - -"Mrs. Tietjens will be pleased." - -"Oh!" the answer came. "Mathematics don't interest her any more than -cock-fighting." With immense swiftness, between word and word, Valentine -read into that a hope! This splendid creature did not sympathise with -her husband's activities. But he crushed it heavily by saying: "Why -should she? She's so many occupations of her own that she's unrivalled -at!" - -He began to tell her, rather minutely, of a calculation he had made only -that day at lunch. He had gone into the Department of Statistics and had -had rather a row with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln. A pretty title the fellow -had taken! They had wanted him to ask to be seconded to his old -department for a certain job. But he had said he'd be damned if he -would. He detested and despised the work they were doing. - -Valentine, for the first time in her life, hardly listened to what he -said. Did the fact that Sylvia Tietjens had so many occupations of her -own mean that Tietjens found her unsympathetic? Of their relationships -she knew nothing. Sylvia had been so much of a mystery as hardly to -exist as a problem hitherto. Macmaster, Valentine knew, hated her. She -knew that through Mrs. Duchemin; she had heard it ages ago, but she -didn't know why. Sylvia had never come to the Macmaster afternoons; but -that was natural. Macmaster passed for a bachelor, and it was excusable -for a young woman of the highest fashion not to come to bachelor teas of -literary and artistic people. On the other hand, Macmaster dined at the -Tietjens quite often enough to make it public that he was a friend of -that family. Sylvia, too, had never come down to see Mrs. Wannop. But -then it would, in the old days, have been a long way to come for a lady -of fashion with no especial literary interests. And no one, in mercy, -could have been expected to call on poor them in their dog kennel in an -outer suburb. They had had to sell almost all their pretty things. - -Tietjens was saying that after his tempestuous interview with Lord -Ingleby of Lincoln--she wished he would not be so rude to powerful -people!--he had dropped in on Macmaster in his private room, and finding -him puzzled over a lot of figures had, in the merest spirit of bravado, -taken Macmaster and his papers out to lunch. And, he said, chancing to -look, without any hope at all, at the figures, he had suddenly worked -out an ingenious mystification. It had just come! - -His voice had been so gay and triumphant that she hadn't been able to -resist looking up at him. His cheeks were fresh coloured, his hair -shining; his blue eyes had a little of their old arrogance--and -tenderness! Her heart seemed to sing with joy! He was, she felt, her -man. She imagined the arms of his mind stretching out to enfold her. - -He went on explaining. He had rather, in his recovered self-confidence, -gibed at Macmaster. Between themselves, wasn't it easy to do what the -Department, under orders, wanted done? They had wanted to rub into our -allies that their losses by devastation had been nothing to write home -about--so as to avoid sending reinforcements to their lines! Well, if -you took just the bricks and mortar of the devastated districts, you -could prove that the loss in bricks, tiles, woodwork and the rest -didn't--and the figures with a little manipulation would prove -it!--amount to more than a normal year's dilapidations spread over the -whole country in peace time. . . . House repairs in a normal year had -cost several million sterling. The enemy had only destroyed just about -so many million sterling in bricks and mortar. And what was a mere -year's dilapidations in house property! You just neglected to do them -and did them next year. - -So, if you ignored the lost harvests of three years, the lost industrial -output of the richest industrial region of the country, the smashed -machinery, the barked fruit trees, the three years' loss of four and a -half-tenths of the coal output for three years--and the loss of -life!--we could go to our allies and say: - -"All your yappings about losses are the merest bulls. You can perfectly -well afford to reinforce the weak places of your own lines. We intend to -send our new troops to the Near East, where lies our true interest!" -And, though they might sooner or later point out the fallacy, you would -by so much have put off the abhorrent expedient of a single command. - -Valentine, though it took her away from her own thoughts, couldn't help -saying: - -"But weren't you arguing against your own convictions?" - -He said: - -"Yes, of course I was. In the lightness of my heart! It's always a good -thing to formulate the other fellow's objections." - -She had turned half round in her chair. They were gazing into each -other's eyes, he from above, she from below. She had no doubt of his -love: he, she knew, could have no doubt of hers. She said: - -"But isn't it dangerous? To show these people how to do it?" - -He said: - -"Oh, no, no. No! You don't know what a good soul little Vinnie is. I -don't think you've ever been quite just to Vincent Macmaster! He'd as -soon think of picking my pocket as of picking my brains. The soul of -honour!" - -Valentine had felt a queer, queer sensation. She was not sure afterwards -whether she had felt it before she had realised that Sylvia Tietjens was -looking at them. She stood there, very erect, a queer smile on her face. -Valentine could not be sure whether it was kind, cruel, or merely -distantly ironic; but she was perfectly sure it showed, whatever was -behind it, that its wearer knew all that there was to know of her, -Valentine's, feelings for Tietjens and for Tietjens' feelings for -her. . . . It was like being a woman and man in adultery in Trafalgar -Square. - -Behind Sylvia's back, their mouths agape, were the two staff officers. -Their dark hairs were too untidy for them to amount to much, but, such -as they were, they were the two most presentable males of the -assembly--and Sylvia had snaffled them. - -Mrs. Tietjens said: - -"Oh, Christopher! I'm going on to the Basil's." - -Tietjens said: - -"All right. I'll pop Mrs. Wannop into the tube as soon as she's had -enough of it, and come along and pick you up!" - -Sylvia had just drooped her long eyelashes, in sign of salutation, to -Valentine Wannop, and had drifted through the door, followed by her -rather unmilitary military escort in khaki and scarlet. - -From that moment Valentine Wannop never had any doubt. She knew that -Sylvia Tietjens knew that her husband loved her, Valentine Wannop, and -that she, Valentine Wannop, loved her husband--with a passion absolute -and ineffable. The one thing she, Valentine, didn't know, the one -mystery that remained impenetrable, was whether Sylvia Tietjens was good -to her husband! - -A long time afterwards Edith Ethel had come to her beside the tea-cups -and had apologised for not having known, earlier than Sylvia's -demonstration, that Mrs. Wannop was in the room. She hoped that they -might see Mrs. Wannop much more often. She added after a moment that she -hoped Mrs. Wannop wouldn't, in future, find it necessary to come under -the escort of Mr. Tietjens. They were too old friends for that, surely. - -Valentine said: - -"Look here, Ethel, if you think that you can keep friends with mother -and turn on Mr. Tietjens after all he's done for you, you're mistaken. -You are really. And mother's a great deal of influence. I don't want to -see you making any mistakes: just at this juncture. It's a mistake to -make nasty rows. And you'd make a very nasty one if you said anything -against Mr. Tietjens to mother. She knows a great deal. Remember. She -lived next door to the rectory for a number of years. And she's got a -dreadfully incisive tongue. . . ." - -Edith Ethel coiled back on her feet as if her whole body were threaded -by a steel spring. Her mouth opened, but she bit her lower lip and then -wiped it with a very white handkerchief. She said: - -"I hate that man! I detest that man! I shudder when he comes near me." - -"I know you do!" Valentine Wannop answered. "But I wouldn't let other -people know it if I were you. It doesn't do you any real credit. He's a -good man." - -Edith Ethel looked at her with a long, calculating glance. Then she went -to stand before the fireplace. - -That had been five--or at most six--Fridays before Valentine sat with -Mark Tietjens in the War Office waiting hall, and, on the Friday -immediately before that again, all the guests being gone, Edith Ethel -had come to the tea-table and, with her velvet kindness, had placed her -right hand on Valentine's left. Admiring the gesture with a deep -fervour, Valentine knew that that was the end. - -Three days before, on the Monday, Valentine, in her school uniform, in a -great store to which she had gone to buy athletic paraphernalia, had run -into Mrs. Duchemin, who was buying flowers. Mrs. Duchemin had been -horribly distressed to observe the costume. She had said: - -"But do you go _about_ in that? It's really dreadful." Valentine had -answered: - -"Oh, yes. When I'm doing business for the school in school hours I'm -expected to wear it. And I wear it if I'm going anywhere in a hurry -after school hours. It saves my dresses. I haven't got too many." - -"But _any_ one might meet you," Edith Ethel said in a note of agony. -"It's very inconsiderate. Don't you _think_ you've been very -inconsiderate? You might meet any of the people who come to our -Fridays!" - -"I frequently do," Valentine said. "But they don't seem to mind. Perhaps -they think I'm a Waac officer. That would be quite respectable. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin drifted away, her arms full of flowers and real agony upon -her face. - -Now, beside the tea-table she said, very softly: - -"My dear, we've decided not to have our usual Friday afternoon next -week." Valentine wondered whether this was merely a lie to get rid of -her. But Edith Ethel went on: "We've decided to have a little evening -festivity. After a great deal of thought we've come to the conclusion -that we ought, now, to make our union public." She paused to await -comment, but Valentine making none she went on: "It coincides very -happily--I can't help feeling it coincides very happily!--with another -event. Not that we set much store by these things. . . . But it has been -whispered to Vincent that next Friday. . . . Perhaps, my dear Valentine, -you, too, will have heard . . ." - -Valentine said: - -"No, I haven't. I suppose he's got the O.B.E. I'm very glad." - -"The Sovereign," Mrs. Duchemin said, "is seeing fit to confer the honour -of knighthood on him." - -"Well!" Valentine said. "He's had a quick career. I've no doubt he -deserves it. He's worked very hard. I do sincerely congratulate you. -It'll be a great help to you." - -"It's," Mrs. Duchemin said, "not for mere plodding. That's what makes it -so gratifying. It's for a special piece of brilliance, that has marked -him out. It's, of course, a secret. But . . ." - -"Oh, I know!" Valentine said. "He's worked out some calculations to -prove that losses in the devastated districts, if you ignore machinery, -coal output, orchard trees, harvests, industrial products and so on, -don't amount to more than a year's household dilapidations for -the . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin said with real horror: - -"But how did you know? How on _earth_ did you know? . . ." She paused. -"It's such a _dead_ secret. . . . That fellow must have told you. . . . -But how on earth could _he_ know?" - -"I haven't seen Mr. Tietjens to speak to since the last time he was -here," Valentine said. She saw, from Edith Ethel's bewilderment, the -whole situation. The miserable Macmaster hadn't even confided to his -wife that the practically stolen figures weren't his own. He desired to -have a little prestige in the family circle; for once a little prestige! -Well! Why shouldn't he have it? Tietjens, she knew, would wish him to -have all he could get. She said therefore: - -"Oh, it's probably in the air. . . . It's known the Government want to -break their claims to the higher command. And anyone who could help them -to that would get a knighthood. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin was more calm. - -"It's certainly," she said, "Burke'd, as you call it, those beastly -people." She reflected for a moment. "It's probably that," she went on. -"It's in the air. Anything that can help to influence public opinion -against those horrible people is to be welcomed. That's known pretty -widely. . . . No! It could hardly be Christopher Tietjens who thought of -it and told you. It wouldn't enter his head. He's their friend! He would -be . . ." - -"He's certainly," Valentine said, "not a friend of his country's -enemies. I'm not myself." - -Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed sharply, her eyes dilated. - -"What do you mean? What on earth do you dare to mean? I thought you were -a pro-German!" - -Valentine said: - -"I'm not! I'm not! . . . I hate men's deaths. . . . I hate any men's -deaths. . . . Any men . . ." She calmed herself by main force. "Mr. -Tietjens says that the more we hinder our allies the more we drag the -war on and the more lives are lost. . . . More lives, do you understand? -. . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin assumed her most aloof, tender and high air: "My poor -child," she said, "what possible concern can the opinions of that broken -fellow cause anyone? You can warn him from me that he does himself no -good by going on uttering these discredited opinions. He's a marked man. -Finished! It's no good Guggums, my husband, trying to stand up for him." - -"He _does_ stand up for him?" Valentine asked. "Though I don't see why -it's needed. Mr. Tietjens is surely able to take care of himself." - -"My good child," Edith Ethel said, "you may as well know the worst. -There's not a more discredited man in London than Christopher Tietjens, -and my husband does himself infinite harm in standing up for him. It's -our one quarrel." - -She went on again: - -"It was all very well whilst that fellow had brains. He was said to have -some intellect, though I could never see it. But now that, with his -drunkenness and debaucheries, he has got himself into the state he is -in; for there's no other way of accounting for his condition! They're -striking him, I don't mind telling you, off the roll of his -office. . . ." - -It was there that, for the first time, the thought went through -Valentine Wannop's mind, like a mad inspiration: this woman must at one -time have been in love with Tietjens. It was possible, men being what -they were that she had even once been Tietjens' mistress. For it was -impossible otherwise to account for this spite, which to Valentine -seemed almost meaningless. She had, on the other hand, no impulse to -defend Tietjens against accusations that could not have any possible -grounds. - -Mrs. Duchemin was going on with her kind loftiness: - -"Of course a fellow like that--in that condition!--could not understand -matters of high policy. It is imperative that these fellows should not -have the higher command. It would pander to their insane spirit of -militarism. They _must_ be hindered. I'm talking, of course, between -ourselves, but my husband says that that is the conviction in the very -highest circles. To let them have their way, even if it led to earlier -success, would be to establish a precedent--so my husband -says!--compared with which the loss of a few lives. . . ." - -Valentine sprang up, her face distorted. - -"For the sake of Christ," she cried out, "as you believe that Christ -died for you, try to understand that millions of men's lives are at -stake. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin smiled. - -"My poor child," she said, "if you moved in the higher circles you would -look at these things with more aloofness. . . ." - -Valentine leant on the back of a high chair for support. - -"You don't move in the higher circles," she said. "For Heaven's -sake--for your own--remember that you are a woman, not for ever and for -always a snob. You were a good woman once. You stuck to your husband for -quite a long time. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin, in her chair, had thrown herself back. - -"My good girl," she said, "have you gone mad?" - -Valentine said: - -"Yes, very nearly. I've got a brother at sea; I've had a man I loved out -there for an infinite time. You can understand that, I suppose, even if -you can't understand how one can go mad merely at the thoughts of -suffering at all. . . . And I know, Edith Ethel, that you are afraid of -my opinion of you, or you wouldn't have put up all the subterfuges and -concealments of all these years. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin said quickly: - -"Oh, my good girl. . . . If you've got personal interests at stake you -can't be expected to take abstract views of the higher matters. We had -better change the subject." - -Valentine said: - -"Yes, do. Get on with your excuses for not asking me and mother to your -knighthood party." - -Mrs. Duchemin, too, rose at that. She felt at her amber beads with long -fingers that turned very slightly at the tips. She had behind her all -her mirrors, the drops of her lustres, shining points of gilt and of the -polish of dark woods. Valentine thought that she had never seen anyone -so absolutely impersonate kindness, tenderness and dignity. She said: - -"My dear, I was going to suggest that it was the sort of party to which -you might not care to come. . . . The people will be stiff and formal -and you probably haven't got a frock." - -Valentine said: - -"Oh, I've got a frock all right. But there's a Jacob's ladder in my -party stockings and that's the sort of ladder you can't kick down." She -couldn't help saying that. - -Mrs. Duchemin stood motionless and very slowly redness mounted into her -face. It was most curious to see against that scarlet background the -vivid white of the eyes and the dark, straight eyebrows that nearly met. -And, slowly again her face went perfectly white; then her dark blue eyes -became marked. She seemed to wipe her long, white hands one in the -other, inserting her right hand into her left and drawing it out again. - -"I'm sorry," she said in a dead voice. "We had hoped that, if that man -went to France--or if other things happened--we might have continued on -the old friendly footing. But you yourself must see that, with our -official position, we can't be expected to connive . . ." - -Valentine said: - -"I don't understand!" - -"Perhaps you'd rather I didn't go on!" Mrs. Duchemin retorted. "I'd much -rather not go on." - -"You'd probably better," Valentine answered. - -"We had meant," the elder woman said, "to have a quiet little dinner--we -two and you, before the party--for auld lang syne. But that fellow has -forced himself in, and you see for yourself that we can't have you as -well." - -Valentine said: - -"I don't see why not. I always like to see Mr. Tietjens!" - -Mrs. Duchemin looked hard at her. - -"I don't see the use," she said, "of your keeping on that mask. It is -surely bad enough that your mother should go about with that man and -that terrible scenes like that of the other Friday should occur. Mrs. -Tietjens was heroic; nothing less than heroic. But you have no right to -subject us, your friends, to such ordeals." - -Valentine said: - -"You mean . . . Mrs. Christopher Tietjens . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin went on: - -"My husband insists that I should ask you. But I will not. I simply will -not. I invented for you the excuse of the frock. Of course we could have -given you a frock if that man is so mean or so penniless as not to keep -you decent. But I repeat, with our official position we cannot--we -cannot; it would be madness!--connive at this intrigue. And all the more -as the wife appears likely to be friendly with us. She has been once: -she may well come again." She paused and went on solemnly: "And I warn -you, if the split comes--as it must, for what woman could stand it!--it -is Mrs. Tietjens we shall support. She will always find a home here." - -An extraordinary picture of Sylvia Tietjens standing beside Edith Ethel -and dwarfing her as a giraffe dwarfs an emu, came into Valentine's head. -She said: - -"Ethel! Have I gone mad? Or is it you? Upon my word I can't -understand. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed: - -"For God's sake hold your tongue, you shameless thing! You've had a -child by the man, haven't you?" - -Valentine saw suddenly the tall silver candlesticks, the dark polished -panels of the rectory and Edith Ethel's mad face and mad hair whirling -before them. - -She said: - -"No! I certainly haven't. Can you get that into your head? I certainly -haven't." She made a further effort over immense fatigue. "I assure -you--I beg you to believe if it will give you any ease--that Mr. -Tietjens has never addressed a word of love to me in his life. Nor have -I to him. We have hardly talked to each other in all the time we have -known each other." - -Mrs. Duchemin said in a harsh voice: - -"Seven people in the last five weeks have told me you have had a child -by that brute beast: he's ruined because he has to keep you and your -mother and the child. You won't deny that he has a child somewhere -hidden away? . . ." - -Valentine exclaimed suddenly: - -"Oh, Ethel, you mustn't . . . you _mustn't_ be jealous of me! If you -only knew you wouldn't be jealous of me. . . . I suppose the child you -were going to have was by Christopher? Men are like that. . . . But not -of me! You need never, never. I've been the best friend you can ever -have had. . . ." - -Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed harshly, as if she were being strangled: - -"A sort of blackmail! I knew it would come to that! It always does with -your sort. Then do your damnedest, you harlot. You never set foot in -this house again! Go you and rot. . . ." Her face suddenly expressed -extreme fear and with great swiftness she ran up the room. Immediately -afterwards she was tenderly bending over a great bowl of roses beneath -the lustre. The voice of Vincent Macmaster from the door had said: - -"Come in, old man. Of course I've got ten minutes. The book's in here -somewhere. . . ." - -Macmaster was beside her, rubbing his hands, bending with his curious, -rather abject manner, and surveying her agonisedly with his eyeglass, -which enormously magnified his lashes, his red lower lid and the veins -on his cornea. - -"Valentine!" he said, "my dear Valentine. . . . You've heard? We've -decided to make it public. . . . Guggums will have invited you to our -little feast. And there will be a surprise, I believe. . . ." - -Edith Ethel looked, as she bent, lamentably and sharply, over her -shoulder at Valentine. - -"Yes," she said bravely, aiming her voice at Edith Ethel, "Ethel has -invited me. I'll try to come. . . ." - -"Oh, but you must," Macmaster said, "just you and Christopher, who've -been so kind to us. For old time's sake. You could not . . ." - -Christopher Tietjens was ballooning slowly from the door, his hand -tentatively held out to her. As they practically never shook hands at -home it was easy to avoid his hand. She said to herself: "Oh! How is it -possible! How could he have. . ." And the terrible situation poured -itself over her mind: the miserable little husband, the desperately -nonchalant lover--and Edith Ethel mad with jealousy! A doomed household. -She hoped Edith Ethel had seen her refuse her hand to Christopher. - -But Edith Ethel, bent over her rose bowl, was burying her beautiful face -in flower after flower. She was accustomed to do this for many minutes -on end: she thought that, so, she resembled a picture by the subject of -her husband's first little monograph. And so, Valentine thought, she -did. She was trying to tell Macmaster that Friday evenings were -difficult times for her to get away. But her throat ached too much. -That, she knew, was her last sight of Edith Ethel, whom she had loved -very much. That also, she hoped, would be her last sight of Christopher -Tietjens--whom also she had loved very much. . . . He was browsing along -a bookshelf, very big and very clumsy. - -Macmaster pursued her into the stony hall with clamorous repetitions of -his invitation. She couldn't speak. At the great iron-lined door he held -her hand for an eternity, gazing lamentably, his face close up against -hers. He exclaimed in accents of great fear: - -"Has Guggums? . . . She _hasn't_ . . ." His face, which when you saw it -so closely was a little blotched, distorted itself with anxiety: he -glanced aside with panic at the drawing-room door. - -Valentine burst a voice through her agonised throat. - -"Ethel," she said, "has told me she's to be Lady Macmaster. I'm so glad. -I'm so truly glad for you. You've got what you wanted, haven't you?" - -His relief let him get out distractedly, yet as if he were too tired to -be any more agitated: - -"Yes! yes! . . . It's, of course, a secret. . . . I don't want _him_ -told till Friday next . . . so as to be a sort of _bonne bouche_ . . . -He's practically certain to go out again on Saturday. . . . They're -sending out a great batch of them . . . for the big push. . . ." At that -she tried to draw her hand from his: she missed what he was saying. It -was something to the effect that he would give it all for a happy little -party. She caught the rather astonishing words: "_Wie der alten schoenen -Zeit._" She couldn't tell whether it was his or her eyes that were full -of tears. She said: - -"I believe . . . I believe you're a kind man!" - -In the great stone hall, hung with long Japanese paintings on silk, the -electric light suddenly jumped; it was at best a sad, brown place. - -He exclaimed: - -"I, too, beg you to believe that I will never abandon . . ." He glanced -again at the inner door and added: "You both . . . I will never abandon -. . . you both!" he repeated. - -He let go her hand: she was on the stone stairs in the damp air. The -great door closed irresistibly behind her, sending a whisper of air -downwards. - - - - -V - - -Mark Tietjens' announcement that his father had after all carried out -his long-standing promise to provide for Mrs. Wannop in such a way as to -allow her to write for the rest of her life only the more lasting kind -of work, delivered Valentine Wannop of all her problems except one. That -one loomed, naturally and immediately, immensely large. - -She had passed a queer, unnatural week, the feeling dominating its -numbness having been, oddly, that she would have nothing to do on -Friday! This feeling recurred to her whilst she was casting her eyes -over a hundred girls all in their cloth jumpers and men's black ties, -aligned upon asphalte; whilst she was jumping on trams; whilst she was -purchasing the tinned or dried fish that formed the staple diet of -herself and her mother; whilst she was washing-up the dinner-things; -upbraiding the house agent for the state of the bath, or bending closely -over the large but merciless handwriting of the novel of her mother's -that she was typing. It came, half as a joy, half mournfully across her -familiar businesses; she felt as a man might feel who, luxuriating in -the anticipation of leisure, knew that it was obtained by being -compulsorily retired from some laborious but engrossing job. There would -be nothing to do on Fridays! - -It was, too, as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she -would never know the end. Of the fairy-tale she knew the end: the -fortunate and adventurous tailor had married his beautiful and -be-princessed goose girl, and was well on the way to burial in -Westminster Abbey--or at any rate to a memorial service, the squire -being actually buried amongst his faithful villagers. But she would -never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch -tiles they wanted to line their bathroom. . . . She would never know. -Yet witnessing similar ambitions had made up a great deal of her life. - -And, she said to herself, there was another tale ended. On the surface -the story of her love for Tietjens had been static enough. It had begun -in nothing and in nothing it had ended. But, deep down in her being--ah! -it had progressed enough. Through the agency of two women! Before the -scene with Mrs. Duchemin there could, she thought, have been few young -women less preoccupied than she with the sexual substrata, either of -passion or of life. Her months as a domestic servant had accounted for -that, sex, as she had seen it from a back kitchen, having been a -repulsive affair, whilst the knowledge of its manifestations that she -had thus attained had robbed it of the mystery which caused most of the -young women whom she knew to brood upon these subjects. - -Her conviction: as to the moral incidence of sex were, she knew, quite -opportunist. Brought up amongst rather "advanced" young people, had she -been publicly challenged to pronounce her views she would probably, out -of loyalty to her comrades, have declared that neither morality nor any -ethical aspects were concerned in the matter. Like most of her young -friends, influenced by the advanced teachers and tendential novelists of -the day, she would have stated herself to advocate an--of course, -enlightened!--promiscuity. That, before the revelations of Mrs. -Duchemin! Actually she had thought very little about the matter. - -Nevertheless, even before that date, had her deeper feelings been -questioned she would have reacted with the idea that sexual incontinence -was extremely ugly and chastity to be prized in the egg and spoon race -that life was. She had been brought up by her father--who, perhaps, was -wiser than appeared on the surface--to admire athleticism, and she was -aware that proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety, -cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the -heading of abnegation. She couldn't have lived amongst the Ealing -servant-class--the eldest son of the house in which she had been -employed bad been the defendant in a peculiarly scabrous breach of -promise case, and the comments of the drunken cook on this and similar -affairs had run the whole gamut from the sentimentally reticent to the -extreme of coarseness according to the state of her alcoholic -barometer--she couldn't then have lived among the Ealing servant-class -and come to any other subliminal conclusion. So that, dividing the world -into bright beings on the one hand and, on the other, into the mere -stuff to fill graveyards whose actions during life couldn't matter, she -had considered that the bright beings must be people whose public -advocating of enlightened promiscuity went along with an absolute -continence. She was aware that enlightened beings occasionally fell away -from these standards in order to become portentous Egerias; but the Mary -Wollstonecrafts, the Mrs. Taylors, and the George Eliots of the last -century she had regarded humorously as rather priggish nuisances. -Indeed, being very healthy and very hard worked, she had been in the -habit of regarding the whole matter, if not humorously, then at least -good-humouredly, as a nuisance. - -But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a -first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs. Duchemin -had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely -æsthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and -infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook. -The language that she had used about her lover--calling him always "that -oaf" or "that beast"!--had seemed literally to pain the girl internally, -as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports at each -two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through the -darkness from the rectory. - -And she had never heard what had become of Mrs. Duchemin's baby. Next -day Mrs. Duchemin had been as suave, as circumspect, and as collected as -ever. Never a word more had passed between them on the subject. This -left in Valentine Wannop's mind a dark patch--as it were of murder--at -which she must never look. And across the darkened world of her sexual -tumult there flitted continually the quick suspicion that Tietjens might -have been the lover of her friend. It was a matter of the simplest -analogy. Mrs. Duchemin had appeared a bright being: so had Tietjens. But -Mrs. Duchemin was a foul whore. . . . How much more then must Tietjens, -who was a man, with the larger sexual necessities of the male . . . Her -mind always refused to complete the thought. - -Its suggestion wasn't to be combated by the idea of Vincent Macmaster -himself: he was, she felt, the sort of man that it was almost a -necessity for either mistress or comrade to betray. He seemed to ask for -it. Besides, she once put it to herself, how could any woman, given the -choice and the opportunity--and God knows there was opportunity -enough--choose that shadowy, dried leaf, if there were the splendid -masculinity of Tietjens in whose arms to lie. She so regarded these two -men. And that shadowy conviction was at once fortified and appeased -when, a little later, Mrs. Duchemin herself began to apply to Tietjens -the epithets of "oaf" and "beast"--the very ones that she had used to -designate the father of her putative child! - -But then Tietjens must have abandoned Mrs. Duchemin; and, if he had -abandoned Mrs. Duchemin, he must be available for her, Valentine Wannop! -The feeling, she considered, made her ignoble; but it came from depths -of her being that she could not control and, existing, it soothed her. -Then, with the coming of the war, the whole problem died out, and -between the opening of hostilities and what she had known to be the -inevitable departure of her lover, she had surrendered herself to what -she thought to be the pure physical desire for him. Amongst the -terrible, crashing anguishes of that time, there had been nothing for it -but surrender! With the unceasing--the never ceasing--thought of -suffering; with the never ceasing idea that her lover, too, must soon be -so suffering, there was in the world no other refuge. No other! - -She surrendered. She waited for him to speak the word, or look the look -that should unite them. She was finished. Chastity: napoo finny! Like -everything else! - -Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In -the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in -which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the -village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, -little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to -take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, -thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or -not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it -was thus love worked upon the body--and that it would stop for ever at -that! - -But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. -It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her -whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you -are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if -physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid -itself. The moon so draws the tides. - -Once before, for a fraction of a second, after the long, warm night of -their drive, she had felt that impulsion. Now, years after, she was to -know it all the time, waking or half waking; and it would drive her from -her bed. She would stand all night at the open window till the stars -paled above a world turned grey. It could convulse her with joy; it -could shake her with sobs and cut through her breast like a knife. - -The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed -beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her -mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago: he had been -going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what -a love scene was. It passed without any mention of the word "love"; it -passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word -they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, -when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of -your lover beating upon your heart. - -Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster -furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he -had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world--"To -no other soul in the world," he had said!--his doubts, his misgivings -and his fears: it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, -during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered -the word "Come" she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the -earth; if he had said, "There is no hope," she would have known the -finality of despair. Having said neither he said, she knew: "This is our -condition; so we must continue!" And she knew, too, that he was telling -her that he, like her, was . . . oh, say on the side of the angels. She -was then, she knew, so nicely balanced that, had he said, "Will you -to-night be my mistress?" she would have said "Yes"; for it was as if -they had been, really, at the end of the world. - -But his abstention not only strengthened her in her predilection for -chastity; it restored to her her image of the world as a place of -virtues and endeavours. For a time at least she again hummed beneath her -breath upon occasion, for it seemed as if her heart sang within her. And -there was restored to her her image of her lover as a beautiful spirit. -She had been able to look at him across the tea-table of their dog -kennel in Bedford Park, during the last months, almost as she had looked -across the more shining table of the cottage near the rectory. The -deterioration that she knew Mrs. Duchemin to have worked in her mind was -assuaged. It could even occur to her that Mrs. Duchemin's madness had -been no more than a scare to be followed by no necessary crime. -Valentine Wannop had re-become her confident self in a world of at least -straight problems. - -But Mrs. Duchemin's outbreak of a week ago had driven the old phantoms -across her mind. For Mrs. Duchemin she had still had a great respect. -She could not regard her Edith Ethel as merely a hypocrite; or, indeed, -as a hypocrite at all. There was her great achievement of making -something like a man of that miserable little creature--as there had -been her other great achievement of keeping her unfortunate husband for -so long out of a lunatic asylum. That had been no mean feat; neither -feat had been mean. And Valentine knew that Edith Ethel really loved -beauty, circumspection, urbanity. It was no hypocrisy that made her -advocate the Atalanta race of chastity. But, also, as Valentine Wannop -saw it, humanity has these doublings of strong natures; just as the -urbane and grave Spanish nation must find its outlet in the shrieking -lusts of the bull-ring or the circumspect, laborious and admirable city -typist must find her derivative in the cruder lusts of certain -novelists, so Edith Ethel must break down into physical sexualities--and -into shrieked coarseness of fishwives. How else, indeed, do we have -saints? Surely, alone, by the ultimate victory of the one tendency over -the other! - -But now after her farewell scene with Edith Ethel a simple -re-arrangement of the pattern had brought many of the old doubts at -least temporarily back. Valentine said to herself that, just because of -the very strength of her character, Edith Ethel couldn't have been -brought down to uttering her fantastic denunciation of Tietjens, the -merely mad charges of debauchery and excesses and finally the sexually -lunatic charge against herself, except under the sting of some such -passion as jealousy. She, Valentine, couldn't arrive at any other -conclusion. And, viewing the matter as she believed she now did, more -composedly, she considered with seriousness that, men being what they -are, her lover respecting, or despairing of, herself had relieved the -grosser necessities of his being--at the expense of Mrs. Duchemin, who -had, no doubt, been only too ready. - -And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this -suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards the -Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going from -her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life -stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the long, -hard thing that life is. And on the Thursday two minor, or major, -worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced himself as -coming home for several days' leave, and she had the trouble of thinking -that she would have forced upon her a companionship and a point of view -that would be coarsely and uproariously opposed to anything that -Tietjens stood for--or for which he was ready to sacrifice himself. -Moreover she would have to accompany her brother to a number of riotous -festivities whilst all the time she would have to think of Tietjens as -getting hour by hour nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in -contact with enemy forces. In addition her mother had received an -enviably paid for commission from one of the more excitable Sunday -papers to write a series of articles on extravagant matters connected -with the hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully--more -particularly as Edward was coming home--that Valentine Wannop had -conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her mother. . . . -It would have meant very little waste of time, and the £60 that it -would have brought in would have made all the difference to them for -months and months. - -But Tietjens, whom Mrs. Wannop had come to rely on as her right hand man -in these matters, had, it appeared, shown an unexpected recalcitrancy. -He had, Mrs. Wannop said, hardly seemed himself and had gibed at the two -first subjects proposed--that of "war babies" and the fact that the -Germans were reduced to eating their own corpses--as being below the -treatment of any decent pen. The illegitimacy rate, he had said, had -shown very little increase; the French-derived German word "_Cadaver_" -meant bodies of horses or cattle; _Leichnam_ being the German for the -word "corpse." He had practically refused to have anything to do with -the affair. - -As to the _Cadaver_ business Valentine agreed with him, as to the "war -babies" she kept a more open mind. If there weren't any war babies it -couldn't, as far as she could see, matter whether one wrote about them; -it couldn't certainly matter as much as to write about them, supposing -the poor little things to exist. She was aware that this was immoral, -but her mother needed the money desperately and her mother came first. - -There was nothing for it, therefore, but to plead with Tietjens, for -Valentine knew that without so much of moral support from him as would -be implied by a good-natured, or an enforced sanction of the article, -Mrs. Wannop would drop the matter and so would lose her connection with -the excitable paper which paid well. It happened that on the Friday -morning Mrs. Wannop received a request that she would write for a Swiss -review a propaganda article about some historical matter connected with -the peace after Waterloo. The pay would be practically nothing, but the -employment was at least relatively dignified, and Mrs. Wannop--which was -quite in the ordinary course of things!--told Valentine to ring Tietjens -up and ask him for some details about the Congress of Vienna at which, -before and after Waterloo, the peace terms had been wrangled out. - -Valentine rang up--as she had done hundreds of times; it was to her a -great satisfaction that she was going to hear Tietjens speak once more -at least. The telephone was answered from the other end, and Valentine -gave her two messages, the one as to the Congress of Vienna, the other -as to war babies. The appalling speech came back: - -"Young woman! You'd better keep off the grass. Mrs. Duchemin is already -my husband's mistress. You keep off." There was about the voice no human -quality; it was as if from an immense darkness the immense machine had -spoken words that dealt blows. She answered; and it was as if a -substratum of her mind of which she knew nothing must have been prepared -for that very speech; so that it was not her own "she" that answered -levelly and coolly: - -"You have probably mistaken the person you are speaking to. Perhaps you -will ask Mr. Tietjens to ring up Mrs. Wannop when he is at liberty." - -The voice said: - -"My husband will be at the War Office at 4.15. He will speak to you -there--about your war babies. But I'd keep off the grass if I were you!" -The receiver at the other end was hung up. - -She went about her daily duties. She had heard of a kind of pine kernel -that was very cheap and very nourishing, or at least very filling. They -had come to it that it was a matter of pennies balanced against the -feeling of satiety, and she visited several shops in search of this -food. When she had found it she returned to the dog kennel; her brother -Edward had arrived. He was rather subdued. He brought with him a piece -of meat which was part of his leave ration. He occupied himself with -polishing up his sailor's uniform for a rag-time party to which they -were to go that evening. They were to meet plenty of conchies, he said. -Valentine put the meat--it was a Godsend, though very stringy!--on to -stew with a number of chopped vegetables. She went up to her room to do -some typing for her mother. - -The nature of Tietjens' wife occupied her mind. Before, she had barely -thought about her: she had seemed unreal; so mysterious as to be a myth! -Radiant and high-stepping: like a great stag! But she must be cruel! She -must be vindictively cruel to Tietjens himself, or she could not have -revealed his private affairs! Just broadcast; for she could not, bluff -it how she might, have been certain of to whom she was speaking! A thing -that wasn't done! But she had delivered her cheek to Mrs. Wannop; a -thing, too, that wasn't done! Yet so kindly! The telephone bell rang -several times during the morning. She let her mother answer it. - -She had to get the dinner, which took three-quarters of an hour. It was -a pleasure to see her mother eat so well; a good stew, rich and heavy -with haricot beans. She herself couldn't eat, but no one noticed, which -was a good thing. Her mother said that Tietjens had not yet telephoned, -which was very inconsiderate. Edward said: "What! The Huns haven't -killed old Feather Bolster yet? But of course he's been found a safe -job." The telephone on the sideboard became a terror to Valentine; at -any moment his voice might . . . Edward went on telling anecdotes of how -they bamboozled petty officers on mine-sweepers. Mrs. Wannop listened to -him with the courteous, distant interest of the great listening to -commercial travellers. Edward desired draught ale and produced a two -shilling piece. He seemed very much coarsened; it was, no doubt, only on -the surface. In these days everyone was very much coarsened on the -surface. - -She went with a quart jug to the jug and bottle department of the -nearest public-house--a thing she had never done before. Even at Ealing -the mistress hadn't allowed her to be sent to a public-house; the cook -had had to fetch her dinner beer herself or have it sent in. Perhaps the -Ealing mistress had exercised more surveillance than Valentine had -believed; a kind woman, but an invalid. Nearly all day in bed. Blind -passion overcame Valentine at the thought of Edith Ethel in Tietjens' -arms. Hadn't she got her own eunuch? Mrs. Tietjens had said: "Mrs. -Duchemin is his mistress!" _Is!_ Then he might be there now! - -In the contemplation of that image she missed the thrills of buying beer -in a bottle and jug department. Apparently it was like buying anything -else, except for the smell of beer on the sawdust. You said: "A quart of -the best bitter!" and a fat, quite polite man, with an oily head and a -white apron, took your money and filled your jug. . . . But Edith Ethel -had abused Tietjens so foully! The more foully the more certain it made -it! . . . Draught beer in a jug had little marblings of burst foam on -its brown surface. It mustn't be spilt at the kerbs of crossings!--the -more certain it made it! Some women did so abuse their lovers after -sleeping with them, and the more violent the transports the more frantic -the abuse. It was the "_post-dash-tristis_" of the Rev. Duchemin! Poor -devil! Tristis! Tristis! - -_Terra tribus scopulis vastum_ . . . _Not_ longum! - -Brother Edward began communing with himself, long and unintelligibly as -to where he should meet his sister at 19.30 and give her a blow-out! The -names of restaurants fell from his lips into her panic. He decided -hilariously and not quite steadily--a quart is a lot to a fellow from a -mine-sweeper carrying no booze at all!--on meeting her at 7.20 at High -Street and going to a pub he knew; they would go on to the dance -afterwards. In a studio. "Oh, God!" her heart said, "if Tietjens should -want her then!" To be his; on his last night. He might! Everybody was -coarsened then; on the surface. Her brother rolled out of the house, -slamming the door so that every tile on the jerry-built dog kennel rose -and sat down again. - -She went upstairs and began to look over her frocks. She couldn't tell -what frocks she looked over; they lay like aligned rags on the bed, the -telephone bell ringing madly. She heard her mother's voice, suddenly -assuaged: "Oh! oh! . . . It's you!" She shut her door and began to pull -open and to close drawer after drawer. As soon as she ceased that -exercise her mother's voice became half audible; quite audible when she -raised it to ask a question. She heard her say: "Not get her into -trouble . . . Of _course_!" then it died away into mere high sounds. - -She heard her mother calling: - -"Valentine! Valentine! Come down. . . . Don't you want to speak to -Christopher? . . . Valentine! Valentine! . . ." And then another burst: -"Valentine . . . Valentine . . . _Valentine_ . . ." As if she had been a -puppy dog! Mrs. Wannop, thank God, was on the lowest step of the creaky -stairs. She had left the telephone. She called up: - -"Come down. I want to tell you! The dear boy has saved me! He always -saves me! What shall I do now he's gone?" - -"He saved others: himself he could not save!" Valentine quoted bitterly. -She caught up her wideawake. She wasn't going to prink herself for him. -He must take her as she was. . . . Himself he could not save! But he did -himself proud! With women! . . . Coarsened! But perhaps only on the -surface! She herself! . . . She was running downstairs! - -Her mother had retreated into the little parlour: nine feet by nine; in -consequence, at ten feet it was too tall for its size. But there was in -it a sofa with cushions. . . . With her head upon those cushions, -perhaps. . . . If he came home with her! Late! . . . - -Her mother was saying: He's a splendid fellow. . . . A root idea for a -war baby article. . . . If a Tommy was a decent fellow he abstained -because he didn't want to leave his girl in trouble. . . . If he wasn't -he chanced it because it might be his last chance. . . . - -"A message to me!" Valentine said to herself. "But _which_ -sentence. . . ." She moved, absently, all the cushions to one end of the -sofa. Her mother exclaimed: - -"He sent his love! His mother was lucky to have such a son!" and turned -into her tiny hole of a study. - -Valentine ran down over the broken tiles of the garden path, pulling her -wideawake firmly on. She had looked at her wrist watch; it was two and -twelve: 14.45. If she was to walk to the War Office by 4.15--16.15--a -sensible innovation!--she must step out. Five miles to Whitehall. God -knows what, then! Five miles back! Two and a half, diagonally, to High -Street Station by half-past 19! Twelve and a half miles in five hours or -less. And three hours dancing on the top of it. And to dress! . . . She -needed to be fit . . . And, with violent bitterness, she said: - -"Well! I'm fit. . . ." She had an image of the aligned hundred of girls -in blue jumpers and men's ties keeping whom fit had kept her super-fit. -She wondered how many of them would be men's mistresses before the year -was out. It was August then. But perhaps none! Because she had kept them -fit. . . . - -"Ah!" she said, "if I had been a loose woman, with flaccid breasts and a -soft body. All perfumed!" . . . But neither Sylvia Tietjens nor Ethel -Duchemin were soft. They might be scented on occasion! But they could -not contemplate with equanimity doing a twelve mile walk to save a few -pence and dancing all night on top of it! She could! And perhaps the -price she paid was just that; she was in such hard condition she hadn't -moved him to . . . She perhaps exhaled such an aura of sobriety, -chastity and abstinence as to suggest to him that . . . that a decent -fellow didn't get his girl into trouble before going to be killed. . . . -Yet if he were such a town bull! . . . She wondered how she knew such -phrases. . . . - -The sordid and aligned houses seemed to rush past her in the mean August -sunshine. That was because if you thought hard time went quicker; or -because after you noticed the paper shop at this corner you would be up -to the boxes of onions outside the shop of the next corner before you -noticed anything else. - -She was in Kensington Gardens, on the north side; she had left the poor -shops behind. . . . In sham country, with sham lawns, sham avenues, sham -streams. Sham people pursuing their ways across the sham grass. Or no! -Not sham! In a vacuum! No! "Pasteurised" was the word! Like dead milk. -Robbed of their vitamines. . . . - -If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a larger pile to put -into the leering--or compassionate--taxicabman's hand after he had -helped her support her brother into the dog kennel door. Edward would be -dead drunk. She had fifteen shillings for the taxi . . . If she gave a -few coppers more it seemed generous. . . . What a day to look forward to -still! Some days were lifetimes! - -She would rather die than let Tietjens pay for the cab! - -Why? Once a taximan had refused payment for driving her and Edward all -the way to Chiswick, and she hadn't felt insulted. She had paid him; but -she hadn't felt insulted! A sentimental fellow; touched at the heart by -the pretty sister--or perhaps he didn't really believe it was a -sister--and her incapable bluejacket brother! Tietjens was a sentimental -fellow too. . . . What was the difference? . . . And then! The mother a -dead, heavy sleeper; the brother dead drunk. One in the morning! He -couldn't refuse her! Blackness: cushions! She had arranged the cushions, -she remembered. Arranged them subconsciously! Blackness! Heavy sleep; -dead drunkenness! . . . Horrible! . . . A disgusting affair! An affair -of Ealing. . . . It shall make her one with all the stuff to fill -graveyards. . . . Well, what else was she, Valentine Wannop: daughter of -her father? And of her mother? Yes! But she herself . . . Just a little -nobody! - -They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty. . . . But her brother -was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking treason. -At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas couldn't -for the moment concern him. . . . That 'bus touched her skirt as she ran -for the island. . . . It might have been better. . . . But one hadn't -the courage! - -She was looking at patterned deaths under a little green roof, such as -they put over bird shelters. Her heart stopped! Before, she had been -breathless! She was going mad. She was dying. . . . All these deaths! -And not merely the deaths. . . . The waiting for the approach of death; -the contemplation of the parting from life! This minute you were; that, -and you weren't! What was it like? Oh heaven, she knew. . . . She stood -there contemplating parting from . . . One minute you were; the -next . . . Her breath fluttered in her chest. . . . Perhaps he -wouldn't come . . . - -He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him and -said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and his like -responsible! . . . He had apparently a brother, a responsible one too! -Browner complexioned! . . . But he! He! He! He! completely calm; with -direct eyes. . . . It wasn't possible. "_Holde Lippen: klaare Augen: -heller Sinn_. . . ." Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And -the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn't look at you so, unless . . . - -She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he belonged--more -than to any browner, mere civilian, brother!--to her! She was going to -ask him! If he answered: "Yes! I am such a man!" she was going to say: -"Then you must take me too! If them, why not me? I must have a child. I -too!" She desired a child. She would overwhelm these hateful lodestones -with a flood of argument; she imagined--she felt--the words going -between her lips. . . . She imagined her fainting mind; her consenting -limbs. . . . - -His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings. -Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word from him. -Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence -than words can enhance a love that exists. He might as well have recited -the names of railway stations. His eyes, his unconcerned face, his -tranquil shoulders; they were what acquitted him. The greatest love -speech he had ever and could ever make her was when, harshly and -angrily, he said something like: - -"Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better"--brushing her aside as if -she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to her! - -She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said -"Pink! pink!" The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against -her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed. . . . It was just a -problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him. . . . Good _for_ him -was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like -water that goes off the boil. . . . "Waters stilled at even." Nonsense. -It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save _his_ -brother. . . . Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm -feeling settled down upon her; this was _her_ brother; the next to the -best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with -another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! -She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, -never so grateful as to the other--who had done nothing! - -Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the -blessed word Transport! "They," so Mark said: he and she--the family -feeling again--were going to get Christopher into the Transport. . . . -By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of -the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who -could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. -"Hooray!" he had written to his mother, "I've been off my feed; -recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they're putting me senior N.C.O. of -First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally -front line caboodle!" Valentine had had to read this letter in the -scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she -had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But -charity begins surely with the char! She had had to. Now she could thank -God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his -mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber -wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. "Why," one -sentence ran, "our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. -Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b----y -hell to the man who walks across it!" There the O.C. practised casting -with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. "That'll show you what -a soft job it is!" the sergeant had finished triumphantly. . . . - -So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall; -downright, healthy middle-class--or perhaps upper middle-class--for the -Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible, -mocassined shoes the tide of humanity flowed before her hard bench. -There were two commissionaires, the one always benevolent, the other -perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of her; on the other, a -brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy -efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his -mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a knob. She could -not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to conciliate her; but -she knew she would know in a minute. - -For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost -mathematically symmetrical. _Now_ she was an English middle-class -girl--whose mother had a sufficient income--in blue cloth, a wideawake -hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she shouldn't -have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five -minutes ago, she had been . . . She could not even remember what she had -been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town . . . No, she -could not think the words. . . . A raging stallion then! If now he -should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the table, she -would retreat. - -It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old -man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick. . . . When the old -man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman -came out . . . It was exactly like that! She hadn't time to work out the -analogy. But it was like that. . . . In rainy weather the whole world -altered. Darkened! . . . The cat-gut that turned them slackened . . . -slackened. . . . But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the -stick! - -Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance: - -"We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother. . . ." - -It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how -little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr. -Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years ago. Her -mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting, Mr. Tietjens -alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it up to her. He -was making it up. In no princely fashion, but adequately, as a -gentleman. - -Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bell-boy came up -to him and said: "Mr. Riccardo!" Mark Tietjens said: "No! He's gone!" He -continued: - -"Your brother. . . . Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a -practice, a good practice! When he's a full-fledged sawbones." He -stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his umbrella -handle; he was extremely nervous. - -"Now you!" he said. "Two or three hundred. A year of course! The capital -absolutely your own. . . ." He paused: "But I warn you! Christopher -won't like it. He's got his knife into me. I wouldn't grudge you . . . -oh, any sum!" . . . He waved his hand to indicate an amount boundless in -its figures. "I know you keep Christopher straight," he said. "The only -person that could!" He added: "Poor devil!" - -She said: - -"He's got his knife into you? Why?" - -He answered vaguely: - -"Oh, there's been all this talk. . . . Untrue, of course." - -She said: - -"People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps because -there's been delay in settling the estate." - -He said: - -"Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!" - -"Then they have been saying," she exclaimed, "things against . . . -against me. And him!" - -He exclaimed in anguish: - -"Oh, but I ask you to believe . . . I beg you to believe that I believe -. . . _you_! Miss Wannop!" He added grotesquely: "As pure as dew that -lies within Aurora's sun-tipped . . ." His eyes stuck out like those of -a suffocating fish. He said: "I beg you not on that account to hand the -giddy mitten to . . ." He writhed in his tight double collar. "His -wife!" he said . . . "She's no good to . . . _for_ him! . . . She's -soppily in love with him. But no _good_ . . ." He very nearly sobbed. -"You're the only . . ." he said, "I _know_ . . ." - -It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle -des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Fivepence! But -what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year. . . . Two -hundred and forty times five. . . . - -Mark said brightly: - -"If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred. . . . You say -that's ample to give Christopher his chop. . . . And settled on her -three . . . four . . . I like to be exact . . . hundred a year. . . . -The capital of it: with remainder to you . . ." His interrogative face -beamed. - -She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood -Mrs. Duchemin's: - -"You couldn't expect us, with our official position . . . to -connive . . ." Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She _couldn't_ be -expected. . . . She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! -You can't ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! . . . -It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said--to Mark: - -"It's as if the whole world had conspired . . . like a carpenter's -vice--to force us . . ." she was going to say "together. . . ." But he -burst in, astonishingly: - -"He must have his buttered toast . . . and his mutton chop . . . and -Rhum St. James!" He said: "Damn it all. . . . You were made for him. . . . -You can't blame people for coupling you. . . . They're forced to it. . . . -If you hadn't existed they'd have had to invent you . . . Like Dante -for . . . who was it? . . . Beatrice? There _are_ couples like that." - -She said: - -"Like a carpenter's vice. . . . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven't -we resisted?" - -His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the -pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered: - -"You won't . . . because of my ox's hoof . . . desert . . ." - -She said:--she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely. - -"I ask you to believe that I will never . . . abandon . . ." - -It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. Micawber! - -Christopher Tietjens--in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his -best uniform--spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had approached her -from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she had been -turned towards Mark on his bench: - -"Come along! Let's get out of this!" He was, she asked herself, getting -out of this! Towards what? - -Like mutes from a funeral--or as if she had been, between the brothers, -a prisoner under escort--they walked down steps; half righted towards -the exit arch; one and a half righted to face Whitehall. The brothers -grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over her head. They crossed, by -the islands, Whitehall, where the 'bus had brushed her skirt. Under an -archway-- - -In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other. Mark -said: - -"I suppose you won't shake hands!" - -Christopher said: - -"No! Why should I?" She herself had cried out to Christopher: - -"Oh, _do_!" (The wireless squares overhead no longer concerned her. Her -brother was, no doubt, getting drunk in a bar in Piccadilly. . . . A -surface coarseness!) - -Mark said: - -"Hadn't you better? You might get killed! A fellow just getting killed -would not like to think he had refused to shake his brother by the -hand!" - -Christopher had said: "Oh . . . well!" - -During her happiness over this hyperborean sentimentality he had gripped -her thin upper arm. He had led her past swans--or possibly huts; she -never remembered which--to a seat that had over it, or near it, a -weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish: - -"Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from -Waterloo." - -She had answered: - -"Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve. . . . I have to -see my brother home. . . . He will be drunk. . . ." She meant to say: -"Oh, my darling, I have wanted you so much. . . ." - -She said instead: - -"I have arranged the cushions. . . ." - -She said to herself: - -"Now whatever made me say that? It's as if I had said: 'You'll find the -ham in the larder under a plate. . . .' No tenderness about it. . . ." - -She went away, up a cockle-shelled path, between ankle-high railings, -crying bitterly. An old tramp, with red weeping eyes and a thin white -beard, regarded her curiously from where he lay on the grass. He -imagined himself the monarch of that landscape. - -"That's women!" he said with the apparently imbecile enigmaticality of -the old and the hardened. "Some do!" He spat into the grass; said: "Ah!" -then added: "Some do not!" - - - - -VI - - -He let himself in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind him, in -the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious -whisperings up the great stone stairs. These sounds irritated him. If -you shut a heavy door on an enclosed space it will push air in front of -it and there will be whisperings; the atmosphere of mystery was absurd. -He was just a man, returning after a night out. . . . Two-thirds, say, -of a night out! It must be half-past three. But what the night had -lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects. . . . - -He laid his cane down on the invisible oak chest and, through the -tangible and velvety darkness that had always in it the chill of the -stone of walls and stairs, he felt for the handle of the breakfast-room -door. - -Three long parallelograms existed: pale glimmerings above, cut -two-thirds of the way down by the serrations of chimney pot and -roof-shadows! Nine full paces across the heavy piled carpet; then he -ought to reach his round-backed chair, by the left-hand window. He -reached his round-backed chair by the left-hand window. He sank into it; -it fitted exactly his back. He imagined that no man had ever been so -tired and that no man had ever been so alone! A small, alive sound -existed at the other end of the room; in front of him existed one and a -half pale parallelograms. They were the reflection of the windows of the -mirror; the sound was no doubt Calton, the cat. Something alive, at any -rate! Possibly Sylvia at the other end of the room, waiting for him, to -see what he looked like. Most likely! It didn't matter! - -His mind stopped! Sheer weariness! - -When it went on again it was saying: - -"Naked shingles and surges drear . . ." and, "On these debatable borders -of the world!" He said sharply: "Nonsense!" The one was either _Calais -beach_ or _Dover sands_ of the whiskered man: Arnold. . . . He would be -seeing them both within the twenty-four hours. . . . But no! He was -going from Waterloo. Southampton, Havre, therefore! . . . The other was -by that detestable fellow: "the subject of our little monograph!" . . . -What a long time ago! . . . He saw a pile of shining despatch cases: the -inscription "_This rack is reserved for_ . . .": a coloured--pink and -blue!--photograph of Boulogne sands and the held up squares, the proofs -of "our little . . ." What a long time ago! He heard his own voice -saying in the new railway carriage, proudly, clearly and with male -hardness: - -"_I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of -course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again -no talking about it_. . . ." His voice--his own voice--came to him as if -from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn long-distance -one! Ten years . . . - -If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman. . . . Damn it, he -doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent fellow. -. . . His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running -one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue: - -"Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury," and: - -"Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!" - -He said: - -"But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands -didn't meet. . . . I don't believe I've shaken hands. . . . I don't -believe I've touched the girl . . . in my life. . . . Never once! . . . -Not the hand-shaking sort. . . . A nod! . . . A meeting and parting! . . . -English, you know . . . But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders. . . . -On the bank! . . . _On such short acquaintance!_ I said to myself -then . . . Well, we've made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up! . . . -Atoned. . . . As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was -dying. . . ." - -He, his conscious self, said: - -"But it was probably the drunken brother. . . . You don't beguile -virgins with the broken seals of perjury in Kensington High Street at -two at night supporting, one on each side, a drunken bluejacket with -intermittent legs. . . ." - -"Intermittent!" was the word. "Intermittently functioning!" - -At one point the boy had broken from them and run with astonishing -velocity along the dull wood paving of an immense empty street. When -they had caught him up he had been haranguing under black hanging trees, -with an Oxford voice, an immobile policeman: - -"You're the fellows!" he'd been exclaiming, "who make old England what -she is! You keep the peace in our homes! You save us from the vile -excesses. . . ." - -Tietjens himself he had always addressed with the voice and accent of a -common seaman; with his coarsened surface voice! - -He had the two personalities. Two or three times he had said: - -"Why don't you kiss the girl? She's a _nice_ girl, isn't she? You're a -poor b----y Tommie, ain't cher? Well, the poor b----y Tommies ought to -have all the nice girls they want! That's straight, isn't it? . . ." - -And, even at that time they hadn't known what was going to happen. . . . -There are certain cruelties. . . . They had got a four-wheel cab at -last. The drunken boy had sat beside the driver; he had insisted. . . . -Her little, pale, shrunken face had gazed straight before her. . . . It -hadn't been possible to speak; the cab, rattling all over the road had -pulled up with frightful jerks when the boy had grabbed at the -reins. . . . The old driver hadn't seemed to mind; but they had had to -subscribe all the money in their pockets to pay him after they had carried -the boy into the black house. . . . - -Tietjens' mind said to him: - -"Now when they came to her father's house so nimbly she slipped in, and -said: 'There is a fool without and is a maid within. . . .'" - -He answered dully: - -"Perhaps that's what it really amounts to. . . ." He had stood at the -hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the -sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds, -like the laughter of unknown races from darkness. He had turned and -walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed: - -"It's perhaps too . . . untidy . . ." - -She had said: - -"Yes! Yes . . . Ugly . . . Too . . . oh . . . _private_!" - -He said, he remembered: - -"But . . . for ever . . ." - -She said, in a great hurry: - -"But when you come back. . . . Permanently. And . . . oh, as if it were -in public." . . . "I don't know," she had added. "_Ought_ we? . . . I'd -be ready. . . ." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask." - -He had said at some time: "But obviously. . . . Not under _this_ -roof. . . ." And he had added: "We're the sort that . . . _do -not_!" - -She had answered, quickly too: - -"Yes--that's it. We're that sort!" And then she had asked: "And Ethel's -party? Was it a great success?" It hadn't, she knew, been an -inconsequence. He had answered: - -"Ah . . . _That's_ permanent. . . . _That's_ public. . . . There -was Rugeley. The Duke . . . Sylvia brought him. She'll be a great -friend! . . . And the President of the . . . Local Government Board, I -think . . . And a Belgian . . . equivalent to Lord Chief Justice . . . and, -of course, Claudine Sandbach. . . . Two hundred and seventy; all of the -best, the modestly-elated Guggumses said as I left! And Mr. -Ruggles . . . Yes! . . . They're established. . . . No place for me!" - -"Nor for _me_!" she had answered. She added: "But I'm glad!" - -Patches of silence ran between them: they hadn't yet got out of the -habit of thinking they had to hold up the drunken brother. That had -seemed to last for a thousand painful months. . . . Long enough to -acquire a habit. The brother seemed to roar: "Haw--Haw--Kuryasch. . . ." -And after two minutes: "Haw--Haw--Kuryasch. . . ." Hungarian, no doubt! - -He said: - -"It was splendid to see Vincent standing beside the Duke. Showing him a -first edition! Not of course _quite_ the thing for a, after all, wedding -party! But how was Rugeley to know that? . . . And Vincent not in the -least servile! He even corrected cousin Rugeley over the meaning of the -word _colophon_! The first time he ever corrected a superior! . . . -Established, you see! . . . And _practically_ cousin Rugeley. . . . Dear -Sylvia Tietjens' cousin, so the next to nearest thing! Wife of Lady -Macmaster's _oldest_ friend. . . . Sylvia going to them in their--quite -modest!--little place in Surrey. . . . As for us," he had concluded -"they also serve who only stand and wait. . . ." - -She said: - -"I suppose the rooms looked lovely." - -He had answered: - -"Lovely. . . . They'd got all the pictures by that beastly fellow up -from the rectory study in the dining-room on dark oak panelling. . . . A -fair blaze of bosoms and nipples and lips and pomegranates. . . The -tallest silver candlesticks of course. . . . You remember, silver -candlesticks and dark oak. . . ." - -She said: - -"Oh, my dear . . . Don't . . . _Don't_!" - -He had just touched the rim of his helmet with his folded gloves. - -"So we just wash out!" he had said. - -She said: - -"Would you take this bit of parchment. . . . I got a little Jew girl to -write on it in Hebrew:" It's "God bless you and keep you: God watch over -you at your goings out and at . . ." - -He tucked it into his breast pocket. - -"The talismanic passage," he said. "Of course I'll wear it. . . ." - -She said: - -"If we _could_ wash out this afternoon. . . . It would make it easier -to bear. . . . Your poor mother, you know, she was dying when we -last . . ." - -He said: - -"You remember _that_ . . . Even then you . . . And if I hadn't gone to -Lobscheid. . ." - -She said: - -"From the first moment I set eyes on you. . . ." - -He said: - -"And I . . . from the first moment . . . I'll tell you . . . If I looked -out of a door . . . It was all like sand. . . . But to the half left a -little bubbling up of water. That could be trusted. To keep on for ever. -. . . You, perhaps, won't understand." - -She said: - -"Yes! I know!" - -"They were seeing landscapes. . . . Sand dunes; close-cropped. . . . -Some negligible shipping; a stump-masted brig from Archangel. . . ." - -"From the first moment," he repeated. - -She said: - -"If we _could_ wash out . . ." - -He said, and for the first moment felt grand, tender, protective: - -"Yes, you _can_," he said. "You cut out from this afternoon, just before -4.58 it was when I said that to you and you consented . . . I heard the -Horse Guards clock. . . . To now. . . . Cut it out; and join time up. . . . -It _can_ be done. . . . You know they do it surgically; for some -illness; cut out a great length of the bowel and join the tube up. . . . -For colitis, I think. . . ." - -She said: - -"But I _wouldn't_ cut it out. . . . It was the first spoken sign." - -He said: - -"No it wasn't. . . . From the very beginning . . . with every -word. . . ." - -She exclaimed: - -"You felt that. . . . Too! . . . We've been pushed, as in a carpenter's -vice. . . . We couldn't have got away. . . ." - -He said: "By God! That's it. . . ." - -He suddenly saw a weeping willow in St. James's Park; 4.59! He had just -said: "Will you be my mistress to-night?" She had gone away, half left -her hands to her face. . . . A small fountain; half left. That could be -trusted to keep on for ever. . . . - -Along the lake side, sauntering, swinging his crooked stick, his -incredibly shiny top-hat perched sideways, his claw-hammer coat tails, -very long, flapping out behind, in dusty sunlight, his magpie pince-nez -gleaming, had come, naturally, Mr. Ruggles. He had looked at the girl; -then down at Tietjens, sprawled on his bench. He had just touched the -brim of his shiny hat. He said: - -"Dining at the club to-night? . . ." - -Tietjens said: "No; I've resigned." - -With the aspect of a long-billed bird chewing a bit of putridity, -Ruggles said: - -"Oh, but we've had an emergency meeting of the committee . . . the -committee was sitting . . . and sent you a letter asking you to -reconsider. . . ." - -Tietjens said: - -"I know. . . . I shall withdraw my resignation to-night. . . . And -resign again to-morrow morning." - -Ruggles' muscles had relaxed for a quick second, then they stiffened. - -"Oh, I say!" he had said. "Not that. . . . You couldn't do that. . . . -Not to the _club_! . . . It's never been done. . . . It's an -insult. . . ." - -"It's meant to be," Tietjens said. "Gentlemen shouldn't be expected to -belong to a club that has certain members on its committee." - -Ruggles' deepish voice suddenly grew very high. - -"Eh, I say, you know!" he squeaked. - -Tietjens had said: - -"I'm not vindictive. . . . But I _am_ deadly tired: of all old women and -their chatter." - -Ruggles had said: - -"I don't . . ." His face had become suddenly dark brown, scarlet and -then brownish purple. He stood droopingly looking at Tietjens' boots. - -"Oh! Ah! Well!" he said at last. "See you at Macmaster's to-night. . . . -A great thing his knighthood. First-class man. . . ." - -That had been the first Tietjens had heard of Macmaster's knighthood; he -had missed looking at the honours' list of that morning. Afterwards, -dining alone with Sir Vincent and Lady Macmaster, he had seen, pinned -up, a back view of the Sovereign doing something to Vincent; a photo for -next morning's papers. From Macmaster's embarrassed hushings of Edith -Ethel's explanation that the honour was for special services of a -specific kind Tietjens guessed both the nature of Macmaster's service -and the fact that the little man hadn't told Edith Ethel who, -originally, had done the work. And--just like his girl--Tietjens had let -it go at that. He didn't see why poor Vincent shouldn't have that little -bit of prestige at home--under all the monuments! But he hadn't--though -through all the evening Macmaster, with the solicitude and affection of -a cringing Italian greyhound, had hastened from celebrity to celebrity -to hang over Tietjens, and although Tietjens knew that his friend was -grieved and appalled, like any woman, at his, Tietjens', going out again -to France--Tietjens hadn't been able to look Macmaster again in the -face. . . . He had felt ashamed. He had felt, for the first time in his -life, ashamed! - -Even when he, Tietjens, had slipped away from the party--to go to his -good fortune!--Macmaster had come panting down the stairs, running after -him, through guests coming up. He had said: - -"Wait . . . You're not going. . . . I want to . . ." With a miserable -and appalled glance he had looked up the stairs; Lady Macmaster might -have come out too. His black, short beard quivering and his wretched -eyes turned down, he had said: - -"I wanted to explain. . . . This miserable knighthood. . . ." - -Tietjens patted him on the shoulder, Macmaster being on the stairs above -him. - -"It's all right, old man," he had said--and with real affection: "We've -powlered up and down enough for a little thing like that not to . . . -I'm very glad. . . ." Macmaster had whispered: - -"And Valentine. . . . She's not here to-night. . . ." - -He had exclaimed: - -"By God! . . . If I thought . . ." Tietjens had said: "It's all right. -It's all right. She's at another party. . . . I'm going on . . ." - -Macmaster had looked at him doubtingly and with misery, leaning over and -clutching the clammy banisters. - -"Tell her . . ." he said . . . "Good God! You may be killed. . . . I beg -you . . . I beg you to believe . . . I will . . . Like the apple of my -eye. . . ." In the swift glance that Tietjens took of his face he could -see that Macmaster's eyes were full of tears. - -They both stood looking down at the stone stairs for a long time. - -Then Macmaster had said: "Well . . ." - -Tietjens had said: "Well . . ." But he hadn't been able to look at -Macmaster's eyes, though he had felt his friend's eyes pitiably -exploring his own face. . . . "A backstairs way out of it," he had -thought; a queer thing that you couldn't look in the face a man you were -never going to see again! - -"But by God," he said to himself fiercely, when his mind came back again -to the girl in front of him, "this isn't going to be another backstairs -exit. . . . I must tell her. . . . I'm damned if I don't make an -effort. . . ." - -She had her handkerchief to her face. - -"I'm always crying," she said. . . . "A little bubbling spring that can -be trusted to keep on. . . ." - -He looked to the right and to the left. Ruggles or General Someone with -false teeth that didn't fit _must_ be coming along. The street with its -sooty boskage was clean empty and silent. She was looking at him. He -didn't know how long he had been silent, he didn't know where he had -been; intolerable waves urged him towards her. - -After a long time he said: - -"Well . . ." - -She moved back. She said: - -"I won't watch you out of sight. . . . It is unlucky to watch anyone out -of sight. . . . But I will never . . . I will never cut what you said -then out of my memory . . ." She was gone; the door shut. He had -wondered what she would never cut out of her memory. That he had asked -her that afternoon to be his mistress? - -He had caught, outside the gates of his old office, a transport lorry -that had given him a lift to Holborn. . . . - - - - -THE END - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME DO NOT... *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. 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margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} -.poem span.i1 {display: block; margin-left: .45em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} -.poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} -.poem span.i3 {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} -.poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 3em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} -.poem span.i6 {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} -.poem span.i8 {display: block; margin-left: 7em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} - -/* Transcriber's notes */ -.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA; - color: black; - font-size:smaller; - padding:0.5em; - margin-bottom:5em; - margin-top:2em; - font-family:sans-serif, serif; } - - </style> - </head> -<body> - -<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Some do not..., by Ford Madox Ford</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Some do not...</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Ford Madox Ford</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: January 11, 2021 [eBook #64248]</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)</div> - -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME DO NOT... ***</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/some_cover.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -</div> - - - -<h2>SOME DO NOT. . .</h2> - -<h3>A NOVEL</h3> - - - -<h4>BY</h4> - -<h3>FORD MADOX FORD</h3> - - - -<h5>AUTHOR OF "THE MARSDEN CASE," "MISTER BOSPHORUS<br /> -AND THE MUSES," ETC., ETC.</h5> - - - -<h4>London: DUCKWORTH AND COMPANY</h4> - -<h4>3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2</h4> - -<hr class="r5" /> - -<h4>CONTENTS</h4> -<p><a href="#PART_ONE">PART ONE</a><br /> -<a href="#I">CHAPTER I</a><br /> -<a href="#II">CHAPTER II</a><br /> -<a href="#III">CHAPTER III</a><br /> -<a href="#IV">CHAPTER IV</a><br /> -<a href="#V">CHAPTER V</a><br /> -<a href="#VI">CHAPTER VI</a><br /> -<a href="#VII">CHAPTER VII</a><br /> -<a href="#PART_II">PART II</a><br /> -<a href="#I_II">CHAPTER I</a><br /> -<a href="#II_II">CHAPTER II</a><br /> -<a href="#III_II">CHAPTER III</a><br /> -<a href="#IV_II">CHAPTER IV</a><br /> -<a href="#V_II">CHAPTER V</a><br /> -<a href="#VI_II">CHAPTER VI</a></p> - -<hr class="r5" /> - -<h4><a id="PART_ONE">PART ONE</a></h4> - - - - -<h4><a id="I">I</a></h4> - - -<p>The two young men—they were of the English public official -class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather -straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new -luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging -upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in -an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in -Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; -the train ran as smoothly—Tietjens remembered thinking—as -British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or -jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or -over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and -allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the -company. Perhaps he would even have written to the <i>Times</i>.</p> - -<p>Their class administered the world, not merely the newly-created -Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they -saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency -of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, -they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices, or with letters to -the <i>Times</i>, asking in regretful indignation: "Has the British This -or That come to <i>this</i>!" Or they wrote, in the serious reviews of -which so many still survived, articles taking under their care, manners, -the Arts, diplomacy, inter-Imperial trade or the personal reputations of -deceased statesmen and men of letters.</p> - -<p>Macmaster, that is to say, would do all that: of himself Tietjens was -not so certain. There sat Macmaster; smallish; Whig; with a trimmed, -pointed black beard, such as a smallish man might wear to enhance his -already germinated distinction; black hair of a stubborn fibre, drilled -down with hard metal brushes; a sharp nose; strong, level teeth; a -white, butterfly collar of the smoothness of porcelain; a tie confined -by a gold ring, steel-blue speckled with black—to match his eyes, as -Tietjens knew.</p> - -<p>Tietjens, on the other hand, could not remember what coloured tie he had -on. He had taken a cab from the office to their rooms, had got himself -into a loose, tailored coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had packed, -quickly, but still methodically, a great number of things in an immense -two-handled kit-bag, which you could throw into a guard's van if need -be. He disliked letting that "man" touch his things; he had disliked -letting his wife's maid pack for him. He even disliked letting porters -carry his kit-bag. He was a Tory—and as he disliked changing his -clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already in large, brown, -hugely-welted and nailed golf boots, leaning forward on the edge of the -cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an immense white hand—and -thinking vaguely.</p> - -<p>Macmaster, on the other hand, was leaning back, reading some small, -unbound printed sheets, rather stiff, frowning a little. Tietjens knew -that this was, for Macmaster, an impressive moment. He was correcting -the proofs of his first book.</p> - -<p>To this affair, as Tietjens knew, there attached themselves many fine -shades. If, for instance, you had asked Macmaster whether he were a -writer, he would have replied with the merest suggestion of a -deprecatory shrug.</p> - -<p>"No, dear lady!" for of course no man would ask the question of anyone -so obviously a man of the world. And he would continue with a smile: -"Nothing so fine! A mere trifler at odd moments. A critic, perhaps. Yes! -A little of a critic."</p> - -<p>Nevertheless Macmaster moved in drawing-rooms that, with long curtains, -blue china plates, large-patterned wallpapers and large, quiet mirrors, -sheltered the long-haired of the Arts. And, as near as possible to the -dear ladies who gave the At Homes, Macmaster could keep up the talk—a -little magisterially. He liked to be listened to with respect when he -spoke of Botticelli, Rossetti, and those early Italian artists whom he -called "The Primitives." Tietjens had seen him there. And he didn't -disapprove.</p> - -<p>For, if they weren't, these gatherings, Society; they formed a stage on -the long and careful road to a career in a first-class Government -office. And, utterly careless as Tietjens imagined himself of careers or -offices, he was, if sardonically, quite sympathetic towards his friend's -ambitiousnesses. It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of -friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.</p> - -<p>The youngest son of a Yorkshire country gentleman, Tietjens himself was -entitled to the best—the best that first-class public offices and -first-class people could afford. He was without ambition, but these -things would come to him as they do in England. So he could afford to be -negligent of his attire, of the company he kept, of the opinions he -uttered. He had a little private income under his mother's settlement; a -little income from the Imperial Department of Statistics; he had married -a woman of means, and he was, in the Tory manner, sufficiently a master -of flouts and jeers to be listened to when he spoke. He was twenty-six; -but, very big, in a fair, untidy, Yorkshire way, he carried more weight -than his age warranted. His chief, Sir Reginald Ingleby, when Tietjens -chose to talk of public tendencies which influenced statistics, would -listen with attention. Sometimes Sir Reginald would say: "You're a -perfect encyclopædia of exact material knowledge, Tietjens," and -Tietjens thought that that was his due, and he would accept the tribute -in silence.</p> - -<p>At a word from Sir Reginald, Macmaster, on the other hand, would murmur: -"You're very good, Sir Reginald!" and Tietjens thought that perfectly -proper.</p> - -<p>Macmaster was a little the senior in the service as he was probably a -little the senior in age. For, as to his room-mate's years, or as to his -exact origins, there was a certain blank in Tietjens' knowledge. -Macmaster was obviously Scotch by birth, and you accepted him as what -was called a son of the manse. No doubt he was really the son of a -grocer in Cupar or a railway porter in Edinburgh. It does not matter -with the Scotch, and as he was very properly reticent as to his -ancestry, having accepted him, you didn't, even mentally, make any -enquiries.</p> - -<p>Tietjens always had accepted Macmaster—at Clifton, at Cambridge, -in Chancery Lane and in their rooms at Gray's Inn. So for Macmaster he had -a very deep affection—even a gratitude. And Macmaster might be -considered as returning these feelings. Certainly he had always done his -best to be of service to Tietjens. Already at the Treasury and attached -as private secretary to Sir Reginald Ingleby, whilst Tietjens was still -at Cambridge, Macmaster had brought to the notice of Sir Reginald -Tietjens' many great natural gifts, and Sir Reginald, being on the -look-out for young men for his ewe lamb, his newly-founded department, -had very readily accepted Tietjens as his third in command. On the other -hand, it had been Tietjens' father who had recommended Macmaster to the -notice of Sir Thomas Block at the Treasury itself. And, indeed, the -Tietjens' family had provided a little money—that was Tietjens' -mother really—to get Macmaster through Cambridge and install him in -Town. He had repaid the small sum—paying it partly by finding room in -his chambers for Tietjens when in turn he came to Town.</p> - -<p>With a Scots young man such a position had been perfectly possible. -Tietjens had been able to go to his fair, ample, saintly mother in her -morning-room and say:</p> - -<p>"Look here, mother, that fellow Macmaster! He'll need a little money to -get through the University," and his mother would answer:</p> - -<p>"Yes, my dear. How much?"</p> - -<p>With an English young man of the lower orders that would have left a -sense of class obligation. With Macmaster it just didn't.</p> - -<p>During Tietjens' late trouble—for four months before Tietjens' -wife had left him to go abroad with another man—Macmaster had filled -a place that no other man could have filled. For the basis of Christopher -Tietjens' emotional existence was a complete taciturnity—at any rate -as to his emotions. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk." Perhaps -you didn't even think about how you felt.</p> - -<p>And, indeed, his wife's flight had left him almost completely without -emotions that he could realise, and he had not spoken more than twenty -words at most about the event. Those had been mostly to his father, who, -very tall, very largely built, silver-haired and erect, had drifted, as -it were, into Macmaster's drawing-room in Gray's Inn, and after five -minutes of silence had said:</p> - -<p>"You will divorce?"</p> - -<p>Christopher had answered:</p> - -<p>"No! No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of -divorce."</p> - -<p>Mr. Tietjens had suggested that, and after an interval had asked:</p> - -<p>"You will permit her to divorce you?"</p> - -<p>He had answered:</p> - -<p>"If she wishes it. There's the child to be considered." Mr. Tietjens -said:</p> - -<p>"You will get her settlement transferred to the child?" Christopher -answered:</p> - -<p>"If it can be done without friction."</p> - -<p>Mr. Tietjens had commented only:</p> - -<p>"Ah!" Some minutes later he had said:</p> - -<p>"Your mother's very well." Then: "That motor-plough <i>didn't</i> -answer," and then: "I shall be dining at the club."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"May I bring Macmaster in, sir? You said you would put him up."</p> - -<p>Mr. Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"Yes, do. Old General ffolliott will be there. He'll second him. He'd -better make his acquaintance." He had gone away.</p> - -<p>Tietjens considered that his relationship with his father was an almost -perfect one. They were like two men in the club—the <i>only</i> club; -thinking so alike that there was no need to talk. His father had spent a -great deal of time abroad before succeeding to the estate. When, over -the moors, he went into the industrial town that he owned, he drove -always in a coach-and-four. Tobacco smoke had never been known inside -Groby Hall: Mr. Tietjens had twelve pipes filled every morning by his -head gardener and placed in rose bushes down the drive. These he smoked -during the day. He farmed a good deal of his own land; had sat for -Holdernesse from 1876 to 1881, but had not presented himself for -election after the re-distribution of seats; he was patron of eleven -livings; rode to hounds every now and then, and shot fairly regularly. -He had three other sons and two daughters, and was now sixty-one.</p> - -<p>To his sister Effie, on the day after his wife's elopement, Christopher -had said over the telephone:</p> - -<p>"Will you take Tommie for an indefinite period? Marchant will come with -him. She offers to take charge of your two youngest as well, so you'll -save a maid, and I'll pay their board and a bit over."</p> - -<p>The voice of his sister—from Yorkshire—had answered:</p> - -<p>"Certainly, Christopher." She was the wife of a vicar, near Groby, and -she had several children.</p> - -<p>To Macmaster Tietjens had said:</p> - -<p>"Sylvia has left me with that fellow Perowne."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had answered only: "Ah!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens had continued:</p> - -<p>"I'm letting the house and warehousing the furniture. Tommie is going to -my sister Effie. Marchant is going with him."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had said:</p> - -<p>"Then you'll be wanting your old rooms." Macmaster occupied a very large -storey of the Gray's Inn buildings. After Tietjens had left him on his -marriage he had continued to enjoy solitude, except that his man had -moved down from the attic to the bedroom formerly occupied by Tietjens.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I'll come in to-morrow night if I may. That will give Ferens time to -get back into his attic."</p> - -<p>That morning, at breakfast, four months having passed, Tietjens had -received a letter from his wife. She asked, without any contrition at -all, to be taken back. She was fed-up with Perowne and Brittany.</p> - -<p>Tietjens looked up at Macmaster. Macmaster was already half out of his -chair, looking at him with enlarged, steel-blue eyes, his beard -quivering. By the time Tietjens spoke Macmaster had his hand on the neck -of the cut-glass brandy decanter in the brown wood tantalus. Tietjens -said:</p> - -<p>"Sylvia asks me to take her back."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Have a little of this!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens was about to say: "No," automatically. He changed that to:</p> - -<p>"Yes. Perhaps. A liqueur glass."</p> - -<p>He noticed that the lip of the decanter agitated, tinkling on the glass. -Macmaster must be trembling.</p> - -<p>Macmaster, with his back still turned, said:</p> - -<p>"Shall you take her back?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"I imagine so." The brandy warmed his chest in its descent. Macmaster -said:</p> - -<p>"Better have another."</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"Yes. Thanks."</p> - -<p>Macmaster went on with his breakfast and his letters. So did Tietjens. -Ferens came in, removed the bacon plates and set on the table a silver -water-heated dish that contained poached eggs and haddock. A long time -afterwards Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Yes, in principle I'm determined to. But I shall take three days to -think out the details."</p> - -<p>He seemed to have no feelings about the matter. Certain insolent phrases -in Sylvia's letter hung in his mind. He preferred a letter like that. -The brandy made no difference to his mentality, but it seemed to keep -him from shivering.</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Suppose we go down to Rye by the 11.40. We could get a round after tea -now the days are long. I want to call on a parson near there. He has -helped me with my book."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Did your poet know parsons? But of course he did. Duchemin is the name, -isn't it?"</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"We could call about two-thirty. That will be all right in the country. -We stay till four with a cab outside. We can be on the first tee at -five. If we like the course we'll stay next day: then Tuesday at Hythe -and Wednesday at Sandwich. Or we could stay at Rye all your three -days."</p> - -<p>"It will probably suit me better to keep moving," Tietjens said. "There -are those British Columbia figures of yours. If we took a cab now I -could finish them for you in an hour and twelve minutes. Then British -North America can go to the printers. It's only 8.30 now."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said, with some concern:</p> - -<p>"Oh, but you <i>couldn't</i>. I can make our going all right with Sir -Reginald," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"Oh, yes I can. Ingleby will be pleased if you tell him they're -finished. I'll have them ready for you to give him when he comes at -ten."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"What an extraordinary fellow you are, Chrissie. Almost a genius!"</p> - -<p>"Oh," Tietjens answered. "I was looking at your papers yesterday after -you'd left and I've got most of the totals in my head. I was thinking -about them before I went to sleep. I think you make a mistake in -overestimating the pull of Klondyke this year on the population. The -passes are open, but relatively no one is going through. I'll add a note -to that effect."</p> - -<p>In the cab he said:</p> - -<p>"I'm sorry to bother you with my beastly affairs. But how will it affect -you and the office?"</p> - -<p>"The office," Macmaster said, "not at all. It is supposed that Sylvia is -nursing Mrs. Satterthwaite abroad. As for me, I wish . . . ."—he -closed his small, strong teeth—"I wish you would drag the woman -through the mud. By God I do! Why should she mangle you for the rest of -your life? She's done enough!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens gazed out over the flap of the cab.</p> - -<p>That explained a question. Some days before, a young man, a friend of -his wife's rather than of his own, had approached him in the club and -had said that he hoped Mrs. Satterthwaite—his wife's mother—was -better. He said now:</p> - -<p>"I see. Mrs. Satterthwaite has probably gone abroad to cover up Sylvia's -retreat. She's a sensible woman, if a bitch."</p> - -<p>The hansom ran through nearly empty streets, it being very early for the -public official quarters. The hoofs of the horse clattered -precipitately. Tietjens preferred a hansom, horses being made for -gentlefolk. He had known nothing of how his fellows had viewed his -affairs. It was breaking up a great, numb inertia to enquire.</p> - -<p>During the last few months he had employed himself in tabulating from -memory the errors in the <i>Encyclopœdia Britannica</i>, of which a new -edition had lately appeared. He had even written an article for a dull -monthly on the subject. It had been so caustic as to miss its mark, -rather. He despised people who used works of reference; but the point of -view had been so unfamiliar that his article had galled no one's -withers, except possibly Macmaster's. Actually it had pleased Sir -Reginald Ingleby, who had been glad to think that he had under him a -young man with a memory so tenacious and so encyclopædic a -knowledge. . . .</p> - -<p>That had been a congenial occupation, like a long drowse. Now he had to -make enquiries. He said:</p> - -<p>"And my breaking up the establishment at twenty-nine? How's that viewed? -I'm not going to have a house again."</p> - -<p>"It's considered," Macmaster answered, "that Lowndes Street did not -agree with Mrs. Satterthwaite. That accounted for her illness. Drains -wrong. I may say that Sir Reginald entirely—expressly—approves. -He does not think that young married men in Government offices should keep -up expensive establishments in the S.W. district."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Damn him." He added: "He's probably right though." He then said: -"Thanks. That's all I want to know. A certain discredit has always -attached to cuckolds. Very properly. A man ought to be able to keep his -wife."</p> - -<p>Macmaster exclaimed anxiously:</p> - -<p>"No! No! Chrissie."</p> - -<p>Tietjens continued:</p> - -<p>"And a first-class public office is very like a public school. It might -very well object to having a man whose wife had bolted amongst its -members. I remember Clifton hated it when the Governors decided to admit -the first Jew and the first nigger."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"I wish you wouldn't go on."</p> - -<p>"There was a fellow," Tietjens continued, "whose land was next to ours. -Conder his name was. His wife was habitually unfaithful to him. She used -to retire with some fellow for three months out of every year. Conder -never moved a finger. But we felt Groby and the neighbourhood were -unsafe. It was awkward introducing him—not to mention her—in -your drawing-room. All sorts of awkwardnesses. Everyone knew the younger -children weren't Conder's. A fellow married the youngest daughter and -took over the hounds. And not a soul called on her. It wasn't rational -or just. But that's why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never -knows when it mayn't be driven into something irrational and unjust."</p> - -<p>"But you <i>aren't</i>," Macmaster said with real anguish, "going to let -Sylvia behave like that."</p> - -<p>"I don't know," Tietjens said. "How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think -Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman -accepts them. If the woman won't divorce, he <i>must</i> accept them, and -it get's talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You -and, I suppose, Mrs. Satterthwaite between you. But you won't be always -there. Or I might come across another woman."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Ah!" and after a moment:</p> - -<p>"What then?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"God knows . . . There's that poor little beggar to be considered. -Marchant says he's beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"If it wasn't for that. . . . That would be a solution."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said: "Ah!"</p> - -<p>When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled -arch, reaching up, he said:</p> - -<p>"You've been giving the mare less licorice in her mash. I told you she'd -go better."</p> - -<p>The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab -box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said:</p> - -<p>"Ah! Trust you to remember, sir."</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>In the train, from beneath his pile of polished dressing and despatch -cases—Tietjens had thrown his immense kit-bag with his own hands into -the guard's van—Macmaster looked across at his friend. It was, for -him, a great day. Across his face were the proof-sheets of his first, -small, delicate-looking volume. . . . A small page, the type black and -still odorous! He had the agreeable smell of the printer's ink in his -nostrils; the fresh paper was still a little damp. In his white, rather -spatulate, always slightly cold fingers, was the pressure of the small, -flat, gold pencil he had purchased especially for these corrections. He -had found none to make.</p> - -<p>He had expected a wallowing of pleasure—almost the only sensuous -pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the -appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean -task. But to wallow in your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savour of -your own shrewd pawkinesses, to feel your rhythm balanced and yet -sober—that is a pleasure beyond most, and an inexpensive one at that. -He had had it from mere "articles"—on the philosophies and domestic -lives of such great figures as Carlyle and Mill, or on the expansion of -inter-colonial trade. This was a book.</p> - -<p>He relied upon it to consolidate his position. In the office they were -mostly "born," and not vastly sympathetic. There was a sprinkling, -too—it was beginning to be a large one—of young men who had -obtained their entry by merit or by sheer industry. These watched -promotions jealously, discerning nepotic increases of increment and -clamouring amongst themselves at favouritisms.</p> - -<p>To these he had been able to turn a cold shoulder. His intimacy with -Tietjens permitted him to be rather on the "born" side of the institution, -his agreeableness—he knew he was agreeable and useful!—to -Sir Reginald Ingleby, protecting him in the main from unpleasantness. -His "articles" had given him a certain right to an austerity of -demeanour; his book he trusted to let him adopt an almost judicial -attitude. He would then be <i>the</i> Mr. Macmaster, the critic, the -authority. And the first-class departments are not adverse from having -distinguished men as ornaments to their company; at any rate the -promotion of the distinguished are not objected to. So Macmaster -saw—almost physically—Sir Reginald Ingleby perceiving the -empressement with which his valued subordinate was treated in the -drawing-rooms of Mrs. Leamington, Mrs. Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. de Limoux; Sir -Reginald would perceive that, for he was not a reader himself of much else -than Government publications, and he would feel fairly safe in making easy -the path of his critically-gifted and austere young helper. The son of a -very poor shipping clerk in an obscure Scotch harbour town, Macmaster -had very early decided on the career that he would make. As between the -heroes of Mr. Smiles, an author enormously popular in Macmaster's -boyhood, and the more distinctly intellectual achievements open to the -very poor Scot, Macmaster had had no difficulty in choosing. A pit lad -<i>may</i> rise to be a mine owner; a hard, gifted, unsleeping Scots youth, -pursuing unobtrusively and unobjectionably a course of study and of -public usefulness, <i>will</i> certainly achieve distinction, security and -the quiet admiration of those around him. It was the difference between -the <i>may</i> and the <i>will</i>, and Macmaster had had no difficulty in -making his choice. He saw himself by now almost certain of a career that -should give him at fifty a knighthood, and long before that a competence, a -drawing-room of his own and a lady who should contribute to his -unobtrusive fame, she moving about, in that room, amongst the best of -the intellects of the day, gracious, devoted, a tribute at once to his -discernment and his achievements. Without some disaster he was sure of -himself. Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy and women. -Against the first two he knew himself immune, though his expenses had a -tendency to outrun his income, and he was always a little in debt to -Tietjens. Tietjens fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so -certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women, and, arrived at -a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, -be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a -rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he -needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, -passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberative, gracious to -every one around her. He could almost hear the very rustle of her -garments.</p> - -<p>And yet . . . He had had passages when a sort of blind unreason had -attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most -giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked. It was -only Tietjens who had saved him from the most questionable -entanglements.</p> - -<p>"Hang it," Tietjens would say, "don't get messing round that trollop. -All you could do with her would be to set her up in a tobacco shop, and -she would be tearing your beard out inside the quarter. Let alone you -can't afford it."</p> - -<p>And Macmaster, who would have sentimentalised the plump girl to the tune -of <i>Highland Mary</i>, would for a day damn Tietjens up and down for a -coarse brute. But at the moment he thanked God for Tietjens. There he -sat, near to thirty, without an entanglement, a blemish on his health, -or a worry with regard to any woman.</p> - -<p>With deep affection and concern he looked across at his brilliant -junior, who hadn't saved himself. Tietjens had fallen into the most -barefaced snare, into the cruellest snare, of the worst woman that could -be imagined.</p> - -<p>And Macmaster suddenly realised that he wasn't wallowing, as he had -imagined that he would, in the sensuous current of his prose. He had -begun spiritedly with the first neat square of a paragraph. . . . -Certainly his publishers had done well by him in the matter of print:</p> - - -<blockquote> -<p>"Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and -exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and -full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or -whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing -his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than -himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little -monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly -influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things -that go to make up the life of our higher civilisation as we live it -to-day. . . ."</p></blockquote> - - -<p>Macmaster realised that he had only got thus far with his prose, and had -got thus far without any of the relish that he had expected, and that -then he had turned to the middle paragraph of page three—after the -end of his exordium. His eyes wandered desultorily along the line:</p> - - -<blockquote> -<p>"The subject of these pages was born in the western central district of -the metropolis in the year . . ."</p></blockquote> - - -<p>The words conveyed nothing to him at all. He understood that that was -because he hadn't got over that morning. He had looked up from his -coffee-cup—over the rim—and had taken in a blue-grey sheet of -notepaper in Tietjens' fingers, shaking, inscribed, in the large, -broad-nibbed writing of that detestable harridan. And Tietjens had been -staring—staring with the intentness of a maddened horse—at his, -Macmaster's, face! And grey! Shapeless! The nose like a pallid triangle -on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens' face. . . .</p> - -<p>He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He -had thought Tietjens was going mad: that he <i>was</i> mad. It had passed. -Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the -office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful—and -quite rude—lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from -the official figures of population movements in the western territories. -Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a speech -of the Colonial Minister—or an answer to a question—and Sir -Reginald had promised to put Tietjens' views before the great man. That -was the sort of thing to do a young fellow good—because it got kudos -for the office. They had to work on figures provided by the Colonial -Governments, and if they could correct those fellows by sheer brain -work—that scored.</p> - -<p>But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, -clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between -his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of -Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blonde, -high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn't tell what in the world he -was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips -in some one's article on Arminianism. For, absurd as it seemed, -Macmaster knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend's feelings. As -to them, practically no confidences had passed between them. Just two:</p> - -<p>On the night before his starting for his wedding in Paris Tietjens had -said to him:</p> - -<p>"Vinny, old fellow, it's a back door way out of it. She's -bitched <i>me</i>."</p> - -<p>And once, rather lately, he had said:</p> - -<p>"Damn it! I don't even know if the child's my own!"</p> - -<p>This last confidence had shocked Macmaster so irremediably—the -child had been a seven months' child, rather ailing, and Tietjens' clumsy -tenderness towards it had been so marked that, even without this -nightmare, Macmaster had been affected by the sight of them -together—that confidence then had pained Macmaster so frightfully, it -was so appalling, that Macmaster had regarded it almost as an insult. It -was the sort of confidence a man didn't make to his equal, but only to -solicitors, doctors, or the clergy who are not quite men. Or, at any -rate, such confidences are not made between men without appeals for -sympathy, and Tietjens had made no appeal for sympathy. He had just -added sardonically:</p> - -<p>"She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she's as good as -said as much to Marchant"—Marchant had been Tietjens' old nurse.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Suddenly—and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his -head—Macmaster remarked:</p> - -<p>"You can't say the man wasn't a poet!"</p> - -<p>The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, -in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens' forelock -and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been -going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very -little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour and blondish often go speckled -with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age -of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap -off to bowl.</p> - -<p>But Macmaster's mind, taking appalled change, had felt assured that -Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife's letter: in four -hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his -thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. The mental process in -Macmaster had been quite subconscious. He would not, advisedly, have -introduced the painter-poet as a topic.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I haven't said anything at all that I can remember."</p> - -<p>The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster:</p> - -<p>"'Since,'" he quoted, 'when we stand side by side</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i4">Only hands may meet,</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Better half this weary world</span><br /> -<span class="i4">Lay between us, sweet!</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Better far tho' hearts may break</span><br /> -<span class="i4">Bid farewell for aye!</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine,</span><br /> -<span class="i4">Tempt my soul away!'</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>"You can't," he continued, "say that that isn't poetry! Great -poetry."</p> - -<p>"I can't say," Tietjens answered contemptuously. "I don't read poetry -except Byron. But it's a filthy picture. . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said uncertainly:</p> - -<p>"I don't know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?"</p> - -<p>"It isn't painted!" Tietjens said. "But it's there!"</p> - -<p>He continued with sudden fury:</p> - -<p>"Damn it. What's the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? -England's mad about it. Well, you've got your John Stuart Mill's and -your George Eliot's for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! -Or leave me out at least. I tell you it revolts me to think of that -obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown -and the underclothes he's slept in, standing beside a five shilling -model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a -mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop -chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about -passion."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling:</p> - -<p>"You daren't . . . you daren't talk like that," he stuttered.</p> - -<p>"I <i>dare</i>!" Tietjens answered; "but I oughtn't to . . . to you! I -admit that. But you oughtn't, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to -me, either. It's an insult to my intelligence."</p> - -<p>"Certainly," Macmaster said stiffly, "the moment was not opportune."</p> - -<p>"I don't understand what you mean," Tietjens answered. "The moment can -never be opportune. Let's agree that making a career is a dirty -business—for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their -masks. They never preach to each other."</p> - -<p>"You're getting esoteric," Macmaster said faintly.</p> - -<p>"I'll underline," Tietjens went on. "I quite understand that the favour -of Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear -of that old don Ingleby."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Damn!"</p> - -<p>"I quite agree," Tietjens continued, "I quite approve. It's the game as -it has always been played. It's the tradition, so it's right. It's been -sanctioned since the days of the <i>Précieuses Ridicules</i>."</p> - -<p>"You've a way of putting things," Macmaster said.</p> - -<p>"I haven't," Tietjens answered. "It's just because I haven't that what I -<i>do</i> say sticks out in the minds of fellows like you who are always -fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I -stand for monogamy."</p> - -<p>Macmaster uttered a "<i>You!</i>" of amazement.</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered with a negligent "<i>I!</i>" He continued:</p> - -<p>"I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of -course, if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And -again, no talking about it. He'd no doubt be in the end better, and -better off, if he didn't. Just as it would probably be better for him if -he didn't have the second glass of whisky and soda. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You call that monogamy and chastity!" Macmaster interjected.</p> - -<p>"I do," Tietjens answered. "And it probably is, at any rate it's clean. -What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placket-holes and polysyllabic -Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That's all -right if you can get your club to change its rules."</p> - -<p>"You're out of my depth," Macmaster said. "And being very disagreeable. -You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don't like it."</p> - -<p>"I'm probably being disagreeable," Tietjens said. "Jeremiahs -usually are. But there ought to be a twenty years' close time for -discussions of sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca—and -Dante's—went, very properly, to Hell, and no bones about it. You -don't get Dante justifying them. But your fellow whines about creeping -into Heaven."</p> - -<p>"He <i>doesn't</i>," Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with -equanimity:</p> - -<p>"Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth -seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop -boys . . ."</p> - -<p>"I'll admit," Macmaster coincided, "that Briggs is going too far. I told -him only last Thursday at Mrs. Limoux's. . . ."</p> - -<p>"I'm not talking of anyone in particular," Tietjens said. "I don't read -novels. I'm supposing a case. And it's a cleaner case than that of your -pre-Raphaelite horrors! No! I don't read novels, but I follow -tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of -uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the -rights of man, it's relatively respectable. It would be better just to -boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. -But . . ."</p> - -<p>"You carry joking too far sometimes," Macmaster said. "I've warned you -about it."</p> - -<p>"I'm as solemn as an owl!" Tietjens rejoined. "The lower classes are -becoming vocal. Why shouldn't they? They're the only people in this -country who are sound in wind and limb. They'll save the country if the -country's to be saved."</p> - -<p>"And you call yourself a Tory!" Macmaster said.</p> - -<p>"The lower classes," Tietjens continued equably, "such of them as get -through the secondary schools, want irregular and very transitory -unions. During holidays they go together on personally-conducted tours -to Switzerland and such places. Wet afternoons they pass in their tiled -bathrooms, slapping each other hilariously on the backs and splashing -white enamel paint about."</p> - -<p>"You say you don't read novels," Macmaster said, "but I recognise the -quotation."</p> - -<p>"I don't <i>read</i> novels," Tietjens answered. "I know what's in 'em. -There has been nothing worth <i>reading</i> written in England since the -eighteenth century except by a woman. . . . But it's natural for your -enamel splashers to want to see themselves in a bright and variegated -literature. Why shouldn't they? It's a healthy, human desire, and now -that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied. It's healthy, I -tell you. Infinitely healthier than . . ." He paused.</p> - -<p>"Than what?" Macmaster asked.</p> - -<p>"I'm thinking," Tietjens said, "thinking how not to be too rude."</p> - -<p>"You want to be rude," Macmaster said bitterly, "to people who lead the -contemplative . . . the circumspect life."</p> - -<p>"It's precisely that," Tietjens said. He quoted:</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"'She walks the lady of, my delight,</span><br /> -<span class="i4">A shepherdess of sheep;</span><br /> -<span class="i3">She is so circumspect and right:</span><br /> -<span class="i4">She has her thoughts to keep.'"</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Confound you, Chrissie. You know everything."</p> - -<p>"Well, yes," Tietjens said musingly, "I think I should want to be rude -to her. I don't say I should be. Certainly I shouldn't if she were good -looking. Or if she were your soul's affinity. You can rely on that."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens' large and clumsy form walking -beside the lady of his, Macmaster's, delight, when ultimately she was -found—walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies -and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. -All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn't like Tietjens. Women -didn't as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated -him.</p> - -<p>. . . Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said -conciliatorily:</p> - -<p>"Yes, I think I could rely on that!" He added: "All the same I don't -wonder that . . ."</p> - -<p>He had been about to say:</p> - -<p>"I don't wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral." For Tietjens' wife -alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his -silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his -views. . . . But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on:</p> - -<p>"All the same when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will -save England, because they've the courage to know what they want and to -say so."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said loftily:</p> - -<p>"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought -to know as well as I do that a war is impossible—at any rate -with this country in it. Simply because . . ." He hesitated and then -emboldened himself: "<i>We</i>—the circumspect—yes, the -circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places."</p> - -<p>"War, my good fellow," Tietjens said—the train was slowing down -preparatorily to running into Ashford—"is inevitable, and with this -country plumb centre in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows -are such damn hypocrites. There's not a country in the world that -trusts us. We're always, as it were, committing adultery—like your -fellow!—with the name of Heaven on our lips." He was jibing again at -the subject of Macmaster's monograph.</p> - -<p>"He never!" Macmaster said in almost a stutter. "He never whined about -Heaven."</p> - -<p>"He did," Tietjens said: "The beastly poem you quoted ends:"</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"'Better far though hearts may break,</span><br /> -<span class="i4">Since we dare not love,</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Part till we once more may meet</span><br /> -<span class="i4">In a Heaven above.'"</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>And Macmaster, who had been dreading that shot—for he never knew -how much or how little of any given poem his friend would have by -heart—Macmaster collapsed, as it were, into fussily getting down his -dressing-cases and clubs from the rack, a task he usually left to a -porter. Tietjens who, however much a train might be running into a -station he was bound for, sat like a rock until it was dead-still, said:</p> - -<p>"Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there's you fellows who can't be -trusted. And then there's the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and -white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And -there aren't enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round. -It's like you polygamists with women. There aren't enough women in the -world to go round to satisfy your insatiable appetites. And there aren't -enough men in the world to give each woman one. And most women want -several. So you have divorce cases. I suppose you won't say that because -you're so circumspect and right there shall be no more divorce? Well, -war is as inevitable as divorce. . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had his head out of the carriage window and was calling for a -porter.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>On the platform a number of women in lovely sable cloaks, with purple or -red jewel cases, with diaphanous silky scarves flying from motor hoods, -were drifting towards the branch train for Rye, under the shepherding of -erect, burdened footmen. Two of them nodded to Tietjens.</p> - -<p>Macmaster considered that he was perfectly right to be tidy in his -dress; you never knew whom you mightn't meet on a railway journey. This -confirmed him as against Tietjens, who preferred to look like a navvy.</p> - -<p>A tall, white-haired, white-moustached, red-cheeked fellow limped after -Tietjens, who was getting his immense bag out of the guard's van. He -clapped the young man on the shoulder and said:</p> - -<p>"Hullo! How's your mother-in-law? Lady Claude wants to know. She says -come up and pick a bone to-night if you're going to Rye." He had -extraordinarily blue, innocent eyes.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Hullo, general," and added: "I believe she's much better. Quite -restored. This is Macmaster. I think I shall be going over to bring my -wife back in a day or two. They're both at Lobscheid . . . a German -spa."</p> - -<p>The general said:</p> - -<p>"Quite right. It isn't good for a young man to be alone. Kiss Sylvia's -finger-tips for me. She's the real thing, you lucky beggar." He added, a -little anxiously: "What about a foursome to-morrow? Paul Sandbach is -down. He's as crooked as me. We can't do a full round at singles."</p> - -<p>"It's your own fault," Tietjens said. "You ought to have gone to my -bone-setter. Settle it with Macmaster, will you?" He jumped into the -twilight of the guard's van.</p> - -<p>The general looked at Macmaster, a quick, penetrating scrutiny:</p> - -<p>"You're <i>the</i> Macmaster," he said. "You would be if you're with -Chrissie."</p> - -<p>A high voice called:</p> - -<p>"General! General!"</p> - -<p>"I want a word with you," the general said, "about the figures in that -article you wrote about Pondoland. Figures are all right. But we shall -lose the beastly country if . . . But we'll talk about it after dinner -to-night. You'll come up to Lady Claudine's. . . ."</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Macmaster congratulated himself again on his appearance. It was all very -well for Tietjens to look like a sweep; he was of these people. He, -Macmaster, wasn't. He had, if anything, to be an authority, and -authorities wear gold tie-rings and broadcloth. General Lord Edward -Campion had a son, a permanent head of the Treasury department that -regulated increases of salaries and promotions in all the public -offices. Tietjens only caught the Rye train by running alongside it, -pitching his enormous kit-bag through the carriage window and swinging -on the footboard. Macmaster reflected that if he had done that half the -station would have been yelling, "Stand away there."</p> - -<p>As it was Tietjens a stationmaster was galloping after him to open the -carriage door and grinningly to part:</p> - -<p>"Well caught, sir!" for it was a cricketing county.</p> - -<p>"Truly," Macmaster quoted to himself.</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"'The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Some enter at the portal. Some do not!'"</span> -</div></div> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="II">II</a></h4> - - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite with her French maid, her priest, and her -disreputable young man, Mr. Bayliss, were at Lobscheid, an unknown and -little-frequented air resort amongst the pinewoods of the Taunus. Mrs. -Satterthwaite was ultra-fashionable and consummately indifferent—she -only really lost her temper if at her table and under her nose you -consumed her famous Black Hamburg grapes without taking their skin and -all. Father Consett was out to have an uproarious good time during his -three weeks' holiday from the slums of Liverpool; Mr. Bayliss, thin like -a skeleton in tight blue serge, golden haired and pink, was so nearly -dead of tuberculosis, was so dead penniless, and of tastes so costly -that he was ready to keep stone quiet, drink six pints of milk a day and -behave himself. On the face of it he was there to write the letters of -Mrs. Satterthwaite, but the lady never let him enter her private rooms -for fear of infection. He had to content himself with nursing a growing -adoration for Father Consett. This priest, with an enormous mouth, high -cheek bones, untidy black hair, a broad face that never looked too clean -and waving hands that always looked too dirty, never kept still for a -moment, and had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned -English novels of Irish life. He had a perpetual laugh, like the noise -made by a steam roundabout. He was, in short, a saint, and Mr. Bayliss -knew it, though he didn't know how. Ultimately, and with the financial -assistance of Mrs. Satterthwaite, Mr. Bayliss became almoner to Father -Consett, adopted the rule of St. Vincent de Paul and wrote some very -admirable, if decorative, devotional verse.</p> - -<p>They proved thus a very happy, innocent party. For Mrs. Satterthwaite -interested herself—it was the only interest she had—in -handsome, thin and horribly disreputable young men. She would wait for -them, or send her car to wait for them, at the gaol gates. She would bring -their usually admirable wardrobes up to date and give them enough money to -have a good time. When contrary to all expectations—but it happened -more often than not!—they turned out well, she was lazily pleased. -Sometimes she sent them away to a gay spot with a priest who needed a -holiday; sometimes she had them down to her place in the west of -England.</p> - -<p>So they were a pleasant company and all very happy. Lobscheid contained -one empty hotel with large verandahs and several square farm-houses, -white with grey beams, painted in the gables with bouquets of blue and -yellow flowers or with scarlet huntsmen shooting at purple stags. They -were like gay cardboard boxes set down in fields of long grass; then the -pinewoods commenced and ran, solemn, brown and geometric for miles up -and down hill. The peasant girls wore black velvet waistcoats, white -bodices, innumerable petticoats and absurd parti-coloured headdresses of -the shape and size of halfpenny buns. They walked about in rows of four -to six abreast, with a slow step, protruding white-stockinged feet in -dancing pumps, their headdresses nodding solemnly; young men in blue -blouses, knee-breeches and, on Sundays, in three-cornered hats, followed -behind singing part-songs.</p> - -<p>The French maid—whom Mrs. Satterthwaite had borrowed from -the Duchesse de Carbon Châteaulherault in exchange for her own -maid—was at first inclined to find the place <i>maussade</i>. But -getting up a tremendous love affair with a fine, tall, blonde young -fellow, who included a gun, a gold-mounted hunting knife as long as his -arm, a light, grey-green uniform, with gilt badges and buttons, -she was reconciled to her lot. When the young Förster tried to shoot -her—"<i>et pour cause</i>," as she said—she was ravished and -Mrs. Satterthwaite lazily amused.</p> - -<p>They were sitting playing bridge in the large, shadowy dining-hall of -the hotel: Mrs. Satterthwaite, Father Consett, Mr. Bayliss. A young -blonde sub-lieutenant of great obsequiousness who was there as a last -chance for his right lung and his career, and the bearded Kur-doctor cut -in. Father Consett, breathing heavily and looking frequently at his -watch, played very fast, exclaiming: "Hurry up now; it's nearly twelve. -Hurry up wid ye." Mr. Bayliss being dummy, the Father exclaimed: "Three, -no trumps; I've to make. Get me a whisky and soda quick, and don't drown -it as ye did the last." He played his hand with extreme rapidity, threw -down his last three cards, exclaimed: "Ach! Botheranouns an' all; I'm -two down and I've revoked on the top av it," swallowed down his whisky -and soda, looked at his watch and exclaimed: "Done it to the minute! -Here, doctor, take my hand and finish the rubber." He was to take the -mass next day for the local priest, and mass must be said fasting from -midnight, and without cards played. Bridge was his only passion; a -fortnight every year was what, in his worn-out life, he got of it. On -his holiday he rose at ten. At eleven it was: "A four for the Father." -From two to four they walked in the forest. At five it was: "A four for -the Father." At nine it was: "Father, aren't you coming to your bridge?" -And Father Consett grinned all over his face and said: "It's good ye are -to a poor ould soggart. It will be paid back to you in Heaven."</p> - -<p>The other four played on solemnly. The Father sat himself down behind -Mrs. Satterthwaite, his chin in the nape of her neck. At excruciating -moments he gripped her shoulders, exclaimed: "Play the <i>queen</i>, -woman!" and breathed hard down her back. Mrs. Satterthwaite would play the -two of diamonds, and the Father, throwing himself back, would groan. She -said over her shoulder:</p> - -<p>"I want to talk to you to-night, Father," took the last trick of the -rubber, collected 17 marks 50 from the doctor and 8 marks from the -unter-leutenant. The doctor exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"You gan't dake that immense sum from us and then ko off. Now we shall -be ropped py Herr Payliss at gutt-throat!"</p> - -<p>She drifted, all shadowy black silk, across the shadows of the -dining-hall, dropping her winnings into her black satin vanity bag and -attended by the priest. Outside the door, beneath the antlers of a royal -stag, in an atmosphere of paraffin lamps and varnished pitch-pine, she -said:</p> - -<p>"Come up to my sitting-room. The prodigal's returned. Sylvia's -here."</p> - -<p>The Father said:</p> - -<p>"I thought I saw her out of the corner of my eye in the 'bus after -dinner. She'll be going back to her husband. It's a poor world."</p> - -<p>"She's a wicked devil!" Mrs. Satterthwaite said.</p> - -<p>"I've known her myself since she was nine," Father Consett said, "and -it's little I've seen in her to hold up to the commendation of my -flock." He added: "But maybe I'm made unjust by the shock of it."</p> - -<p>They climbed the stairs slowly.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite sat herself on the edge of a cane chair. She -said:</p> - -<p>"Well!"</p> - -<p>She wore a black hat like a cart-wheel and her dresses appeared always -to consist of a great many squares of silk that might have been thrown -on to her. Since she considered that her complexion, which was mat -white, had gone slightly violet from twenty years of make up, when she -was not made up—as she never was at Lobscheid—she wore bits of -puce-coloured satin ribbon stuck here and there, partly to counteract -the violet of her complexion, partly to show she was not in mourning. -She was very tall and extremely emaciated; her dark eyes that had -beneath them dark brown thumb-marks were very tired or very indifferent -by turns.</p> - -<p>Father Consett walked backwards and forwards, his hands behind his back, -his head bent, over the not too well polished floor. There were two -candles, lit but dim, in imitation pewter <i>nouvel art</i> candlesticks, -rather dingy; a sofa of cheap mahogany with red plush cushions and -rests, a table covered with a cheap carpet and an American roll-top desk -that had thrown into it a great many papers in scrolls or flat. Mrs. -Satterthwaite was extremely indifferent to her surroundings, but she -insisted on having a piece of furniture for her papers. She liked also -to have a profusion of hot-house, not garden, flowers, but as there were -none of these at Lobscheid she did without them. She insisted also, as a -rule, on a comfortable chaise longue which she rarely, if ever, used; -but the German Empire of those days did not contain a comfortable chair, -so she did without it, lying down on her bed when she was really tired. -The walls of the large room were completely covered with pictures of -animals in death agonies: capercailzies giving up the ghost with gouts -of scarlet blood on the snow; deer dying with their heads back and eyes -glazing, gouts of red blood on their necks; foxes dying with scarlet -blood on green grass. These pictures were frame to frame, representing -sport, the hotel having been a former Grand Ducal hunting-box, freshened -to suit the taste of the day with varnished pitch-pine, bathrooms, -verandahs, and excessively modern but noisy lavatory arrangements which -had been put in for the delight of possible English guests.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite sat on the edge of her chair; she had always the air -of being just about to go out somewhere or of having just come in and -being on the point of going to take her things off. She said:</p> - -<p>"There's been a telegram waiting for her all the afternoon. I knew she -was coming."</p> - -<p>Father Consett said:</p> - -<p>"I saw it in the rack myself. I misdoubted it." He added: "Oh dear, oh -dear! After all we've talked about it; now it's come."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"I've been a wicked woman myself as these things are measured; -but . . ."</p> - -<p>Father Consett said:</p> - -<p>"Ye have! It's no doubt from you she gets it, for your husband was a -good man. But one wicked woman is enough for my contemplation at a time. -I'm no St. Anthony. . . . The young man says he will take her back?"</p> - -<p>"On conditions," Miss Satterthwaite said. "He is coming here to have an -interview."</p> - -<p>The priest said:</p> - -<p>"Heaven knows, Mrs. Satterthwaite, there are times when to a poor priest -the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard and he -almost doubts her inscrutable wisdom. He doesn't mind you. But at times -I wish that that young man would take what advantage—it's all there -is!—that he can of being a Protestant and divorce Sylvia. For I tell -you, there are bitter things to see amongst my flock over there . . ." -He made a vague gesture towards the infinite. . . . "And bitter things -I've seen, for the heart of man is a wicked place. But never a bitterer -than this young man's lot."</p> - -<p>"As you say," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "my husband was a good man. I -hated him, but that was as much my fault as his. More! And the only -reason I don't wish Christopher to divorce Sylvia is that it would bring -disgrace on my husband's name. At the same time, Father . . ."</p> - -<p>The priest said:</p> - -<p>"I've heard near enough."</p> - -<p>"There's this to be said for Sylvia," Mrs. Satterthwaite went on. "There -are times when a woman hates a man—as Sylvia hates her husband. . . . -I tell you I've walked behind a man's back and nearly screamed because of -the desire to put my nails into the veins of his neck. It was a -fascination. And it's worse with Sylvia. It's a natural antipathy."</p> - -<p>"Woman!" Father Consett fulminated, "I've no patience wid ye! If the -woman, as the Church directs, would have children by her husband and -live decent, she would have no such feelings. It's unnatural living and -unnatural practises that cause these complexes. Don't think I'm an -ignoramus, priest if I am."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"But Sylvia's had a child."</p> - -<p>Father Consett swung round like a man that has been shot at.</p> - -<p>"Whose?" he asked, and he pointed a dirty finger at his interlocutress. -"It was that blackguard Drake's, wasn't it? I've long suspected that."</p> - -<p>"It was probably Drake's," Mrs. Satterthwaite said.</p> - -<p>"Then," the priest said, "in the face of the pains of the hereafter how -could you let that decent lad in the hotness of his sin? . . ."</p> - -<p>"Indeed," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "I shiver sometimes when I think of -it. Don't believe that I had anything to do with trepanning him. But I -couldn't hinder it. Sylvia's my daughter, and dog doesn't eat dog."</p> - -<p>"There are times when it should," Father Consett said -contemptuously.</p> - -<p>"You don't seriously," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "say that I, a mother, -if an indifferent one, with my daughter appearing in trouble, as the -kitchenmaids say, by a married man—that I should step in and stop a -marriage that was a Godsend. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Don't," the priest said, "introduce the sacred name into an affair of -Piccadilly bad girls. . . ." He stopped. "Heaven help me," he said -again, "don't ask me to answer the question of what you should or -shouldn't have done. You know I loved your husband like a brother, and -you know I've loved you and Sylvia ever since she was a tiny. And I -thank God that I am not your spiritual adviser, but only your friend in -God. For if I had to answer your question I could answer it only in one -way." He broke off to ask: "Where is that woman?"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite called:</p> - -<p>"Sylvia! Sylvia! Come here!"</p> - -<p>A door in the shadows opened and light shone from another room behind a -tall figure leaning one hand on the handle of the door. A very deep -voice said:</p> - -<p>"I can't understand, mother, why you live in rooms like a sergeants' -mess." And Sylvia Tietjens wavered into the room. She added: "I suppose -it doesn't matter. I'm bored."</p> - -<p>Father Consett groaned:</p> - -<p>"Heaven help us, she's like a picture of Our Lady by Fra Angelico."</p> - -<p>Immensely tall, slight and slow in her movements, Sylvia Tietjens wore -her reddish, very fair hair in great bandeaux right down over her ears. -Her very oval, regular face had an expression of virginal lack of -interest such as used to be worn by fashionable Paris courtesans a -decade before that time. Sylvia Tietjens considered that, being -privileged to go everywhere where one went and to have all men at her -feet, she had no need to change her expression or to infuse into it the -greater animation that marked the more common beauties of the early -twentieth century. She moved slowly from the door and sat languidly on -the sofa against the wall.</p> - -<p>"There you are, Father," she said. "I'll not ask you to shake hands with -me. You probably wouldn't."</p> - -<p>"As I am a priest," Father Consett answered, "I could not refuse. But -I'd rather not."</p> - -<p>"This," Sylvia repeated, "appears to be a boring place."</p> - -<p>"You won't say so to-morrow," the priest said. "There's two young -fellows. . . . And a sort of policeman to trepan away from your mother's -maid!"</p> - -<p>"That," Sylvia answered, "is meant to be bitter. But it doesn't hurt. I -am done with men." She added suddenly: "Mother, didn't you one day, -while you were still young, say that you had done with men? Firmly! And -mean it?"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"I did."</p> - -<p>"And did you keep to it?" Sylvia asked.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"I did."</p> - -<p>"And shall I, do you imagine?"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"I imagine you will."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Oh dear!"</p> - -<p>The priest said:</p> - -<p>"I'd be willing to see your husband's telegram. It makes a difference to -see the words on paper."</p> - -<p>Sylvia rose effortlessly.</p> - -<p>"I don't see why you shouldn't," she said. "It will give you no -pleasure." She drifted towards the door.</p> - -<p>"If it would give me pleasure," the priest said, "you would not show it -me."</p> - -<p>"I would not," she said.</p> - -<p>A silhouette in the doorway, she halted, drooping, and looked over her -shoulder.</p> - -<p>"Both you and mother," she said, "sit there scheming to make life -bearable for the Ox. I call my husband the Ox. He's repulsive: like a -swollen animal. Well . . . you can't do it." The lighted doorway was -vacant. Father Consett sighed.</p> - -<p>"I told you this was an evil place," he said. "In the deep forests. -She'd not have such evil thoughts in another place."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"I'd rather you didn't say that, Father. Sylvia would have evil thoughts -in any place."</p> - -<p>"Sometimes," the priest said, "at night I think I hear the claws of evil -things scratching on the shutters. This was the last place in Europe to -be christianised. Perhaps it wasn't ever even christianised and they're -here yet."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"It's all very well to talk like that in the day-time. It makes the -place seem romantic. But it must be near one at night. And things are -bad enough as it is."</p> - -<p>"They are," Father Consett said. "The devil's at work."</p> - -<p>Sylvia drifted back into the room with a telegram of several sheets. -Father Consett held it close to one of the candles to read, for he was -short-sighted.</p> - -<p>"All men are repulsive," Sylvia said; "don't you think so, mother?"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"I do not. Only a heartless woman would say so."</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Vanderdecken," Sylvia went on, "says all men are repulsive and -it's woman's disgusting task to live beside them."</p> - -<p>"You've been seeing that foul creature?" Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "She's -a Russian agent. And worse!"</p> - -<p>"She was at Gosingeux all the time we were," Sylvia said. "You needn't -groan. She won't split on us. She's the soul of honour."</p> - -<p>"It wasn't because of that I groaned, if I did," Mrs. Satterthwaite -answered.</p> - -<p>The priest, from over his telegram, exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Vanderdecken! God forbid."</p> - -<p>Sylvia's face, as she sat on the sofa, expressed languid and incredulous -amusement.</p> - -<p>"What do you know of her?" she asked the Father.</p> - -<p>"I know what you know," he answered, "and that's enough."</p> - -<p>"Father Consett," Sylvia said to her mother, "has been renewing his -social circle."</p> - -<p>"It's not," Father Consett said, "amongst the dregs of the people that -you must live if you don't want to hear of the dregs of society."</p> - -<p>Sylvia stood up. She said:</p> - -<p>"You'll keep your tongue off my best friends if you want me to stop and -be lectured. But for Mrs. Vanderdecken I should not be here, returned to -the fold!"</p> - -<p>Father Consett exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Don't say it, child. I'd rather, heaven help me, you had gone on living -in open sin."</p> - -<p>Sylvia sat down again, her hands listlessly in her lap.</p> - -<p>"Have it your own way," she said, and the Father returned to the fourth -sheet of the telegram.</p> - -<p>"What does this mean?" he asked. He had returned to the first sheet. -"This here: '<i>Accept resumption yoke</i>'?" he read, breathlessly.</p> - -<p>"Sylvia," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "go and light the spirit lamp for -some tea. We shall want it."</p> - -<p>"You'd think I was a district messenger boy," Sylvia said as she rose. -"Why don't you keep your maid up? . . . It's a way we had of referring -to our . . . union," she explained to the Father.</p> - -<p>"There was sympathy enough between you and him then," he said, "to have -bywords for things. It was that I wanted to know. I understood the -words."</p> - -<p>"They were pretty bitter bywords, as you call them," Sylvia said. "More -like curses than kisses."</p> - -<p>"It was you that used them then," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "Christopher -never said a bitter thing to you."</p> - -<p>An expression like a grin came slowly over Sylvia's face as she turned -back to the priest.</p> - -<p>"That's mother's tragedy," she said. "My husband's one of her best boys. -She adores him. And he can't bear <i>her</i>." She drifted behind the wall -of the next room and they heard her tinkling the tea-things as the Father -read on again beside the candle. His immense shadow began at the centre -and ran along the pitch-pine ceiling, down the wall and across the floor -to join his splay feet in their clumsy boots.</p> - -<p>"It's bad," he muttered. He made a sound like "Umbleumbleumble. . . . -Worse than I feared . . . umble-umble. . . . '<i>accept resumption yoke -but on rigid conditions</i>.' What's this: <i>esoecially</i>; it ought to -be a 'p,' '<i>especially regards child reduce establishment ridiculous our -position remake settlements in child's sole interests flat not house -entertaining minimum am prepared resign office settle Yorkshire but -imagine this not suit you child remain sister Effie open visits both -wire if this rough outline provisionally acceptable in that case will -express draft general position Monday for you and mother reflect upon -follow self Tuesday arrive Thursday Lobscheid go Wiesbaden fortnight on -social task discussion Thursday limited solely comma emphasised comma to -affairs.</i>'"</p> - -<p>"That means," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "that he doesn't mean to reproach -her. <i>Emphasised</i> applies to the word <i>solely</i>. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Why d'you take it. . . ." Father Consett asked, "did he spend an -immense lot of money on this telegram? Did he imagine you were in such -trepidation. . . ." He broke off. Walking slowly, her long arms extended -to carry the tea-tray, over which her wonderfully moving face had a rapt -expression of indescribable mystery, Sylvia was coming through the -door.</p> - -<p>"Oh, child," the Father exclaimed, "whether it's St. Martha or that Mary -that made the bitter choice, not one of them ever looked more virtuous -than you. Why aren't ye born to be a good man's help-meet?"</p> - -<p>A little tinkle sounded from the tea-tray and three pieces of sugar fell -on to the floor. Mrs. Tietjens hissed with vexation.</p> - -<p>"I <i>knew</i> that damned thing would slide off the tea-cups," she -said. She dropped the tray from an inch or so of height on to the carpeted -table. "I'd made it a matter of luck between myself and myself," she said. -Then she faced the priest.</p> - -<p>"I'll tell you," she said, "why he sent the telegram. It's because of -that dull display of the English gentleman that I detested. He gives -himself the solemn airs of the Foreign Minister, but he's only a -youngest son at the best. That is why I loathe him."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"That isn't the reason why he sent the telegram."</p> - -<p>Her daughter had a gesture of amused, lazy tolerance.</p> - -<p>"Of course it isn't," she said. "He sent it out of consideration: the -lordly, full dress consideration that drives me distracted." As he would -say: "He'd imagine I'd find it convenient to have ample time for -reflection. It's like being addressed as if one were a monument and by -a herald according to protocol. And partly because he's the soul of -truth like a stiff Dutch doll. He wouldn't write a letter because he -couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours -sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' . . . He's that sort of -precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the -conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them."</p> - -<p>"Then," Father Consett said, "if ye know him so well, Sylvia -Satterthwaite, how is it ye can't get on with him better? They say: -<i>Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner.</i>"</p> - -<p>"It isn't," Sylvia said. "To know everything about a person is to be -bored . . . bored . . . bored!"</p> - -<p>"And how are ye going to answer this telegram of his?" the Father asked. -"Or have ye answered it already?"</p> - -<p>"I shall wait until Monday night to keep him as bothered as I can to -know whether he's to start on Tuesday. He fusses like a hen over his -packings and the exact hours of his movements. On Monday I shall -telegraph: 'Righto' and nothing else."</p> - -<p>"And why," the Father asked, "will ye telegraph him a vulgar word that -you never use, for your language is the one thing about you that isn't -vulgar?"</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Thanks!" She curled her legs up under her on the sofa and laid her head -back against the wall so that her Gothic arch of a chinbone pointed at -the ceiling. She admired her own neck, which was very long and white.</p> - -<p>"I know!" Father Consett said. "You're a beautiful woman. Some men would -say it was a lucky fellow that lived with you. I don't ignore the fact -in my cogitation. He'd imagine all sorts of delights to lurk in the -shadow of your beautiful hair. And they wouldn't."</p> - -<p>Sylvia brought her gaze down from the ceiling and fixed her brown eyes -for a moment on the priest, speculatively.</p> - -<p>"It's a great handicap we suffer from," he said.</p> - -<p>"I don't know why I selected that word," Sylvia said, "it's one word, so -it costs only fifty pfennigs. I couldn't hope really to give a jerk to -his pompous self-sufficiency."</p> - -<p>"It's great handicaps we priests suffer from," the Father repeated. -"However much a priest may be a man of the world—and he has to be to -fight the world . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"Have a cup of tea, Father, while it's just right. I believe Sylvia is -the only person in Germany who knows how to make tea."</p> - -<p>"There's always behind him the Roman collar and the silk bib, and you -don't believe in him," Father Consett went on, "yet he knows ten—a -thousand times!—more of human nature than ever you can."</p> - -<p>"I don't see," Sylvia said placably, "how you can learn in your slums -anything about the nature of Eunice Vanderdecken, or Elizabeth B. or -Queenie James, or any of my set." She was on her feet pouring cream into -the Father's tea. "I'll admit for the moment that you aren't giving me -pi-jaw."</p> - -<p>"I'm glad," the priest said, "that ye remember enough of yer schooldays -to use the old term."</p> - -<p>Sylvia wavered backwards to her sofa and sank down again.</p> - -<p>"There you are," she said, "you can't really get away from preachments. -Me for the pyore young girl is always at the back of it."</p> - -<p>"It isn't," the Father said. "I'm not one to cry for the moon."</p> - -<p>"You don't want me to be a pure young girl," Sylvia asked with lazy -incredulity.</p> - -<p>"I do not!" the Father said, "but I'd wish that at times ye'd remember -you once were."</p> - -<p>"I don't believe I ever was," Sylvia said, "if the nuns had known I'd -have been expelled from the Holy Child."</p> - -<p>"You would not," the Father said. "Do stop your boasting. The nuns have -too much sense. . . . Anyhow, it isn't a pure young girl I'd have you or -behaving like a Protestant deaconess for the craven fear of hell. I'd -have ye be a physically healthy, decently honest-with-yourself young -devil of a married woman. It's them that are the plague and the -salvation of the world."</p> - -<p>"You admire mother?" Mrs. Tietjens asked suddenly. She added in -parenthesis: "You see you can't get away from salvation."</p> - -<p>"I mean keeping bread and butter in their husband's stomachs," the -priest said. "Of course I admire your mother."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite moved a hand slightly.</p> - -<p>"You're at any rate in league with her against me," Sylvia said. She -asked with more interest: "Then would you have me model myself on her -and do good works to escape hell fire? She wears a hair shirt in Lent."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite started from her doze on the edge of her chair. She -had been trusting the Father's wit to give her daughter's insolence a -run for its money, and she imagined that if the priest hit hard enough -he might, at least, make Sylvia think a little about some of her ways.</p> - -<p>"Hang it, no, Sylvia," she exclaimed more suddenly. "I may not be much, -but I'm a sportsman. I'm afraid of hell fire; horribly, I'll admit. But -I don't bargain with the Almighty. I hope He'll let me through; but I'd go -on trying to pick men out of the dirt—I suppose that's what you and -Father Consett mean—if I were as certain of going to hell as I am of -going to bed to-night. So that's that!"</p> - -<p>"'And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!'" Sylvia jeered softly. -"All the same I bet you wouldn't bother to reclaim men if you could not -find the young, good-looking, interestingly vicious sort."</p> - -<p>"I wouldn't," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "If they didn't interest me, why -should I?"</p> - -<p>Sylvia looked at Father Consett.</p> - -<p>"If you're going to trounce me any more," she said, "get a move on. It's -late, I've been travelling for thirty-six hours."</p> - -<p>"I will," Father Consett said. "It's a good maxim that if you swat flies -enough some of them stick to the wall. I'm only trying to make a little -mark on your common sense. Don't you see what you're going to?"</p> - -<p>"What?" Sylvia said indifferently. "Hell?"</p> - -<p>"No," the Father said, "I'm talking of this life. Your confessor must -talk to you about the next. But I'll not tell you what you're going to. -I've changed my mind. I'll tell your mother after you're gone."</p> - -<p>"Tell me," Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>"I'll not," Father Consett answered. "Go to the fortune-tellers at the -Earl's Court exhibition; they'll tell ye all about the fair woman you're -to beware of."</p> - -<p>"There's some of them said to be rather good," Sylvia said. "Di Wilson's -told me about one. She said she was going to have a baby. . . . You -don't mean that, Father? For I swear I never will. . . ."</p> - -<p>"I daresay not," the priest said. "But let's talk about men."</p> - -<p>"There's nothing you can tell me I don't know," Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>"I daresay not," the priest answered. "But let's rehearse what you do -know. Now suppose you could elope with a new man every week and no -questions asked? Or how often would you want to?"</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Just a moment, Father," and she addressed Mrs. Satterthwaite: "I -suppose I shall have to put myself to bed."</p> - -<p>"You will," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "I'll not have any maid kept up -after ten in a holiday resort. What's she to do in a place like this? -Except listen for the bogies it's full of?"</p> - -<p>"Always considerate!" Mrs. Tietjens gibed. "And perhaps it's just as -well. I'd probably beat that Marie of your's arms to pieces with a -hair-brush if she came near me." She added: "You were talking about men, -Father. . . ." And then began with sudden animation to her mother:</p> - -<p>"I've changed my mind about that telegram. The first thing to-morrow I -shall wire: '<i>Agreed entirely but arrange bring Hullo Central with -you.</i>'"</p> - -<p>She addressed the priest again:</p> - -<p>"I call my maid Hullo Central because she's got a tinny voice like a -telephone." I say: "Hullo Central"—when she answers 'Yes, modd'm,' -you'd swear it was the Exchange speaking. . . . But you were telling me -about men."</p> - -<p>"I was reminding you!" the Father said. "But I needn't go on. You've -caught the drift of my remarks. That is why you are pretending not to -listen."</p> - -<p>"I assure you, no," Mrs. Tietjens said. "It is simply that if a thing -comes into my head I have to say it. . . . You were saying that if one -went away with a different man for every week-end . . ."</p> - -<p>"You've shortened the period already," the priest said. "I gave a full -week to every man."</p> - -<p>"But, of course, one would have to have a home," Sylvia said, "an -address. One would have to fill one's mid-week engagements. Really it -comes to it that one has to have a husband and a place to store one's -maid in. Hullo Central's been on board-wages all the time. But I don't -believe she likes it. . . . Let's agree that if I had a different man -every week I'd be bored with the arrangement. That's what you're getting -at, isn't it?"</p> - -<p>"You'd find," the priest said, "that it whittled down until the only -divvy moment was when you stood waiting in the booking-office for the -young man to take the tickets. . . . And then gradually that wouldn't be -divvy any more. . . . And you'd yawn and long to go back to your -husband."</p> - -<p>"Look here," Mrs. Tietjens said, "you're abusing the secrets of the -confessional. That's exactly what Tottie Charles said. She tried it for -three months while Freddie Charles was in Madeira. It's <i>exactly</i> what -she said down to the yawn and the booking-office. <i>And</i> the 'divvy.' -It's only Tottie Charles who uses it every two words. Most of us prefer -ripping! It <i>is</i> more sensible."</p> - -<p>"Of course I haven't been abusing the secrets of the confessional," -Father Consett said mildly.</p> - -<p>"Of course you haven't," Sylvia said with affection. "You're a good old -stick and no end of a mimic, and you know us all to the bottom of our -hearts."</p> - -<p>"Not all that much," the priest said, "there's probably a good deal of -good at the bottom of your hearts."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Thanks." She asked suddenly: "Look here. <i>Was</i> it what you saw of -us—the future mothers of England, you know, and all—at Miss -Lampeter's—that made you take to the slums? Out of disgust and -despair?"</p> - -<p>"Oh, let's not make melodrama out of it," the priest answered. "Let's -say I wanted a change. I couldn't see that I was doing any good."</p> - -<p>"You did us all the good there was done," Sylvia said. "What with Miss -Lampeter always drugged to the world, and all the French mistresses as -wicked as hell."</p> - -<p>"I've heard you say all this before," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "But it -was supposed to be the best finishing school in England. I know it cost -enough!"</p> - -<p>"Well, say it was we who were a rotten lot," Sylvia concluded; and then -to the Father: "We <i>were</i> a lot of rotters, weren't we?"</p> - -<p>The priest answered:</p> - -<p>"I don't know. I don't suppose you were—or are—any worse -than your mother or grandmother, or the patricianesses of Rome or the -worshippers of Ashtaroth. It seems we have to have a governing class and -governing classes are subject to special temptations."</p> - -<p>"Who's Ashtaroth?" Sylvia asked. "Astarte?" and then: "Now, Father, -after your experiences would you say the factory girls of Liverpool, or -any other slum, are any better women than us that you used to look -after?"</p> - -<p>"Astarte Syriaca," the Father said, "was a very powerful devil. There's -some that hold she's not dead yet. I don't know that I do myself."</p> - -<p>"Well, I've done with her," Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>The Father nodded:</p> - -<p>"You've had dealings with Mrs. Profumo?" he asked. "And that loathsome -fellow. . . . What's his name?"</p> - -<p>"Does it shock you?" Sylvia asked. "I'll admit it was a bit thick. . . . -But I've done with it. I prefer to pin my faith to Mrs. Vanderdecken. -And, of course, Freud."</p> - -<p>The priest nodded his head and said:</p> - -<p>"Of course! Of course. . . ."</p> - -<p>But Mrs. Satterthwaite exclaimed, with sudden energy:</p> - -<p>"Sylvia Tietjens, I don't care what you do or what you read, but if you -ever speak another word to that woman, you never do to me!"</p> - -<p>Sylvia stretched herself on her sofa. She opened her brown eyes wide and -let the lids slowly drop again.</p> - -<p>"I've said once," she said, "that I don't like to hear my friends -miscalled. Eunice Vanderdecken is a bitterly misjudged woman. She's a -real good pal."</p> - -<p>"She's a Russian spy," Mrs. Satterthwaite said.</p> - -<p>"Russian grandmother," Sylvia answered. "And if she is, who cares? She's -welcome for me. . . . Listen now, you two. I said to myself when I came -in: 'I daresay I've given them both a rotten time.' I know you're both -more nuts on me than I deserve. And I said I'd sit and listen to all the -pi-jaw you wanted to give me if I sat till dawn. And I will. As a -return. But I'd rather you let my friends alone."</p> - -<p>Both the elder people were silent. There came from the shuttered -windows of the dark room a low, scratching rustle.</p> - -<p>"You hear!" the priest said to Mrs. Satterthwaite.</p> - -<p>"It's the branches," Mrs. Satterthwaite answered.</p> - -<p>The Father answered: "There's no tree within ten yards! Try bats as an -explanation."</p> - -<p>"I've said I wish you wouldn't, once," Mrs. Satterthwaite shivered. -Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"I don't know what you two are talking about. It sounds like -superstition. Mother's rotten with it."</p> - -<p>"I don't say that it's devils trying to get in," the Father said. "But -it's just as well to remember that devils <i>are</i> always trying to get -in. And there are especial spots. These deep forests are noted among -others." He suddenly turned his back and pointed at the shadowy wall. -"Who," he asked, "but a savage possessed by a devil could have conceived -of <i>that</i> as a decoration?" He was pointing at a life-sized, coarsely -daubed picture of a wild boar dying, its throat cut, and gouts of -scarlet blood. Other agonies of animals went away into all the shadows.</p> - -<p>"<i>Sport!</i>" he hissed. "It's devilry!"</p> - -<p>"That's perhaps true," Sylvia said. Mrs. Satterthwaite was crossing -herself with great rapidity. The silence remained.</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Then if you're both done talking I'll say what I have to say. To begin -with . . ." She stopped and sat rather erect, listening to the rustling -from the shutters.</p> - -<p>"To begin with," she began again with impetus, "you spared me the -catalogue of the defects of age; I know them. One grows skinny—my -sort—the complexion fades, the teeth stick out. And then there is the -boredom. I know it; one is bored . . . bored . . . bored! You can't tell -me anything I don't know about that. I'm thirty. I know what to expect. -You'd like to have told me, Father, only you were afraid of taking away -from your famous man of the world effect—you'd like to have told me -that one can insure against the boredom and the long, skinny teeth by -love of husband and child. The home stunt! I believe it! I do quite -believe it. Only I hate my husband . . . and I hate . . . I hate my -child."</p> - -<p>She paused, waiting for exclamations of dismay or disapprobation from -the priest. These did not come.</p> - -<p>"Think," she said, "of all the ruin that child has meant for me; the -pain in bearing him and the fear of death."</p> - -<p>"Of course," the priest said, "child-bearing is for women a very -terrible thing."</p> - -<p>"I can't say," Mrs. Tietjens went on, "that this has been a very decent -conversation. You get a girl . . . fresh from open sin, and make her -talk about it. Of course you're a priest and mother's mother; we're <i>en -famille</i>. But Sister Mary of the Cross at the convent had a maxim: 'Wear -velvet gloves in family life.' We seem to be going at it with the gloves -off."</p> - -<p>Father Consett still didn't say anything.</p> - -<p>"You're trying, of course, to draw me," Sylvia said. "I can see that -with half an eye. . . . Very well then, you shall. . . ."</p> - -<p>She drew a breath.</p> - -<p>"You want to know why I hate my husband. I'll tell you; it's because of -his simple, sheer immorality. I don't mean his actions; his views! Every -speech he utters about everything makes me—I swear it makes -me—in spite of myself, want to stick a knife into him, and I can't -prove he's wrong, not ever, about the simplest thing. But I can pain him. -And I will. . . . He sits about in chairs that fit his back, clumsy, like a -rock, not moving for hours. . . . And I can make him wince. Oh, without -showing it. . . . He's what you call . . . oh, loyal. . . . There's an -absurd little chit of a fellow. . . . oh, Macmaster . . . and his mother -. . . whom he persists in a silly, mystical way in calling a saint . . . -a Protestant saint! . . . And his old nurse, who looks after the -child . . . and the child itself. . . . I tell you I've only got to raise -an eyelid . . . yes, cock an eyelid up a little when anyone of them is -mentioned . . . and it hurts him dreadfully. His eyes roll in a sort of -mute anguish. . . . Of course he doesn't say anything. He's an English -country gentleman."</p> - -<p>Father Consett said:</p> - -<p>"This immorality you talk about in your husband. . . . I've never -noticed it. I saw a good deal of him when I stayed with you for the week -before your child was born. I talked with him a great deal. Except in -matters of the two communions—and even in these I don't know that we -differed so much—I found him perfectly sound."</p> - -<p>"Sound!" Mrs. Satterthwaite said with sudden emphasis; "of course he's -sound. It isn't even the word. He's the best ever. There was your -father, for a good man . . . and him. That's an end of it."</p> - -<p>"Ah," Sylvia said, "you don't know. . . . Look here. Try and be just. -Suppose I'm looking at the <i>Times</i> at breakfast and say, not having -spoken to him for a week: "It's wonderful what the doctors are doing. -Have you seen the latest?" And at once he'll be on his high-horse—he -knows everything!—and he'll prove . . . <i>prove</i> . . . that all -unhealthy children must be lethal-chambered or the world will go to -pieces. And it's like being hypnotised; you can't think of what to -answer him. Or he'll reduce you to speechless rage by proving that -murderers ought not to be executed. And then I'll ask, casually, if -children ought to be lethal-chambered for being constipated. Because -Marchant—that's the nurse—is always whining that the child's -bowels aren't regular and the dreadful diseases that leads to. Of course -<i>that</i> hurts him. For he's perfectly soppy about that child, though he -half knows it isn't his own. . . . But that's what I mean by immorality. -He'll profess that murderers ought to be preserved in order to breed -from because they're bold fellows, and innocent little children executed -because they're sick . . . And he'll almost make you believe it, though -you're on the point of retching at the ideas."</p> - -<p>"You wouldn't now," Father Consett began, and almost coaxingly, "think -of going into retreat for a month or two."</p> - -<p>"I wouldn't," Sylvia said. "How could I?"</p> - -<p>"There's a convent of female Premonstratensians near Birkenhead, many -ladies go there," the Father went on. "They cook very well, and you can -have your own furniture and your own maid if ye don't like nuns to wait -on you."</p> - -<p>"It can't be done," Sylvia said, "you can see for yourself. It would -make people smell a rat at once. Christopher wouldn't hear of it. . . ."</p> - -<p>"No, I'm afraid it can't be done, Father," Mrs. Satterthwaite -interrupted finally. "I've hidden here for four months to cover Sylvia's -tracks. I've got Wateman's to look after. My new land steward's coming -in next week."</p> - -<p>"Still," the Father urged, with a sort of tremulous eagerness, "if only -for a month. . . . If only for a fortnight. . . . So many Catholic -ladies do it. . . . Ye might think of it."</p> - -<p>"I see what you're aiming at," Sylvia said with sudden anger; "you're -revolted at the idea of my going straight from one man's arms to -another."</p> - -<p>"I'd be better pleased if there could be an interval," the Father said. -"It's what's called bad form."</p> - -<p>Sylvia became electrically rigid on her sofa.</p> - -<p>"Bad form!" she exclaimed. "You accuse me of bad form."</p> - -<p>The Father slightly bowed his head like a man facing a wind.</p> - -<p>"I do," he said. "It's disgraceful. It's unnatural. I'd travel a bit at -least."</p> - -<p>She placed her hand on her long throat.</p> - -<p>"I know what you mean," she said, "you want to spare Christopher . . . -the humiliation. The . . . the nausea. No doubt he'll feel nauseated. -I've reckoned on that. It will give me a little of my own back."</p> - -<p>The Father said:</p> - -<p>"That's enough, woman. I'll hear no more."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"You will then. Listen here. . . . I've always got this to look forward -to: I'll settle down by that man's side. I'll be as virtuous as any -woman. I've made up my mind to it and I'll be it. And I'll be bored -stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that -man. And I'll do it. Do you understand how I'll do it? There are many -ways. But if the worst comes to the worst, I can always drive him silly -. . . by corrupting the child!" She was panting a little, and round her -brown eyes the whites showed. "I'll get even with him. I can. I know -how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I've come -all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven't slept. . . . But I -can . . ."</p> - -<p>Father Consett put his hand beneath the tail of his coat.</p> - -<p>"Sylvia Tietjens," he said, "in my pistol pocket I've a little bottle of -holy water which I carry for such occasions. What if I was to -throw two drops of it over you and cry: <i>Exorciso te Ashtaroth in -nomine?</i> . . ."</p> - -<p>She erected her body above her skirts on the sofa, stiffened like a -snake's neck above its coils. Her face was quite pallid, her eyes -staring out.</p> - -<p>"You . . . you <i>daren't</i>," she said. "To me . . . an outrage!" Her -feet slid slowly to the floor; she measured the distance to the doorway -with her eyes. "You <i>daren't</i>," she said again; "I'd denounce you to -the Bishop . . ."</p> - -<p>"It's little the Bishop would help you with them burning into your -skin," the priest said. "Go away, I bid you, and say a Hail Mary or two. -Ye need them. Ye'll not talk of corrupting a little child before me -again."</p> - -<p>"I won't," Sylvia said. "I shouldn't have . . ."</p> - -<p>Her black figure showed in silhouette against the open doorway.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>When the door was closed upon them, Mrs. Satterthwaite said:</p> - -<p>"Was it necessary to threaten her with that? You know best, of course. -It seems rather strong to me."</p> - -<p>"It's a hair from the dog that's bit her," the priest said. "She's a -silly-girl. She's been playing at black masses along with that Mrs. -Profumo and the fellow who's name I can't remember. You could tell that. -They cut the throat of a white kid and splash its blood about. . . . -That was at the back of her mind. . . . It's not very serious. A parcel -of silly, idle girls. It's not much more than palmistry or -fortune-telling to them if one has to weigh it, for all it's ugliness, -as a sin. As far as their volition goes, and it's volition that's the -essence of prayer, black or white. . . . But it was at the back of her -mind, and she won't forget to-night."</p> - -<p>"Of course, that's your affair, Father," Mrs. Satterthwaite said lazily. -"You hit her pretty hard. I don't suppose she's ever been hit so hard. -What was it you wouldn't tell her?"</p> - -<p>"Only," the priest said, "I wouldn't tell her because the thought's best -not put in her head. . . . But her hell on earth will come when her -husband goes running, blind, head down, mad after another woman."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite looked at nothing; then she nodded.</p> - -<p>"Yes," she said; "I hadn't thought of it. . . . But will he? He is a -very sound fellow, isn't he?"</p> - -<p>"What's to stop it?" the priest asked. "<i>What</i> in the world but the -grace of our blessed Lord, which he hasn't got and doesn't ask for? And -then . . . He's a young man, full-blooded, and they won't be living . . . -<i>maritalement</i>. Not if I know him. And then. . . . <i>Then</i> she'll -tear the house down. The world will echo with her wrongs."</p> - -<p>"Do you mean to say," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "that Sylvia would do -anything vulgar?"</p> - -<p>"Doesn't every woman who's had a man to torture for years when she loses -him?" the priest asked. "The more she's made an occupation of torturing -him the less right she thinks she has to lose him."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Satterthwaite looked gloomily into the dusk.</p> - -<p>"That poor devil. . . ." she said. "Will he get any peace -anywhere? . . . What's the matter, Father?" The Father said:</p> - -<p>"I've just remembered she gave me tea and cream and I drank it. Now I -can't take mass for Father Reinhardt. I'll have to go and knock up his -curate, who lives away in the forest."</p> - -<p>At the door, holding the candle, he said:</p> - -<p>"I'd have you not get up to-day nor yet to-morrow, if ye can stand it. -Have a headache and let Sylvia nurse you . . . You'll have to tell how -she nursed you when you get back to London. And I'd rather ye didn't lie -more out and out than ye need, if it's to please me. . . . Besides, if -ye watch Sylvia nursing you, you might hit on a characteristic touch to -make it seem more truthful. . . . How her sleeves brushed the medicine -bottles and irritated you, maybe . . . or—<i>you'll</i> know! If we -can save scandal to the congregation, we may as well."</p> - -<p>He ran downstairs.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="III">III</a></h4> - - -<p>At the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, -Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing -patience engrossedly in a sort of garret bedroom. It had a sloping roof -outlined by black oak beams, which cut into squares the cream coloured -patent distemper of the walls. The room contained also a four-post -bedstead, a corner cupboard in black oak, and many rush mats on a -polished oak floor of very irregular planking. Tietjens, who hated these -disinterred and waxed relics of the past, sat in the centre of the room -at a flimsy card-table beneath a white-shaded electric light of a -brilliance that, in those surroundings, appeared unreasonable. This was -one of those restored old groups of cottages that it was at that date -the fashion to convert into hostelries. To it Macmaster, who was in -search of the inspiration of the past, had preferred to come. Tietjens, -not desiring to interfere with his friend's culture, had accepted the -quarters, though he would have preferred to go to a comfortable modern -hotel as being less affected and cheaper. Accustomed to what he called -the grown oldnesses of a morose, rambling Yorkshire manor house, he -disliked being among collected and rather pitiful bits which, he said, -made him feel ridiculous, as if he were trying to behave seriously at a -fancy-dress ball. Macmaster, on the other hand, with gratification and a -serious air, would run his finger tips along the bevellings of a -darkened piece of furniture, and would declare it genuine "Chippendale" -or "Jacobean oak," as the case might be. And he seemed to gain an added -seriousness and weight of manner with each piece of ancient furniture -that down the years he thus touched. But Tietjens would declare that you -could tell the beastly thing was a fake by just cocking an eye at it -and, if the matter happened to fall under the test of professional -dealers in old furniture, Tietjens was the more often in the right of -it, and Macmaster, sighing slightly, would prepare to proceed still -further along the difficult road to connoisseurship. Eventually, by -conscientious study, he got so far as at times to be called in by -Somerset House to value great properties for probate—an occupation at -once distinguished and highly profitable.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Tietjens swore with the extreme vehemence of a man who has been made, -but who much dislikes being seen, to start.</p> - -<p>Macmaster—in evening dress he looked extremely -miniature!—said:</p> - -<p>"I'm sorry, old man, I know how much you dislike being interrupted. But -the General is in a terrible temper."</p> - -<p>Tietjens rose stiffly, lurched over to an eighteenth century rosewood -folding washstand, took from its top a glass of flat whisky and soda, -and gulped down a large quantity. He looked about uncertainly, perceived -a notebook on a "Chippendale" bureau, made a short calculation in pencil -and looked at his friend momentarily.</p> - -<p>Macmaster said again:</p> - -<p>"I'm sorry old man. I must have interrupted one of your immense -calculations."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"You haven't. I was only thinking. I'm just as glad you've come. What -did you say?"</p> - -<p>Macmaster repeated:</p> - -<p>"I said the General is in a terrible temper. It's just as well you -didn't come up to dinner."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"He isn't . . . He isn't in a temper. He's as pleased as punch at not -having to have these women up before him."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"He says he's got the police scouring the whole county for them, and -that you'd better leave by the first train to-morrow."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I won't. I can't. I've got to wait here for a wire from Sylvia."</p> - -<p>Macmaster groaned:</p> - -<p>"Oh dear! Oh dear!" Then he said hopefully: "But we could have it -forwarded to Hythe."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said with some vehemence:</p> - -<p>"I tell you I won't leave here. I tell you I've settled it with the -police and that swine of a Cabinet Minister. I've mended the leg of the -canary of the wife of the police-constable. Sit down and be reasonable. -The police don't touch people like us."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"I don't believe you realise the public feeling there is . . ."</p> - -<p>"Of course I do, amongst people like Sandbach," Tietjens said. "Sit down -I tell you. . . . Have some whisky. . . ." He filled himself out another -long tumbler and, holding it, dropped into a too low-seated, reddish -wicker arm-chair that had cretonne fixings. Beneath his weight the chair -sagged a good deal and his dress-shirt front bulged up to his chin.</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"What's the matter with you?" Tietjens' eyes were bloodshot.</p> - -<p>"I tell you," Tietjens said, "I'm waiting for a wire from Sylvia."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Oh!" And then: "It can't come to-night, it's getting on for one."</p> - -<p>"It can," Tietjens said, "I've fixed it up with the postmaster—all -the way up to Town! It probably won't come because Sylvia won't send it -until the last moment, to bother me. None the less I'm waiting for a -wire from Sylvia, and this is what I look like."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"That woman's the cruellest beast . . ."</p> - -<p>"You might," Tietjens interrupted, "remember that you're talking about -my wife."</p> - -<p>"I don't see," Macmaster said, "how one can talk about Sylvia -without . . ."</p> - -<p>"The line is a perfectly simple one to draw," Tietjens said. "You can -relate a lady's actions if you know them and are asked to. You mustn't -comment. In this case you don't know the lady's actions even, so you may -as well hold your tongue." He sat looking straight in front of him.</p> - -<p>Macmaster sighed from deep in his chest. He asked himself if this was -what sixteen hours waiting had done for his friend, what were all the -remaining hours going to do?</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I shall be fit to talk about Sylvia after two more whiskies. . . . -Let's settle your other perturbations first. . . . The fair girl is -called Wannop: Valentine Wannop."</p> - -<p>"That's the Professor's name," Macmaster said.</p> - -<p>"She's the late Professor Wannop's daughter," Tietjens said. "She's -also the daughter of the novelist."</p> - -<p>Macmaster interjected:</p> - -<p>"But . . ."</p> - -<p>"She supported herself for a year after the Professor's death as a -domestic servant," Tietjens said. "Now she's housemaid for her mother, -the novelist, in an inexpensive cottage. I should imagine the two -experiences would make her desire to better the lot of her sex."</p> - -<p>Macmaster again interjected a "But . . ."</p> - -<p>"I got that information from the policeman whilst I was putting his -wife's canary's leg in splints."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"The policeman you knocked down?" His eyes expressed unreasoning -surprise. He added: "He knew Miss . . . eh . . . Wannop then!"</p> - -<p>"You would not expect much intelligence from the police of Sussex," -Tietjens said. "But you would be wrong. P.C. Finn is clever enough to -recognise the young lady who for several years past has managed the -constabulary's wives' and children's annual tea and sports. He says Miss -Wannop holds the quarter-mile, half-mile, high jump, long jump and -putting the weight records for East Sussex. That explains how she went -over that dyke in such tidy style. . . . And precious glad the good, -simple man was when I told him he was to leave the girl alone. He didn't -know, he said, how he'd ever a had the face to serve the warrant on Miss -Wannop. The other girl—the one that squeaked—is a stranger, -a Londoner probably."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"<i>You</i> told the policeman . . ."</p> - -<p>"I gave him," Tietjens said, "the Rt. Hon. Stephen Fenwick Waterhouse's -compliments, and he'd be much obliged if the P.C. would hand in a 'No -Can Do' report in the matter of those ladies every morning to his -inspector. I gave him also a brand new fi' pun note—from the Cabinet -Minister—and a couple of quid and the price of a new pair of trousers -from myself. So he's the happiest constable in Sussex. A very decent -fellow; he told me how to know a dog otter's spoor from a gravid -bitch's. . . . But that wouldn't interest you."</p> - -<p>He began again:</p> - -<p>"Don't look so inexpressibly foolish. I told you I'd been dining with -that swine. . . . No, I oughtn't to call him a swine after eating his -dinner. Besides, he's a very decent fellow. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You didn't tell me you'd been dining with Mr. Waterhouse," Macmaster -said. "I hope you remembered that, as he's amongst other things the -President of the Funded Debt Commission he's the power of life and death -over the department and us."</p> - -<p>"You didn't think," Tietjens answered, "that you are the only one to -dine with the great ones of the earth! I wanted to talk to that -fellow . . . about those figures their cursed crowd made me fake. I meant -to give him a bit of my mind."</p> - -<p>"You <i>didn't</i>!" Macmaster said with an expression of panic. -"Besides, they didn't ask you to fake the calculation. They only asked you -to work it out on the basis of given figures."</p> - -<p>"Anyhow," Tietjens said, "I gave him a bit of my mind. I told him that, -at threepence, it must run the country—and certainly himself as a -politician!—to absolute ruin."</p> - -<p>Macmaster uttered a deep "Good Lord!" and then: "But won't you ever -remember you're a Government servant. He could . . ."</p> - -<p>"Mr. Waterhouse," Tietjens said, "asked me if I wouldn't consent to be -transferred to his secretary's department. And when I said: "Go to -hell!" he walked round the streets with me for two hours arguing. . . . -I was working out the chances on a 4½d. basis for him when you -interrupted me. I've promised to let him have the figures when he goes -by up the 1.30 on Monday."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"You haven't. . . . But by Jove you're the only man in England that -could do it."</p> - -<p>"That was what Mr. Waterhouse said," Tietjens commented. "He said old -Ingleby had told him so."</p> - -<p>"I do hope," Macmaster said, "that you answered him politely!"</p> - -<p>"I told him," Tietjens answered, "that there were a dozen men who could -do it as well as I, and I mentioned your name in particular."</p> - -<p>"But I <i>couldn't</i>," Macmaster answered. "Of course I could convert -a 3d. rate into 4½d. But these are the actuarial variations; they're -infinite. I couldn't touch them."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said negligently: "I don't want my name mixed up in the -unspeakable affair." "When I give him the papers on Monday I shall tell -him you did most of the work."</p> - -<p>Again Macmaster groaned.</p> - -<p>Nor was this distress mere altruism. Immensely ambitious for his -brilliant friend, Macmaster's ambition was one ingredient of his strong -desire for security. At Cambridge he had been perfectly content with a -moderate, quite respectable place on the list of mathematical -postulants. He knew that that made him safe, and he had still more -satisfaction in the thought that it would warrant him in never being -brilliant in after life. But when Tietjens, two years after, had come -out as a mere Second Wrangler, Macmaster had been bitterly and loudly -disappointed. He knew perfectly well that Tietjens simply hadn't taken -trouble; and, ten chances to one, it was on purpose that Tietjens hadn't -taken trouble. For the matter of that, for Tietjens it wouldn't have -been trouble.</p> - -<p>And, indeed, to Macmaster's upbraidings, which Macmaster hadn't spared -him, Tietjens had answered that he hadn't been able to think of going -through the rest of his life with a beastly placard like Senior Wrangler -hung round his neck.</p> - -<p>But Macmaster had early made up his mind that life for him would be -safest if he could go about, not very much observed but still an -authority, in the midst of a body of men all labelled. He wanted to walk -down Pall Mall on the arm, precisely, of a largely-lettered Senior -Wrangler; to return eastward on the arm of the youngest Lord Chancellor -England had ever seen; to stroll down Whitehall in familiar converse -with a world-famous novelist, saluting on the way a majority of My Lords -Commissioners of the Treasury. And, after tea, for an hour at the club -all these, in a little group, should treat him with the courtesy of men -who respected him for his soundness. Then he would be safe.</p> - -<p>And he had no doubt that Tietjens was the most brilliant man in -England of that day, so that nothing caused him more anguish than the -thought that Tietjens might not make a brilliant and rapid career -towards some illustrious position in the public services. He would -very willingly—he desired, indeed, nothing better!—have seen -Tietjens pass over his own head! It did not seem to him a condemnation -of the public services that this appeared to be unlikely.</p> - -<p>Yet Macmaster was still not without hope. He was quite aware that there -are other techniques of careers than that which he had prescribed for -himself. He could not imagine himself, even in the most deferential way, -correcting a superior; yet he could see that, though Tietjens treated -almost every hierarch as if he were a born fool, no one very much -resented it. Of course Tietjens was a Tietjens of Groby; but was that -going to be enough to live on for ever? Times were changing, and -Macmaster imagined this to be a democratic age.</p> - -<p>But Tietjens went on, with both hands as it were, throwing away -opportunity and committing outrage. . . .</p> - -<p>That day Macmaster could only consider to be one of disaster. He got up -from his chair and filled himself another drink; he felt himself to be -distressed and to need it. Slouching amongst his cretonnes, Tietjens was -gazing in front of him. He said:</p> - -<p>"Here!" without looking at Macmaster, and held out his long glass. Into -it Macmaster poured whisky with a hesitating hand. Tietjens said: "Go -on!"</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"It's late; we're breakfasting at the Duchemin's at ten."</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"Don't worry, sonny. We'll be there for your pretty lady." He added: -"Wait another quarter of an hour. I want to talk to you."</p> - -<p>Macmaster sat down again and deliberately began to review the day. It -had begun with disaster, and in disaster it had continued.</p> - -<p>And, with something like a bitter irony, Macmaster remembered and -brought up now for digestion the parting words of General Campion to -himself. The General had limped with him to the hall door up at Mountby -and, standing patting him on the shoulder, tall, slightly bent and very -friendly, had said:</p> - -<p>"Look here. Christopher Tietjens is a splendid fellow. But he needs a -good woman to look after him. Get him back to Sylvia as quick as you -can. Had a little tiff, haven't they? Nothing serious? Chrissie hasn't -been running after the skirts? No? I daresay a little. No? Well -then . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had stood like a gate-post, so appalled. He had -stuttered:</p> - -<p>"No! No!"</p> - -<p>"We've known them both so long," the General went on. "Lady Claudine in -particular. And, believe me, Sylvia is a splendid girl. Straight as a -die; the soul of loyalty to her friends. And fearless.—She'd face the -devil in his rage. You should have seen her out with the Belvoir! Of -course you know her. . . . Well then!"</p> - -<p>Macmaster had just managed to say that he knew Sylvia, of course.</p> - -<p>"Well then . . ." the General had continued . . . "you'll agree with me -that if there <i>is</i> anything wrong between them he's to blame. And it -will be resented. Very bitterly. He wouldn't set foot in this house -again. But he says he's going out to her and Mrs. Satterthwaite. . . ."</p> - -<p>"I believe . . ." Macmaster had begun . . . "I believe he is . . ."</p> - -<p>"Well then!" the General had said: "It's all right. . . . But -Christopher Tietjens needs a good woman's backing. . . . He's a splendid -fellow. There are few young fellows for whom I have more . . . I could -almost say respect. . . . But he needs that. To ballast him."</p> - -<p>In the car, running down the hill from Mountby, Macmaster had exhausted -himself in the effort to restrain his execrations of the General. He -wanted to shout that he was a pig-headed old fool: a meddlesome ass. But -he was in the car with the two secretaries of the Cabinet Minister: the -Rt. Hon. Edward Fenwick Waterhouse, who, being himself an advanced -Liberal down for a week-end of golf, preferred not to dine at the house -of the Conservative member. At that date there was, in politics, a phase -of bitter social feud between the parties: a condition that had not till -lately been characteristic of English political life. The prohibition -had not extended itself to the two younger men.</p> - -<p>Macmaster was not unpleasurably aware that these two fellows treated him -with a certain deference. They had seen Macmaster being talked to -familiarly by General Lord Edward Campion. Indeed, they and the car had -been kept waiting whilst the General patted their fellow guest on the -shoulder; held his upper arm and spoke in a low voice into his -ear. . . .</p> - -<p>But that was the only pleasure that Macmaster got out of it.</p> - -<p>Yes, the day had begun disastrously with Sylvia's letter; -it ended—if it was ended!—almost more disastrously with the -General's eulogy of that woman. During the day he had nerved himself to -having an immensely disagreeable scene with Tietjens. Tietjens -<i>must</i> divorce the woman; it was necessary for the peace of mind of -himself, of his friends, of his family; for the sake of his career; in -the very name of decency!</p> - -<p>In the meantime Tietjens had rather forced his hand. It had been a -most disagreeable affair. They had arrived at Rye in time for -lunch—at which Tietjens had consumed the best part of a bottle of -Burgundy. During lunch Tietjens had given Macmaster Sylvia's letter to -read, saying that, as he should later consult his friend, his friend had -better be made acquainted with the document.</p> - -<p>The letter had appeared extraordinary in its effrontery, for it said -nothing. Beyond the bare statement, "I am now ready to return to you," -it occupied itself simply with the fact that Mrs. Tietjens -wanted—could no longer get on without—the services of her -maid, whom she called Hullo Central. If Tietjens wanted her, Mrs. -Tietjens, to return to him he was to see that Hullo Central was waiting -on the doorstep for her, and so on. She added the detail that there was -<i>no one</i> else, underlined, she could bear round her while she was -retiring for the night. On reflection Macmaster could see that this was -the best letter the woman could have written if she wanted to be taken -back; for, had she extended herself into either excuses or explanations, -it was ten chances to one Tietjens would have taken the line that he -couldn't go on living with a woman capable of such a lapse in taste. But -Macmaster had never thought of Sylvia as wanting in <i>savoir -faire</i>.</p> - -<p>It had none the less hardened him in his determination to urge his -friend to divorce. He had intended to begin this campaign in the fly, -driving to pay his call on the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, who, in early life, -had been a personal disciple of Mr. Ruskin and a patron and acquaintance -of the poet-painter, the subject of Macmaster's monograph. On this drive -Tietjens preferred not to come. He said that he would loaf about the -town and meet Macmaster at the golf club towards four-thirty. He was not -in the mood for making new acquaintances. Macmaster, who knew the -pressure under which his friend must be suffering, thought this -reasonable enough, and drove off up Iden Hill by himself.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Few women had ever made so much impression on Macmaster as Mrs. -Duchemin. He knew himself to be in a mood to be impressed by almost any -woman, but he considered that that was not enough to account for the -very strong influence she at once exercised over him. There had been two -young girls in the drawing-room when he had been ushered in, but they -had disappeared almost simultaneously, and although he had noticed them -immediately afterwards riding past the window on bicycles, he was aware -that he would not have recognised them again. From her first words on -rising to greet him: "Not <i>the</i> Mr. Macmaster!" he had had eyes for no -one else.</p> - -<p>It was obvious that the Rev. Mr. Duchemin must be one of those clergymen -of considerable wealth and cultured taste who not infrequently adorn the -Church of England. The rectory itself, a great, warm-looking manor house -of very old red brick, was abutted on to by one of the largest tithe -barns that Macmaster had ever seen; the church itself, with a primitive -roof of oak shingles, nestled in the corner formed by the ends of -rectory and tithe barn, and was by so much the smallest of the three and -so undecorated that but for its little belfry it might have been a good -cow-byre. All three buildings stood on the very edge of the little row -of hills that looks down on the Romney Marsh; they were sheltered from -the north wind by a great symmetrical fan of elms and from the -south-west by a very tall hedge and shrubbery, all of remarkable yews. -It was, in short, an ideal cure of souls for a wealthy clergyman of -cultured tastes, for there was not so much as a peasant's cottage within -a mile of it.</p> - -<p>To Macmaster, in short, this was the ideal English home. Of Mrs. -Duchemin's drawing-room itself, contrary to his habit, for he was -sensitive and observant in such things, he could afterwards remember -little except that it was perfectly sympathetic. Three long windows gave -on to a perfect lawn, on which, isolated and grouped, stood standard -rose trees, symmetrical half globes of green foliage picked out with -flowers like bits of carved pink marble. Beyond the lawn was a low stone -wall; beyond that the quiet expanse of the marsh shimmered in the -sunlight.</p> - -<p>The furniture of the room was, as to its woodwork, brown, old, with -the rich softnesses of much polishing with beeswax. What pictures there -were Macmaster recognised at once as being by Simeon Solomon, -one of the weaker and more frail æsthetes—aureoled, palish heads -of ladies carrying lilies that were not very like lilies. They were in the -tradition—but not the best of the tradition. Macmaster -understood—and later Mrs. Duchemin confirmed him in the -idea—that Mr. Duchemin kept his more precious specimens of work in -a sanctum, leaving to the relatively public room, good-humouredly and -with slight contempt, these weaker specimens. That seemed to stamp Mr. -Duchemin at once as being of the elect.</p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin in person was, however, not present; and there seemed to be -a good deal of difficulty in arranging a meeting between the two men. -Mr. Duchemin, his wife said, was much occupied at the week-ends. She -added, with a faint and rather absent smile, the word, "Naturally." -Macmaster at once saw that it was natural for a clergyman to be much -occupied during the week-ends. With a little hesitation Mrs. Duchemin -suggested that Mr. Macmaster and his friend might come to lunch on the -next day—Saturday. But Macmaster had made an engagement to play the -foursome with General Campion—half the round from twelve till -one-thirty: half the round from three to half-past four. And, as their -then present arrangements stood, Macmaster and Tietjens were to take the -6.30 train to Hythe; that ruled out either tea or dinner next day.</p> - -<p>With sufficient, but not too extravagant regret, Mrs. Duchemin raised -her voice to say:</p> - -<p>"Oh dear! Oh dear! But you must see my husband and the pictures after -you have come so far."</p> - -<p>A rather considerable volume of harsh sound was coming through the end -wall of the room—the barking of dogs, apparently the hurried removal -of pieces of furniture or perhaps of packing cases, guttural ejaculations. -Mrs. Duchemin said, with her far away air and deep voice:</p> - -<p>"They are making a good deal of noise. Let us go into the garden and -look at my husband's roses, if you've a moment more to give us."</p> - -<p>Macmaster quoted to himself:</p> - -<p>"'I looked and saw your eyes in the shadow of your hair. . . .'"</p> - -<p>There was no doubt that Mrs. Duchemin's eyes, which were of a dark, -pebble blue, were actually in the shadow of her blue-black, very -regularly waved hair. The hair came down on the square, low forehead. It -was a phenomenon that Macmaster had never before really seen, and, he -congratulated himself, this was one more confirmation—if confirmation -were needed!—of the powers of observation of the subject of his -monograph!</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin bore the sunlight! Her dark complexion was clear; there -was, over the cheekbones, a delicate suffusion of light carmine. Her -jawbone was singularly clear-cut, to the pointed chin—like an -alabaster, mediæval saint's.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Of course you're Scotch. I'm from Auld Reekie myself."</p> - -<p>Macmaster would have known it. He said he was from the Port of Leith. He -could not imagine hiding anything from Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin said -with renewed insistence:</p> - -<p>"Oh, but of <i>course</i> you must see my husband and the pictures. Let -me see. . . . We must think. . . . Would breakfast now? . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said that he and his friend were Government servants and up to -rising early. He had a great desire to breakfast in that house. She -said:</p> - -<p>"At a quarter to ten, then, our car will be at the bottom of your -street. It's a matter of ten minutes only, so you won't go hungry -long!"</p> - -<p>She said, gradually gaining animation, that of course Macmaster would -bring his friend. He could tell Tietjens that he should meet a very -charming girl. She stopped and added suddenly: "Probably, at any rate." -She said the name which Macmaster caught as "Wanstead." And possibly -another girl. And Mr. Horsted, or something like it, her husband's -junior curate. She said reflectively:</p> - -<p>"Yes, we might try quite a party . . ." and added, "quite noisy and gay. -I hope your friend's talkative!"</p> - -<p>Macmaster said something about trouble.</p> - -<p>"Oh, it can't be too much trouble," she said. "Besides, it might do my -husband good." She went on: "Mr. Duchemin is apt to brood. It's perhaps -too lonely here." And added the rather astonishing words: "After all."</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>And, driving back in the fly, Macmaster said to himself that you -couldn't call Mrs. Duchemin ordinary, at least. Yet meeting her was like -going into a room that you had long left and never ceased to love. It felt -good. It was perhaps partly her Edinburgh-ness. Macmaster allowed himself -to coin that word. There was in Edinburgh a society—he himself -had never been privileged to move in it, but its annals are part of the -literature of Scotland!—where the ladies are all great ladies in tall -drawing-rooms; circumspect yet shrewd: still yet with a sense of the -comic: frugal yet warmly hospitable. It was perhaps just Edinburgh-ness -that was wanting in the drawing-rooms of his friends in London. Mrs. -Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. Limoux and Mrs. Delawnay were all almost -perfection in manner, in speech, in composure. But, then, they were not -young, they weren't Edinburgh—and they weren't strikingly elegant!</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin was all three! Her assured, tranquil manner she would -retain to any age: it betokened the enigmatic soul of her sex, but, -physically, she couldn't be more than thirty. That was unimportant, for -she would never want to do anything in which physical youth counted. She -would never, for instance, have occasion to run: she would always just -"move"—floatingly! He tried to remember the details of her dress.</p> - -<p>It had certainly been dark blue—and certainly of silk: that rather -coarsely-woven, exquisite material that has on its folds as of a silvery -shimmer with minute knots. But very dark blue. And it contrived to be at -once artistic—absolutely in the tradition! And yet well cut! Very -large sleeves, of course, but still with a certain fit. She had worn an -immense necklace of yellow polished amber: on the dark blue! And Mrs. -Duchemin had said, over her husband's roses, that the blossoms always -reminded her of little mouldings of pink cloud come down for the cooling -of the earth. . . . A charming thought!</p> - -<p>Suddenly he said to himself:</p> - -<p>"What a mate for Tietjens!" And his mind added: "Why should she not -become an Influence!"</p> - -<p>A vista opened before him, in time! He imagined Tietjens, in some way -proprietarily responsible for Mrs. Duchemin: quite <i>pour le bon</i>, -tranquilly passionate and accepted, <i>motif</i>; and "immensely improved" -by the association. And himself, in a year or two, bringing the at last -found Lady of his Delight to sit at the feet of Mrs. Duchemin—the -Lady of his Delight whilst circumspect would be also young and -impressionable!—to learn the mysterious assuredness of manner, the -gift of dressing, the knack of wearing amber and bending over standard -roses—and the Edinburgh-ness!</p> - -<p>Macmaster was thus not a little excited, and finding Tietjens at tea -amid the green-stained furnishings and illustrated papers of the large, -corrugated iron golf-house, he could not help exclaiming:</p> - -<p>"I've accepted the invitation to breakfast with the Duchemins to-morrow -for us both. I hope you won't mind," although Tietjens was sitting at a -little table with General Campion and his brother-in-law, the Hon. Paul -Sandbach, Conservative member for the division and husband of Lady -Claudine. The General said pleasantly to Tietjens:</p> - -<p>"Breakfast! With Duchemin! You go, my boy! You'll get the best breakfast -you ever had in your life."</p> - -<p>He added to his brother-in-law: "Not the eternal mock kedgeree Claudine -gives us every morning."</p> - -<p>Sandbach grunted:</p> - -<p>"It's not for want of trying to steal their cook. Claudine has a shy at -it every time we come down here."</p> - -<p>The General said pleasantly to Macmaster—he spoke always -pleasantly, with a half smile and a slight sibilance:</p> - -<p>"My brother-in-law isn't serious, you understand. My sister wouldn't -think of stealing a cook. Let alone from Duchemin. She'd be frightened -to."</p> - -<p>Sandbach grunted:</p> - -<p>"Who wouldn't?"</p> - -<p>Both these gentlemen were very lame: Mr. Sandbach from birth and the -General as the result of a slight but neglected motor accident. He had -practically only one vanity, the belief that he was qualified to act as -his own chauffeur, and since he was both inexpert and very careless, he -met with frequent accidents. Mr. Sandbach had a dark, round, bull-dog -face and a violent manner. He had twice been suspended from his -Parliamentary duties for applying to the then Chancellor of the -Exchequer the epithet "lying attorney," and he was at that moment still -suspended.</p> - -<p>Macmaster then became unpleasantly perturbed. With his sensitiveness he -was perfectly aware of an unpleasant chill in the air. There was also a -stiffness about Tietjens' eyes. He was looking straight before him; -there was a silence too. Behind Tietjens' back were two men with bright -green coats, red knitted waistcoats and florid faces. One was bald and -blonde, the other had black hair, remarkably oiled and shiny; both were -forty-fivish. They were regarding the occupants of the Tietjens' table -with both their mouths slightly open. They were undisguisedly listening. -In front of each were three empty sloe-gin glasses and one half-filled -tumbler of brandy and soda. Macmaster understood why the General had -explained that his sister had not tried to steal Mrs. Duchemin's cook.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Drink up your tea quickly and let's get started." He was drawing from -his pocket a number of telegraph forms which he began arranging. The -General said:</p> - -<p>"Don't burn your mouth. We can't start off before all . . . all these -other gentlemen. We're too slow."</p> - -<p>"No; we're beastly well stuck," Sandbach said.</p> - -<p>Tietjens handed the telegraph forms over to Macmaster.</p> - -<p>"You'd better take a look at these," he said. "I mayn't see you again -to-day after the match. You're dining up at Mountby. The General will -run you up. Lady Claude will excuse me. I've got work to do."</p> - -<p>This was already matter for dismay for Macmaster. He was aware that -Tietjens would have disliked dining up at Mountby with the Sandbachs, -who would have a crowd, extremely smart but more than usually -unintelligent. Tietjens called this crowd, indeed, the plague-spot of the -party—meaning of Toryism. But Macmaster couldn't help thinking that -a disagreeable dinner would be better for his friend than brooding in -solitude in the black shadows of the huddled town. Then Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I'm going to have a word with that swine!" He pointed his square chin -rather rigidly before him, and looking past the two brandy drinkers, -Macmaster saw one of those faces that frequent caricature made familiar -and yet strange. Macmaster couldn't, at the moment, put a name to it. It -must be a politician, probably a Minister. But which? His mind was -already in a dreadful state. In the glimpse he had caught of the -telegraph form now in his hand he had perceived that it was addressed to -Sylvia Tietjens and began with the word "agreed." He said swiftly:</p> - -<p>"Has that been sent or is it only a draft?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"That fellow is the Rt. Hon. Stephen Fenwick Waterhouse. He's chairman -of the Funded Debt Commission. He's the swine who made us fake that -return in the office."</p> - -<p>That moment was the worst Macmaster had ever known. A worse came. -Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I'm going to have a word with him. That's why I'm not dining at -Mountby. It's a duty to the country."</p> - -<p>Macmaster's mind simply stopped. He was in a space, all windows. There -was sunlight outside. And clouds. Pink and white. Woolly! Some ships. -And two men: one dark and oily, the other rather blotchy on a blonde -baldness. They were talking, but their words made no impression on -Macmaster. The dark, oily man said that he was not going to take Gertie -to Budapest. Not half! He winked like a nightmare. Beyond were two young -men and a preposterous face. . . . It was all so like a nightmare that -the Cabinet Minister's features were distorted for Macmaster. Like an -enormous mask of pantomime: shiny, with an immense nose and elongated, -Chinese eyes.</p> - -<p>Yet not unpleasant! Macmaster was a Whig by conviction, by nation, by -temperament. He thought that public servants should abstain from -political activity. Nevertheless, he couldn't be expected to think a -Liberal Cabinet Minister ugly. On the contrary, Mr. Waterhouse appeared -to have a frank, humorous, kindly expression. He listened deferentially -to one of his secretaries, resting his hand on the young man's shoulder, -smiling a little, rather sleepily. No doubt he was overworked. And then, -letting himself go in a side-shaking laugh. Putting on flesh!</p> - -<p>What a pity! What a <i>pity</i>! Macmaster was reading a -string of incomprehensible words in Tietjens' heavily scored writing. -<i>Not entertain</i> . . . <i>flat not house</i> . . . <i>child remain at -sister.</i> . . . His eyes went backwards and forwards over the phrases. He -could not connect the words without stops. The man with the oily hair said -in a sickly voice that Gertie was hot stuff, but not the one for Budapest -with all the Gitana girls you were telling me of! Why, he'd kept Gertie -for five years now. More like the real thing! His friend's voice was -like a result of indigestion. Tietjens, Sandbach and the General were -stiff, like pokers.</p> - -<p>What a pity! Macmaster thought.</p> - -<p>He ought to have been sitting . . . It would have been pleasant and -right to be sitting with the pleasant Minister. In the ordinary course -he, Macmaster, would have been. The best golfer in the place was usually -set to play with distinguished visitors, and there was next to no one in -the south of England who ordinarily could beat him. He had begun at -four, playing with a miniature cleek and a found shilling ball over the -municipal links. Going to the poor school every morning and back to -dinner; and back to school and back to bed! Over the cold, rushy, sandy -links, beside the grey sea. Both shoes full of sand. The found shilling -ball had lasted him three years. . . .</p> - -<p>Macmaster exclaimed: "Good God!" He had just gathered from the telegram -that Tietjens meant to go to Germany on Tuesday. As if at Macmaster's -ejaculation Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Yes. It <i>is</i> unbearable. If you don't stop those swine, General, I -shall."</p> - -<p>The General sibilated low, between his teeth:</p> - -<p>"Wait a minute. . . . Wait a minute. . . . Perhaps that other fellow -will."</p> - -<p>The man with the black oily hair said:</p> - -<p>"If Budapest's the place for the girls you say it is, old pal, with the -Turkish baths and all, we'll paint the old town red all right, next -month," and he winked at Tietjens. His friend, with his head down, -seemed to make internal rumblings, looking apprehensively beneath his -blotched forehead at the General.</p> - -<p>"Not," the other continued argumentatively, "that I don't love my old -woman. She's all right. And then there's Gertie. 'Ot stuff, but the real -thing. But I say a man wants . . ." He ejaculated, "Oh!"</p> - -<p>The General, his hands in his pockets, very tall, thin, red-cheeked, his -white hair combed forward in a fringe, sauntered towards the other -table. It was not two yards, but it seemed a long saunter. He stood -right over them, they looking up, open-eyed, like schoolboys at a -balloon. He said:</p> - -<p>"I'm glad you're enjoying our links, gentlemen."</p> - -<p>The bald man said: "We are! We are! First-class. A treat!"</p> - -<p>"But," the General said, "it isn't wise to discuss one's . . . eh . . . -domestic circumstances . . . at . . . at mess, you know, or in a golf -house. People might hear."</p> - -<p>The gentleman with the oily hair half rose and exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Oo, the . . ." The other man mumbled: "Shut up, Briggs."</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"I'm the president of the club, you know. It's my duty to see that the -<i>majority</i> of the club and its visitors are pleased. I hope you don't -mind."</p> - -<p>The General came back to his seat. He was trembling with vexation.</p> - -<p>"It makes one as beastly a bounder as themselves," he said. "But what -the devil else was one to do?" The two city men had ambled hastily into -the dressing-rooms; the dire silence fell. Macmaster realised that, for -these Tories at least, this was really the end of the world. The last of -England! He returned, with panic in his heart, to Tietjens' -telegram. . . . Tietjens was going to Germany on Tuesday. He offered to -throw over the department. . . . These were unthinkable things. You -couldn't imagine them!</p> - -<p>He began to read the telegram all over again. A shadow fell upon the -flimsy sheets. The Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse was between the head of the -table and the windows. He said:</p> - -<p>"We're much obliged, General. It was impossible to hear ourselves speak -for those obscene fellows' smut. It's fellows like that that make our -friends the suffragettes! That warrants them. . . ." He added: "Hullo! -Sandbach! Enjoying your rest?"</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"I was hoping you'd take on the job of telling these fellows off."</p> - -<p>Mr. Sandbach, his bull-dog jaw sticking out, the short black hair on his -scalp appearing to rise, barked:</p> - -<p>"Hullo, Waterslop! Enjoying your plunder?"</p> - -<p>Mr. Waterhouse, tall, slouching and untidy-haired, lifted the flaps of -his coat. It was so ragged that it appeared as if straws stuck out of -the elbows.</p> - -<p>"All that the suffragettes have left of me," he said, laughingly. "Isn't -one of you fellows a genius called Tietjens?" He was looking at -Macmaster. The General said:</p> - -<p>"Tietjens . . . Macmaster . . ." The Minister went on very -friendly:</p> - -<p>"Oh, it's you? . . . I just wanted to take the opportunity of thanking -you."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Good God! What for?"</p> - -<p>"<i>You</i> know!" the Minister said, "we couldn't have got the Bill -before the House till next session without your figures. . . ." He said -slily: "Could we, Sandbach?" and added to Tietjens: "Ingleby told -me. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens was chalk-white and stiffened. He stuttered:</p> - -<p>"I can't take any credit. . . . I consider . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Tietjens . . . you . . ." he didn't know what he was going to say.</p> - -<p>"Oh, you're too modest," Mr. Waterhouse overwhelmed Tietjens. "We know -whom we've to thank . . ." His eyes drifted to Sandbach a little -absently. Then his face lit up.</p> - -<p>"Oh! Look here, Sandbach," he said. . . . "Come here, will you?" He -walked a pace or two away, calling to one of his young men: "Oh, -Sanderson, give the bobbie a drink. A good stiff one." Sandbach jerked -himself awkwardly out of his chair and limped to the Minister.</p> - -<p>Tietjens burst out:</p> - -<p>"Me too modest! <i>Me</i>! . . . The swine. . . . The unspeakable -swine!"</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"What's it all about, Chrissie? You probably are too modest."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Damn it. It's a serious matter. It's driving me out of the unspeakable -office I'm in."</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"No! No! You're wrong. It's a wrong view you take." And with a good deal -of real passion he began to explain to the General. It was an affair -that had already given him a great deal of pain. The Government had -asked the statistical department for figures illuminating a number of -schedules that they desired to use in presenting their new Bill to the -Commons. Mr. Waterhouse was to present it.</p> - -<p>Mr. Waterhouse at the moment was slapping Mr. Sandbach on the back, -tossing the hair out of his eyes and laughing like a hysterical -schoolgirl. He looked suddenly tired. A police constable, his buttons -shining, appeared, drinking from a pewter-pot outside the glazed door. -The two city men ran across the angle from the dressing-room to the same -door, buttoning their clothes. The Minister said loudly:</p> - -<p>"Make it guineas!"</p> - -<p>It seemed to Macmaster painfully wrong that Tietjens should call anyone -so genial and unaffected an unspeakable swine. It was unjust. He went on -with his explanation to the General.</p> - -<p>The Government had wanted a set of figures based on a calculation called -B 7. Tietjens, who had been working on one called H 19—for his own -instruction—had persuaded himself that H 19 was the lowest figure -that was actuarially sound.</p> - -<p>The General said pleasantly: "All this is Greek to me."</p> - -<p>"Oh no, it needn't be," Macmaster heard himself say. "It amounts to -this. Chrissie was asked by the Government—by Sir Reginald -Ingleby—to work out what 3 x 3 comes to: it was that sort of thing in -principle. He said that the only figure that would not ruin the country was -nine times nine. . . ."</p> - -<p>"The Government wanted to shovel money into the working man's pockets, -in fact," the General said. "Money for nothing. . . . or votes, I -suppose."</p> - -<p>"But that isn't the point, sir," Macmaster ventured to say. "All that -Chrissie was asked to do was to say what 3 x 3 was."</p> - -<p>"Well, he appears to have done it and earned no end of kudos," the -General said. "That's all right. We've all, always, believed in -Chrissie's ability. But he's a strong-tempered beggar."</p> - -<p>"He was extraordinarily rude to Sir Reginald over it," Macmaster went -on.</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"Oh dear! Oh dear!" He shook his head at Tietjens and assumed with care -the blank, slightly disappointing air of the regular officer. "I don't -like to hear of rudeness to a superior. In <i>any</i> service."</p> - -<p>"I don't think," Tietjens said with extreme mildness, "that Macmaster is -quite fair to me. Of course he's a right to his opinion as to what the -discipline of a service demands. I certainly told Ingleby that I'd -rather resign than do that beastly job. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You shouldn't have," the General said. "What would become of the -services if everyone did as you did?"</p> - -<p>Sandbach came back laughing and dropped painfully into his low -arm-chair.</p> - -<p>"That fellow . . ." he began.</p> - -<p>The General slightly raised his hand.</p> - -<p>"A minute!" he said. "I was about to tell Chrissie, here, that if I am -offered the job—of course it's an order really—of suppressing -the Ulster Volunteers . . . I'd rather cut my throat than do it. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"Of course you would, old chap. They're our brothers. You'd see the -beastly, lying Government damned first."</p> - -<p>"I was going to say that I should accept," the General said, "I -shouldn't resign my commission."</p> - -<p>Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"Good <i>God</i>!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Well, I didn't."</p> - -<p>Sandbach exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"General! You! After all Claudine and I have said. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens interrupted:</p> - -<p>"Excuse me, Sandbach. I'm receiving this reprimand for the moment. I -wasn't, then, rude to Ingleby. If I'd expressed contempt for what he -said or for himself, that would have been rude. I didn't. He wasn't in -the least offended. He looked like a cockatoo, but he wasn't offended. -And I let him over-persuade me. He was right, really. He pointed out -that, if I didn't do the job, those swine would put on one of our little -competition wallah head clerks and get all the schedules faked, as well -as starting off with false premises!"</p> - -<p>"That's the view I take," the General said, "if I don't take the Ulster -job the Government will put on a fellow who'll bum all the farm-houses -and rape all the women in the three counties. They've got him up their -sleeve. He only asks for the Connaught Rangers to go through the north -with. And you know what <i>that</i> means. All the same . . ." He looked at -Tietjens: "One should not be rude to one's superiors."</p> - -<p>"I tell you I wasn't rude," Tietjens exclaimed. "Damn your nice, -paternal old eyes. Get that into your mind!"</p> - -<p>The General shook his head:</p> - -<p>"You brilliant fellows!" he said. "The country, or the army, or -anything, could not be run by you. It takes stupid fools like me and -Sandbach, along with sound, moderate heads like our friend here." He -indicated Macmaster and, rising, went on: "Come along. You're playing -me, Macmaster. They say you're hot stuff. Chrissie's no good. He can -take Sandbach on."</p> - -<p>He walked off with Macmaster towards the dressing-room.</p> - -<p>Sandbach, wriggling awkwardly out of his chair, shouted:</p> - -<p>"Save the country. . . . Damn it. . . ." He stood on his feet. "I and -Campion . . . Look at what the country's come to. . . . What with swine -like these two in our club houses! And policemen to go round the links -with Ministers to protect them from the wild women. . . . By God! I'd -like to have the flaying of the skin off some of their backs. I would. -By God I would."</p> - -<p>He added:</p> - -<p>"That fellow Waterslops is a bit of a sportsman. I haven't been able to -tell you about our bet, you've been making such a noise. . . . Is your -friend really plus one at North Berwick? What are you like?"</p> - -<p>"Macmaster is a good plus two anywhere when he's in practice."</p> - -<p>Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"Good Lord. . . . A stout fellow. . . ."</p> - -<p>"As for me," Tietjens said, "I loathe the beastly game."</p> - -<p>"So do I," Sandbach answered. "We'll just lollop along behind them."</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="IV">IV</a></h4> - - -<p>They came out into the bright open where all the distances under the -tall sky showed with distinct prismatic outlines. They made a little -group of seven—for Tietjens would not have a caddy—waiting on -the flat, first teeing ground. Macmaster walked up to Tietjens and said -under his voice:</p> - -<p>"You've really <i>sent</i> that wire? . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"It'll be in Germany by now!"</p> - -<p>Mr. Sandbach hobbled from one to the other explaining the terms of his -wager with Mr. Waterhouse. Mr. Waterhouse had backed one of the young -men playing with him to drive into and hit twice in the eighteen holes -the two city men who would be playing ahead of them. As the Minister had -taken rather short odds Mr. Sandbach considered him a good sport.</p> - -<p>A long way down the first hole Mr. Waterhouse and his two companions -were approaching the first green. They had high sandhills to the right -and, to their left, a road that was fringed with rushes and a narrow -dyke. Ahead of the Cabinet Minister the two city men and their two -caddies stood on the edge of the dyke or poked downwards into the -rushes. Two girls appeared and disappeared on the tops of the sandhills. -The policeman was strolling along the road, level with Mr. Waterhouse. -The General said:</p> - -<p>"I think we could go now."</p> - -<p>Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"Waterslops will get a hit at them from the next tee. They're in the -dyke."</p> - -<p>The General drove a straight, goodish ball. Just as Macmaster was in his -swing Sandbach shouted:</p> - -<p>"By God! He nearly did it. See that fellow jump!"</p> - -<p>Macmaster looked round over his shoulder and hissed with vexation -between his teeth:</p> - -<p>"Don't you know that you don't shout while a man is driving? Or haven't -you played golf?" He hurried fussily after his ball.</p> - -<p>Sandbach said to Tietjens:</p> - -<p>"Golly! That chap's got a temper!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Only over this game. You deserved what you got."</p> - -<p>Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"I did. . . . But I didn't spoil his shot. He's outdriven the General -twenty yards."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"It would have been sixty but for you."</p> - -<p>They loitered about on the tee waiting for the others to get their -distance. Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"By Jove, your friend is on with his second . . . You wouldn't believe -it of such a <i>little</i> beggar!" He added: "He's not much class, -is he?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens looked down his nose.</p> - -<p>"Oh, about <i>our</i> class!" he said. "He wouldn't take a bet about -driving into the couple ahead."</p> - -<p>Sandbach hated Tietjens for being a Tietjens of Groby: Tietjens was -enraged by the existence of Sandbach, who was the son of an ennobled -mayor of Middlebrough, seven miles or so from Groby. The feuds between -the Cleveland landowners and the Cleveland plutocrats are very bitter. -Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"Ah, I suppose he gets you out of scrapes with girls and the Treasury, -and you take him about in return. It's a practical combination."</p> - -<p>"Like Pottle Mills and Stanton," Tietjens said. The financial operations -connected with the amalgamating of these two steelworks had earned -Sandbach's father a good deal of odium in the Cleveland district. . . . -Sandbach said:</p> - -<p>"Look here, Tietjens. . . ." But he changed his mind and said:</p> - -<p>"We'd better go now." He drove off with an awkward action but not -without skill. He certainly outplayed Tietjens.</p> - -<p>Playing very slowly, for both were desultory and Sandbach very lame, -they lost sight of the others behind some coastguard cottages and dunes -before they had left the third tee. Because of his game leg Sandbach -sliced a good deal. On this occasion he sliced right into the gardens of -the cottages and went with his boy to look for his ball among -potato-haulms, beyond a low wall. Tietjens patted his own ball lazily up -the fairway and, dragging his bag behind him by the strap, he sauntered -on.</p> - -<p>Although Tietjens hated golf as he hated any occupation that was of a -competitive nature he could engross himself in the mathematics of -trajectories when he accompanied Macmaster in one of his expeditions for -practice. He accompanied Macmaster because he liked there to be one -pursuit at which his friend undisputably excelled himself, for it was a -bore always brow-beating the fellow. But he stipulated that they should -visit three different and, if possible, unknown courses every week-end -when they golfed. He interested himself then in the way the courses were -laid out, acquiring thus an extraordinary connoisseurship in golf -architecture, and he made abstruse calculations as to the flight of -balls off sloped club-faces, as to the foot-poundals of energy exercised -by one muscle or the other, and as to theories of spin. As often as not -he palmed Macmaster off as a fair, average player on some other -unfortunate fair, average stranger. Then he passed the afternoon in the -club-house studying the pedigrees and forms of racehorses, for every -club-house contained a copy of Ruff's guide. In the spring he would hunt -for and examine the nests of soft-billed birds, for he was interested in -the domestic affairs of the cuckoo, though he hated natural history and -field botany.</p> - -<p>On this occasion he had just examined some notes of other mashie shots, -had put the notebook back in his pocket, and had addressed his ball with -a niblick that had an unusually roughened face and a head like a -hatchet. Meticulously, when he had taken his grip he removed his little -and third fingers from the leather of the shaft. He was thanking heaven -that Sandbach seemed to be accounted for for ten minutes at least, for -Sandbach was miserly over lost balls and, very slowly, he was raising -his mashie to half cock for a sighting shot.</p> - -<p>He was aware that someone, breathing a little heavily from small lungs, -was standing close to him and watching him: he could indeed, beneath his -cap-rim, perceive the tips of a pair of boy's white sand-shoes. It in no -way perturbed him to be watched since he was avid of no personal glory -when making his shots. A voice said:</p> - -<p>"I say . . ." He continued to look at his ball.</p> - -<p>"Sorry to spoil your shot," the voice said. "But . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens dropped his club altogether and straightened his back. A fair -young woman with a fixed scowl was looking at him intently. She had a -short skirt and was panting a little.</p> - -<p>"I say," she said, "go and see they don't hurt Gertie. I've lost -her . . ." She pointed back to the sandhills. "There looked to be some -beasts among them."</p> - -<p>She seemed a perfectly negligible girl except for the frown: her eyes -blue, her hair no doubt fair under a white canvas hat. She had a striped -cotton blouse, but her fawn tweed skirt was well hung.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"You've been demonstrating."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Of course we have, and of course you object on principle. But you won't -let a girl be man-handled. Don't wait to tell me I know it . . . ."</p> - -<p>Noises existed. Sandbach, from beyond the low garden wall fifty yards -away, was yelping, just like a dog: "Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!" and gesticulating. -His little caddy, entangled in his golf-bag, was trying to scramble over -the wall. On top of a high sandhill stood the policeman: he waved his -arms like a windmill and shouted. Beside him and behind, slowly rising, -were the heads of the General, Macmaster and their two boys. Further -along, in completion were appearing the figures of Mr. Waterhouse, his -two companions and <i>their</i> three boys. The Minister was waving his -driver and shouting. They all shouted.</p> - -<p>"A regular rat-hunt," the girl said; she was counting. "Eleven and two -more caddies!" She exhibited satisfaction. "I headed them all off except -two beasts. They couldn't run. But neither can Gertie . . ."</p> - -<p>She said urgently:</p> - -<p>"Come along! You aren't going to leave Gertie to those beasts! They're -drunk. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Cut away then. I'll look after Gertie." He picked up his bag.</p> - -<p>"No, I'll come with you," the girl said.</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered: "Oh, you don't want to go to gaol. Clear out!"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Nonsense. I've put up with worse than that. Nine months as a -slavey. . . . Come <i>along</i>!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens started to run—rather like a rhinoceros seeing purple. He -had been violently spurred, for he had been pierced by a shrill, faint -scream. The girl ran beside him.</p> - -<p>"You . . . can . . . run!" she panted, "put on a spurt."</p> - -<p>Screams protesting against physical violence were at that date rare -things in England. Tietjens had never heard the like. It upset him -frightfully, though he was aware only of an expanse of open country. The -policeman, whose buttons made him noteworthy, was descending his conical -sandhill, diagonally, with caution. There is something grotesque about a -town policeman, silvered helmet and all, in the open country. It was so -clear and still in the air; Tietjens felt as if he were in a light -museum looking at specimens. . . .</p> - -<p>A little young woman, engrossed, like a hunted rat, came round the -corner of a green mound. "This is an assaulted female!" the mind of -Tietjens said to him. She had a black skirt covered with sand, for she -had just rolled down the sandhill; she had a striped grey and black silk -blouse, one shoulder torn completely off, so that a white camisole -showed. Over the shoulder of the sandhill came the two city men, flushed -with triumph and panting; their red knitted waistcoats moved like -bellows. The black-haired one, his eyes lurid and obscene, brandished -aloft a fragment of black and grey stuff. He shouted hilariously:</p> - -<p>"Strip the bitch naked! . . . Ugh . . . Strip the bitch stark naked!" -and jumped down the little hill. He cannoned into Tietjens, who roared -at the top of his voice:</p> - -<p>"You infernal swine. I'll knock your head off if you move!"</p> - -<p>Behind Tietjens' back the girl said:</p> - -<p>"Come along, Gertie. . . . It's only to there . . ."</p> - -<p>A voice panted in answer:</p> - -<p>"I . . . can't. . . . My heart . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens kept his eye upon the city man. His jaw had fallen down, his -eyes stared! It was as if the bottom of his assured world, where all men -desire in their hearts to bash women, had fallen out. He panted:</p> - -<p>"Ergle! Ergle!"</p> - -<p>Another scream, a little further than the last voices from behind his -back, caused in Tietjens a feeling of intense weariness. What did -beastly women want to scream for? He swung round, bag and all. The -policeman, his face scarlet like a lobster just boiled, was lumbering -unenthusiastically towards the two girls who were trotting towards the -dyke. One of his hands, scarlet also, was extended. He was not a yard -from Tietjens.</p> - -<p>Tietjens was exhausted, beyond thinking or shouting. He slipped his -clubs off his shoulder and, as if he were pitching his kit-bag into a -luggage van, threw the whole lot between the policeman's running legs. -The man, who had no impetus to speak of, pitched forward on to his hands -and knees. His helmet over his eyes, he seemed to reflect for a moment; -then he removed his helmet and with great deliberation rolled round and -sat on the turf. His face was completely without emotion, long, -sandy-moustached and rather shrewd. He mopped his brow with a carmine -handkerchief that had white spots.</p> - -<p>Tietjens walked up to him.</p> - -<p>"Clumsy of me!" he said. "I hope you're not hurt." He drew from his -breast pocket a curved silver flask. The policeman said nothing. His -world, too, contained uncertainties and he was profoundly glad to be -able to sit still without discredit. He muttered:</p> - -<p>"Shaken. A bit! Anybody would be!"</p> - -<p>That let him out and he fell to examining with attention the bayonet -catch of the flask top. Tietjens opened it for him. The two girls, -advancing at a fatigued trot, were near the dyke side. The fair girl, as -they trotted, was trying to adjust her companion's hat; attached by pins -to the back of her hair it flapped on her shoulder.</p> - -<p>All the rest of the posse were advancing at a very slow walk, in a -converging semi-circle. Two little caddies were running, but Tietjens -saw them check, hesitate and stop. And there floated to Tietjens' ears -the words:</p> - -<p>"Stop, you little devils. She'll knock your heads off."</p> - -<p>Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse must have found an admirable voice trainer -somewhere. The drab girl was balancing tremulously over a plank on the -dyke; the other took it at a jump: up in the air—down on her feet; -perfectly business-like. And, as soon as the other girl was off the -plank, she was down on her knees before it, pulling it towards her, the -other girl trotting away over the vast marsh field.</p> - -<p>The girl dropped the plank on the grass. Then she looked up and faced -the men and boys who stood in a row on the road. She called in a shrill, -high voice, like a young cockerel's:</p> - -<p>"Seventeen to two! The usual male odds! You'll <i>have</i> to go round -by Camber railway bridge, and we'll be in Folkestone by then. We've got -bicycles!" She was half going when she checked and, searching out -Tietjens to address, exclaimed: "I'm sorry I said that. Because some of -you didn't want to catch us. But some of you <i>did</i>. And you <i>were</i> -seventeen to two." She addressed Mr. Waterhouse:</p> - -<p>"Why <i>don't</i> you give women the vote?" she said. "You'll find it -will interfere a good deal with your indispensable golf if you don't. Then -what becomes of the nation's health?"</p> - -<p>Mr. Waterhouse said:</p> - -<p>"If you'll come and discuss it quietly . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, tell that to the marines," and turned away, the men in a row -watching her figure disappear into the distance of the flat land. Not -one of them was inclined to risk that jump: there was nine foot of mud -in the bottom of the dyke. It was quite true that, the plank being -removed, to go after the women they would have had to go several miles -round. It had been a well thought out raid. Mr. Waterhouse said that -girl was a ripping girl: the others found her just ordinary. Mr. -Sandbach, who had only lately ceased to shout: "Hi!" wanted to know what -they were going to do about catching the women, but Mr. Waterhouse said: -"Oh, chuck it, Sandy," and went off.</p> - -<p>Mr. Sandbach refused to continue his match with Tietjens. He said that -Tietjens was the sort of fellow who was the ruin of England. He said he -had a good mind to issue a warrant for the arrest of Tietjens—for -obstructing the course of justice. Tietjens pointed out that Sandbach -wasn't a borough magistrate and so couldn't. And Sandbach went off, dot -and carry one, and began a furious row with the two city men who had -retreated to a distance. He said they were the sort of men who were the -ruin of England. They bleated like rams. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens wandered slowly up the course, found his ball, made his shot -with care and found that the ball deviated several feet less to the -right of a straight line than he had expected. He tried the shot again, -obtained the same result and tabulated his observations in his notebook. -He sauntered slowly back towards the club-house. He was content.</p> - -<p>He felt himself to be content for the first time in four months. His -pulse beat calmly; the heat of the sun all over him appeared to be a -beneficent flood. On the flanks of the older and larger sandhills he -observed the minute herbage, mixed with little purple aromatic plants. -To these the constant nibbling of sheep had imparted a protective -tininess. He wandered, content, round the sandhills to the small, silted -harbour mouth. After reflecting for some time on the wave-curves in the -sloping mud of the water sides he had a long conversation, mostly in -signs, with a Finn who hung over the side of a tarred, stump-masted, -battered vessel that had a gaping, splintered hole where the anchor -should have hung. She came from Archangel; was of several hundred tons -burthen, was knocked together anyhow, of soft wood, for about ninety -pounds, and launched, sink or swim, in the timber trade. Beside her, -taut, glistening with brass work, was a new fishing boat, just built -there for the Lowestoft fleet. Ascertaining her price from a man who was -finishing her painting, Tietjens reckoned that you could have built -three of the Archangel timber ships for the cost of that boat, and that -the Archangel vessel would earn about twice as much per hour per -ton. . . .</p> - -<p>It was in that way his mind worked when he was fit: it picked up little -pieces of definite, workmanlike information. When it had enough it -classified them: not for any purpose, but because to know things was -agreeable and gave a feeling of strength, of having in reserve something -that the other fellow would not suspect. . . . He passed a long, quiet, -abstracted afternoon.</p> - -<p>In the dressing-room he found the General, among lockers, old coats, and -stoneware, washing basins set in scrubbed wood. The General leaned back -against a row of these things.</p> - -<p>"You are the ruddy <i>limit</i>!" he exclaimed.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Where's Macmaster?"</p> - -<p>The General said he had sent Macmaster off with Sandbach in the -two-seater. Macmaster had to dress before going up to Mountby. He added: -"The <i>ruddy</i> limit!" again.</p> - -<p>"Because I knocked the bobbie over?" Tietjens asked. "He liked it."</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"Knocked the bobbie over . . . I didn't see that."</p> - -<p>"He didn't want to catch the girls," Tietjens said, "you could see -him—oh, yearning not to."</p> - -<p>"I don't want to know anything about that," the General said. "I shall -hear enough about it from Paul Sandbach. Give the bobbie a quid and -let's hear no more of it. I'm a magistrate."</p> - -<p>"Then what have I done?" Tietjens said. "I helped those girls to get -off. <i>You</i> didn't want to catch them; Waterhouse didn't, the policeman -didn't. No one did except the swine. Then what's the matter?"</p> - -<p>"Damn it all!" the General said, "don't you remember that you're a young -married man?"</p> - -<p>With the respect for the General's superior age and achievements, -Tietjens stopped himself laughing.</p> - -<p>"If you're really serious, sir," he said, "I always remember it very -carefully. I don't suppose you're suggesting that I've ever shown want -of respect for Sylvia."</p> - -<p>The General shook his head.</p> - -<p>"I don't know," he said. "And damn it all I'm worried. I'm . . . Hang -it, I'm your father's oldest friend." The General looked indeed worn and -saddened in the light of the sand-drifted, ground glass windows. He -said: "Was that skirt a . . . a friend of yours? Had you arranged it -with her?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Wouldn't it be better, Sir, if you said what you had on your -mind? . . ."</p> - -<p>The old General blushed a little.</p> - -<p>"I don't like to," he said straightforwardly. "You brilliant -fellows. . . . I only want, my dear boy, to hint that. . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said, a little more stiffly:</p> - -<p>"I'd prefer you to get it out, sir. . . . I acknowledge your right as my -father's oldest friend."</p> - -<p>"Then," the General burst out, "who was the skirt you were lolloping up -Pall Mall with? On the last day they trooped the colours? . . . I didn't -see her myself. . . . Was it this same one? Paul said she looked like a -cook maid."</p> - -<p>Tietjens made himself a little more rigid.</p> - -<p>"She was, as a matter of fact, a bookmaker's secretary," Tietjens said. -"I imagine I have the right to walk where I like, with whom I like. And -no one has the right to question it. . . . I don't mean you, sir. But no -one else."</p> - -<p>The General said puzzledly:</p> - -<p>"It's you <i>brilliant</i> fellows. . . . They all say you're -brilliant. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"You might let your rooted distrust of intelligence . . . It's natural -of course; but you might let it allow you to be just to me. I assure you -there was nothing discreditable."</p> - -<p>The General interrupted:</p> - -<p>"If you were a stupid young subaltern and told me you were showing your -mother's new cook the way to the Piccadilly tube I'd believe you. . . . -But, then, no young subaltern would do such a damn, blasted, tomfool -thing! Paul said you walked beside her like the king in his glory! -Through the crush outside the Haymarket, of all places in the world!"</p> - -<p>"I'm obliged to Sandbach for his commendation. . . ." Tietjens said. He -thought a moment. Then he said:</p> - -<p>"I was trying to get that young woman. . . . I was taking her out to -lunch from her office at the bottom of the Haymarket. . . . To get her -off a friend's back. That is, of course, between ourselves."</p> - -<p>He said this with great reluctance because he didn't want to cast -reflection on Macmaster's taste, for the young lady had been by no means -one to be seen walking with a really circumspect public official. But he -had said nothing to indicate Macmaster, and he had other friends.</p> - -<p>The General choked.</p> - -<p>"Upon my soul," he said, "what do you take me for?" He repeated the -words as if he were amazed. "If," he said, "my G.S.O. II.—who's the -stupidest ass I know—told me such a damn-fool lie as that I'd -have him broke to-morrow." He went on expostulatorily: "Damn it all, -it's the first duty of a soldier—it's the first duty of all -Englishmen—to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge. But -a lie like that . . ."</p> - -<p>He broke off breathless, then he began again:</p> - -<p>"Hang it all, I told that lie to my grandmother and my grandfather told -it to <i>his</i> grandfather. And they call you brilliant! . . ." He paused -and then asked reproachfully:</p> - -<p>"Or do you think I'm in a state of senile decay?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I know you, sir, to be the smartest general of division in the British -Army. I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why I said what I -did. . . ." He had told the exact truth, but he was not sorry to be -disbelieved.</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"Then I'll take it that you tell me a lie meaning me to know that -it's a lie. That's quite proper. I take it you mean to keep the woman -officially out of it. But look here, Chrissie"—his tone took a -deeper seriousness—"if the woman that's come between you and -Sylvia—that's broken up your home, damn it, for that's what it -is!—is little Miss Wannop . . ."</p> - -<p>"Her name was Julia Mandelstein," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! Yes! Of course! . . . But if it <i>is</i> the little Wannop girl -and it's not gone too far . . . Put her back . . . Put her back, as you -used to be a good boy! It would be too hard on the mother. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"General! I give you my word . . ."</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"I'm not asking any questions, my boy; I'm talking now. You've told me -the story you want told and it's the story I'll tell for you! But that -little piece is . . . she used to be! . . . as straight as a die. I -daresay you know better than I. Of course when they get among the wild -women there's no knowing what happens to them. They say they're all -whores. . . . I beg your pardon, if you like the girl . . ."</p> - -<p>"Is Miss Wannop," Tietjens asked, "the girl who demonstrates?"</p> - -<p>"Sandbach said," the General went on, "that he couldn't see from where -he was whether that girl was the same as the one in the Haymarket. But -he thought it was . . . He was pretty certain."</p> - -<p>"As he's married your sister," Tietjens said, "one can't impugn his -taste in women."</p> - -<p>"I say again, I'm not asking," the General said. "But I do say again -too: put her back. Her father was a great friend of your father's: or -your father was a great admirer of his. They say he was the most -brilliant brain of the party."</p> - -<p>"Of course I know who Professor Wannop was," Tietjens said. "There's -nothing you could tell me about him."</p> - -<p>"I daresay not," the General said drily. "Then you know that he didn't -leave a farthing when he died and the rotten Liberal Government wouldn't -put his wife and children on the Civil List because he'd sometimes -written for a Tory paper. And you know that the mother has had a deuced -hard row to hoe and has only just turned the corner. If she can be said -to have turned it. I know Claudine takes them all the peaches she can -cadge out of Paul's gardener."</p> - -<p>Tietjens was about to say that Mrs. Wannop, the mother, had written the -only novel worth reading since the eighteenth century. . . . But the -General went on:</p> - -<p>"Listen to me, my boy. . . . If you can't get on without women . . . I -should have thought Sylvia was good enough. But I know what we men are. -. . . I don't set up to be a saint. I heard a woman in the promenade of -the Empire say once that it was the likes of them that saved the lives -and figures of all the virtuous women of the country. And I daresay it's -true. . . . But choose a girl that you can set up in a tobacco shop and -do your courting in the back parlour. Not in the Haymarket. . . . Heaven -knows if you can afford it. That's your affair. You appear to have been -sold up. And from what Sylvia's let drop to Claudine . . ."</p> - -<p>"I don't believe," Tietjens said, "that Sylvia's said anything to Lady -Claudine . . . She's too straight."</p> - -<p>"I didn't say 'said,'" the General exclaimed, "I particularly said 'let -drop.' And perhaps I oughtn't to have said as much as that, but you know -what devils for ferreting out women are. And Claudine's worse than any -woman I ever knew. . . ."</p> - -<p>"And, of course, she's had Sandbach to help," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"Oh, that fellow's worse than any woman," the General exclaimed.</p> - -<p>"Then what does the whole indictment amount to?" Tietjens asked.</p> - -<p>"Oh, hang it," the General brought out, "I'm not a beastly detective, I -only want a plausible story to tell Claudine. Or not even plausible. An -obvious lie as long as it shows you're not flying in the face of -society—as walking up the Haymarket with the little Wannop when your -wife's left you because of her would be."</p> - -<p>"What does it amount to?" Tietjens said patiently: "What Sylvia 'let -drop'?"</p> - -<p>"Only," the General answered, "that you are—that your views -are—immoral. Of course they often puzzle me. And, of course, if you -have views that aren't the same as other people's, and don't keep them -to yourself, other people will suspect you of immorality. That's what -put Paul Sandbach on your track! . . . and that you're extravagant. . . . -Oh, hang it. . . . Eternal hansoms, and taxis and telegrams. . . . You -know, my boy, times aren't what they were when your father and I -married. We used to say you could do it on five hundred a year as a -younger son. . . . And then this girl too. . . ." His voice took on a more -agitated note of shyness—pain. . . . "It probably hadn't occurred -to you. . . . But, of course, Sylvia has an income of her own. . . . -And, don't you see . . . if you outrun the constable and . . . In short, -you're spending Sylvia's money on the other girl, and that's what people -can't stand." He added quickly: "I'm bound to say that Mrs. -Satterthwaite backs you through thick and thin. Thick and thin! Claudine -wrote to her. But you know what women are with a handsome son-in-law -that's always polite to them. But I may tell you that but for your -mother-in-law, Claudine would have cut you out of her visiting list -months ago. And you'd have been cut out of some others too. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Thanks. I think that's enough to go on with. . . . Give me a couple of -minutes to reflect on what you've said . . ."</p> - -<p>"I'll wash my hands and change my coat," the General said with intense -relief.</p> - -<p>At the end of two minutes Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"No; I don't see that there is anything I want to say."</p> - -<p>The General exclaimed with enthusiasm:</p> - -<p>"That's my good lad! Open confession is next to reform. . . . And . . . -and try to be more respectful to your superiors. . . . Damn it; they say -you're brilliant. But I thank heaven I haven't got you in my -command. . . . Though I believe you're a good lad. But you're the sort of -fellow to set a whole division by the ears. . . . A regular . . . what's -'is name? A regular Dreyfus!"</p> - -<p>"Did you think Dreyfus was guilty?" Tietjens asked.</p> - -<p>"Hang it," the General said, "he was worse than guilty—the sort of -fellow you couldn't believe in and yet couldn't prove anything against. -The curse of the world. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Ah."</p> - -<p>"Well, they are," the General said: "fellows like that <i>unsettle</i> -society. You don't know where you are. You can't judge. They make you -uncomfortable. . . . A brilliant fellow too! I believe he's a -brigadier-general by now. . . ." He put his arm round Tietjens' -shoulders.</p> - -<p>"There, there, my dear boy," he said, "come and have a sloe gin. That's -the real answer to all beastly problems."</p> - -<p>It was some time before Tietjens could get to think of his own problems. -The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over -the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid -of the very old town. Tietjens had to listen to the General suggesting -that it would be better if he didn't come to the golf-club till Monday. -He would get Macmaster some good games. A good, sound fellow that -Macmaster now. It was a pity Tietjens hadn't some of his soundness!</p> - -<p>The two city men had approached the General on the course and had used -some violent invectives against Tietjens: they had objected to being -called ruddy swine to their faces: they were going to the police. The -General said that he had told them himself, slowly and distinctly, that -they <i>were</i> ruddy swine and that they would never get another ticket -at that club after Monday. But till Monday, apparently, they had the right -to be there and the club wouldn't want scenes. Sandbach, too, was -infuriated about Tietjens.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said that the fault lay with the times that permitted the -introduction into gentlemen's company of such social swipes as Sandbach. -One acted perfectly correctly and then a dirty little beggar like that -put dirty little constructions on it and ran about and bleated. He added -that he knew Sandbach was the General's brother-in-law, but he couldn't -help it. That was the truth. . . . The General said: "I know, my boy: I -know. . . ." But one had to take society as one found it. Claudine had -to be provided for and Sandbach made a very good husband, careful, -sober, and on the right side in politics. A bit of a rip; but they -couldn't ask for everything! And Claudine was using all the influence -she had with the other side—which was not a little, women were so -wonderful!—to get him a diplomatic job in Turkey, so as to get him -out of the way of Mrs. Crundall! Mrs. Crundall was the leading -Anti-Suffragette of the little town. That was what made Sandbach so -bitter against Tietjens. He told Tietjens so that Tietjens might -understand.</p> - -<p>Tietjens had hitherto flattered himself that he could examine a -subject swiftly and put it away in his mind. To the General he hardly -listened. The allegations against himself were beastly; but he could -usually ignore allegations against himself and he imagined that if he -said no more about them he would himself hear no more. If there were, in -clubs and places where men talk, unpleasant rumours as to himself he -preferred it to be thought that he was the rip, not his wife the -strumpet. That was normal, male vanity: the preference of the English -gentleman! Had it been a matter of Sylvia spotless and himself as -spotless as he was—for in all these things he knew himself to be -spotless!—he would certainly have defended himself, at least, to -the General. But he had acted practically in not defending himself more -vigorously. For he imagined that, had he really tried, he could have -made the General believe him. But he had behaved rightly! It was not -mere vanity. There was the child up at his sister Effie's. It was better -for a boy to have a rip of a father than a whore for mother!</p> - -<p>The General was expatiating on the solidity of a squat castle, like a -pile of draughts, away to the left, in the sun, on the flatness. He was -saying that we didn't build like that nowadays.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"You're perfectly wrong, General. All the castles that Henry VIII. built -in 1543 along this coast are mere monuments of jerry-building. . . . -'<i>In 1543 jactat castra Delis, Sandgatto, Reia, Hastingas Henricus -Rex</i>' . . . That means he chucked them down . . ."</p> - -<p>The General laughed:</p> - -<p>"You are an incorrigible fellow. . . . If ever there's any known, -certain fact . . ."</p> - -<p>"But go and <i>look</i> at the beastly things," Tietjens said. "You'll -see they've got just a facing of Caen stone that they tide-floated here, -and the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish. . . . Look here! It's a -known certain fact, isn't it, that your eighteen-pounders are better -than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the -hustings, in the papers: the public believes it. . . . But would you put -one of your tin-pot things firing—what is it?—four shells a -minute?—with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the -recoil—against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air -cylinders. . . ."</p> - -<p>The General sat stiffly upon his cushions:</p> - -<p>"That's different," he said. "How the devil do you get to know these -things?"</p> - -<p>"It isn't different," Tietjens said, "it's the same muddle-headed frame -of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII. as lets us into wars with -hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You'd -fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute -against the French."</p> - -<p>"Well, anyhow," the General said, "I thank heaven you're not on my staff -for you'd talk my hind leg off in a week. It's perfectly true that the -public . . ."</p> - -<p>But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural -for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should -exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady -Claudine Sandbach with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband to -believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!</p> - -<p>The General was saying:</p> - -<p>"Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"From you. Three weeks ago!"</p> - -<p>And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands. . . . They -must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their -visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs! -. . . Suddenly he thought that he didn't know for certain that he was -the father of his child and he groaned.</p> - -<p>"Well, what have I said wrong now?" the General asked. "Surely you don't -maintain that pheasants do eat mangolds. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens proved his reputation for sanity with:</p> - -<p>"No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That's sound -enough for you, isn't it?" But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn't been -able to pigeonhole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been -as good as talking to himself. . . .</p> - -<p>In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of -Mr. Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great -man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr. Waterhouse was anxious that -Tietjens—whom he assumed to be a man of sense—should get any -pursuit of the two girls stopped off. He couldn't move in the matter -himself, but a five pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might -be handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account -of their raid of that afternoon.</p> - -<p>It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be -found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the mayor, the town clerk, -the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found -drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came -into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his -affability. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to -talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn't find him a disagreeable -fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired -obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskies, and certainly not -as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a -fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was -then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted -its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English -working-class, you could see that Mr. Waterhouse didn't want to be -dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens' emendations -in the actuarial schedules. . . . And over their port they agreed on two -fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of -four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay -less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as -it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left. . . .</p> - -<p>And Tietjens, who hated no man, in face of this simple-minded and -agreeable schoolboy type of fellow, fell to wondering why it was that -humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass, -a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by -any means detestable and not uninteresting: for each of them would have -technical details of their affairs to impart: you formed them into a -Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, -gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the -combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human -society. And he remembered the words of some Russian: "Cats and monkeys. -Monkeys and cats. All humanity is there."</p> - -<p>Tietjens and Mr. Waterhouse spent the rest of the evening together.</p> - -<p>Whilst Tietjens was interviewing the policeman, the Minister sat on the -front steps of the cottage and smoked cheap cigarettes, and when -Tietjens went to bed Mr. Waterhouse insisted on sending by him kindly -messages to Miss Wannop, asking her to come and discuss female suffrage -any afternoon she liked in his private room at the House of Commons. Mr. -Waterhouse flatly refused to believe that Tietjens hadn't arranged the -raid with Miss Wannop. He said it had been too neatly planned for any -woman, and he said Tietjens was a lucky fellow, for she was a ripping -girl.</p> - -<p>Back in his room under the rafters, Tietjens fell, nevertheless, at once -a prey to real agitation. For a long time he pounded from wall to wall -and, since he could not shake off the train of thought, he got out at -last his patience cards, and devoted himself seriously to thinking out -the conditions of his life with Sylvia. He wanted to stop scandal if he -could; he wanted them to live within his income, he wanted to subtract -that child from the influence of its mother. These were all definite but -difficult things. . . . Then one half of his mind lost itself in the -re-arrangement of schedules, and on his brilliant table his hands set -queens on kings and checked their recurrences.</p> - -<p>In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible -physical shock. He nearly vomited: his brain reeled and the room fell -about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster's -goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn't talk, and he dropped into -his bed faintly aware of his friend's efforts to loosen his clothes. He -had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind -so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the -time, paralysed both his body and his mind.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="V">V</a></h4> - - -<p>"It doesn't seem quite fair, Valentine," Mrs. Duchemin said. She was -rearranging in a glass bowl some minute flowers that floated on water. -They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic -amongst silver chafing dishes, silver épergnes piled with peaches in -pyramids, and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to -the damask cloth. A congeries of silver largenesses made as if a -fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great -silver kettle on a tripod and a couple of silver vases filled with the -extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as -if a fan. The eighteenth century room was very tall and long; panelled -in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the -light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and -the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large -gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: "J. M. W. Turner." The -chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had -the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden -mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a -brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an -épergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another épergne that -supported the large pale globes of grape-fruit; a galantine, a cube of -inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.</p> - -<p>"Oh, women have to back each other up in these days," Valentine Wannop -said. "I couldn't let you go through this alone after breakfasting with -you every Saturday since I don't know when."</p> - -<p>"I do feel," Mrs. Duchemin said, "immensely grateful to you for your -moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But -I've told Parry to keep him out till 10.15."</p> - -<p>"It's, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you," the girl said. "I -think it was worth trying."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position -of the delphiniums.</p> - -<p>"I think they make a good screen," Mrs. Duchemin said.</p> - -<p>"Oh, nobody will be able to see him," the girl answered reassuringly. -She added with a sudden resolution, "Look here, Edie. Stop worrying -about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after -nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an -invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you're simply -mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let's say no more -about it."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said, "Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?"</p> - -<p>"She didn't know," the girl said. "She was out of her mind for grief. -She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before -her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it -took the five shillings a week that I earned to make up the money." She -added, "Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays, -too."</p> - -<p>"I don't understand!" Mrs. Duchemin said. "I simply don't -understand."</p> - -<p>"Of course you wouldn't," the girl answered. "You're like the kindly -people who subscribed at the sale to buy my father's library back and -present it to my mother. That cost us five shillings a week for -warehousing, and at Ealing they were always nagging at me for the state -of my print dresses. . . ."</p> - -<p>She broke off and said:</p> - -<p>"Let's not talk about it any more if you don't mind. You have me in your -house, so I suppose you've a right to references, as the mistresses call -them. But you've been very good to me and never asked. Still, it's come -up; do you know I told a man on the links yesterday that I'd been a -slavey for nine months. I was trying to explain why I was a suffragette; -and, as I was asking him a favour, I suppose I felt I needed to give -<i>him</i> references too."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively, -exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"You darling!"</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop said:</p> - -<p>"Wait a minute. I haven't finished. I want to say this: I never talk -about that stage of my career because I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of -it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I -did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would -probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent -people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if -we've inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we've inherited the Wannop pride. And -I <i>couldn't</i> do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we -were going into the country after the sale. I'm not educated at all, as -you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had -ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical -don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don't know why he -had that tic . . . But I'd like you to understand two things. One I've -said already: what I hear in this house won't ever shock or corrupt me; -that it's said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin -almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and -Gilbert as soon as we talked at all. . . . And, oh yes: I'm a -suffragette because I've been a slavey. But I'd like you to understand -that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette—you're an -old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two -things—then I'd like you to understand that in spite of it all I'm -pure! Chaste, you know. . . . Perfectly virtuous."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap -and apron."</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop replied:</p> - -<p>"Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled, 'M'm!' to the mistress; and -slept under the stairs too. Because I would not sleep with the beast of -a cook."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin now ran forward and catching Miss Wannop by both hands -kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek.</p> - -<p>"Oh, Valentine," she said, "you're a heroine. And you only -twenty-two! . . . Isn't that the motor coming?"</p> - -<p>But it wasn't the motor coming and Miss Wannop said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, no! I'm not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister -yesterday, I just couldn't. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I -just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: 'V . . . V . . . -Votes for W . . . W . . . W . . . omen!' . . . If I'd been decently -brave I shouldn't have been too shy to speak to a strange man. . . . For -that was what it really came to."</p> - -<p>"But that surely," Mrs. Duchemin said—she continued to hold both -the girl's hands—"makes you all the braver. . . . It's the person who -does the thing he's afraid of who's the real hero, isn't it?"</p> - -<p>"Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten. -You can't tell. You've got to define the term brave. I was just abject. -. . . I could harangue the whole crowd when I got them together. But -speak to one man in cold blood I couldn't. . . . Of course I <i>did</i> -speak to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. -But that was different."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin moved both the girl's hands up and down in her own.</p> - -<p>"As you know, Valentine," she said, "I'm an old-fashioned woman. I -believe that woman's true place is at her husband's side. At the same -time . . ."</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop moved away.</p> - -<p>"Now, don't, Edie, don't!" she said. "If you believe that, you're an -anti. Don't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It's your defect -really. . . . I tell you I'm <i>not</i> a heroine. I <i>dread</i> prison: -I <i>hate</i> rows. I'm thankful to goodness that it's my duty to stop and -housemaid-typewrite for mother, so that I can't really <i>do</i> -things. . . . Look at that miserable, adenoidy little, Gertie, hiding -upstairs in our garret. She was crying all last night—but that's just -nerves. Yet she's been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a -moment of funk about her! . . . But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock -that prison wouldn't touch. . . . Why, I'm all of a jump now. That's why -I'm talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound -may be the police coming for me."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl's fair hair and tucked a loose strand -behind her ear.</p> - -<p>"I wish you'd let me show you how to do your hair," she said. "The right -man might come along at any moment."</p> - -<p>"Oh, the right man!" Miss Wannop said. "Thanks for tactfully changing -the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a -married man. That's the Wannop luck!"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern:</p> - -<p>"Don't talk like that. . . . Why should you regard yourself as being -less lucky than other people? Surely your mother's done well. She has a -position; she makes money. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Ah, but mother isn't a Wannop," the girl said, "only by marriage. The -real Wannops . . . they've been executed, and attaindered, and falsely -accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died -penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, -mother's got her mascot . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, what's that?" Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, "a -relic . . ."</p> - -<p>"Don't you know mother's mascot?" the girl asked. "She tells everybody. -. . . Don't you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother -was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came -in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and -asks us to remember him as such in our prayers. . . . He was a man who'd -been at a German university with father years before and loved him very -dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he'd been out of England for -nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: 'Now Mrs. -Wannop, what's this?' And she told him. And he said, 'What you want is -champagne!' And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of -Veuve Cliquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the -mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood -over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he -took her out to lunch . . . o . . . o . . . oh, it's cold! . . . And -lectured her . . . And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had -shares in . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said:</p> - -<p>"You're shivering!"</p> - -<p>"I know I am," the girl said. She went on very fast. "And of course, -mother always <i>wrote</i> father's articles for him. He found the ideas, -but couldn't write, and she's a splendid style. . . . And, since then, -he—the mascot—Tea-tray—has always turned up when she's -been in tight places. When the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss -her for inaccuracies! She's frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a -table of things every leader writer must know, such as that 'A. Ebor' is -the Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he -turned up and said: 'Why don't you write a novel on that story you told -me?' And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we're in now to be -quiet and write in . . . Oh, I can't go on!"</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop burst into tears.</p> - -<p>"It's thinking of those beastly days," she said. "And that beastly, -<i>beastly</i> yesterday!" She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely -into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin's handkerchief and -embraces. She said almost contemptuously:</p> - -<p>"A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over -you! Do you suppose I don't appreciate all your silent heroism of the -home, while we're marching about with flags and shouting? But it's just -to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out, -that we . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had -her handkerchief hiding her face.</p> - -<p>"Why women in your position don't take lovers . . ." the girl said, -hotly. "Or that women in your position <i>do</i> take lovers . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air -of serious dignity:</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>no</i>, Valentine," she said, using her deeper tones. "There's -something beautiful, there's something <i>thrilling</i> about chastity. I'm -not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don't <i>condemn</i>! But to preserve in -word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity. . . . It's no mean -achievement. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You mean like an egg and spoon race," Miss Wannop said.</p> - -<p>"It isn't," Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, "the way I should have put it. -Isn't the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for -the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the -beautiful old legend. . . ."</p> - -<p>"I don't know," Miss Wannop said, "when I read what Ruskin says about it -in the <i>Crown of Wild Olive</i>. Or no! It's the <i>Queen of the Air</i>. -That's his Greek rubbish, isn't it? I always think it seems like an -egg-race in which the young woman didn't keep her eyes in the boat. But I -suppose it comes to the same thing."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said:</p> - -<p>"My <i>dear</i>! Not a word against John Ruskin in <i>this</i> -house."</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop screamed.</p> - -<p>An immense voice had shouted:</p> - -<p>"This way! This way! . . . The ladies will be here!"</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Of Mr. Duchemin's curates—he had three of them, for he had three -marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very -rich clergyman could have held them—it was observed that they were -all very large men with the physiques rather of prize-fighters than of -clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who himself -was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along -a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to -encounter went pit-a-pat.</p> - -<p>Mr. Horsley—the number two—had in addition an enormous -voice. He shouted four or five words, interjected tee-hee, shouted four or -five words more and again interjected "tee-hee." He had enormous -wrist-bones that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam's -apple, a large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with -very sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible -to stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form -of interruption.</p> - -<p>This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the -breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the -steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The -introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success. . . .</p> - -<p>"A STATE OF SIEGE, LADIES! Tee-hee!" he alternately roared and giggled. -"We're living in a regular state of siege. . . . What with . . ." It -appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr. Sandbach and rather -more than half-a-dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had -gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed -with loaded canes . . . for Suffragettes! Every woman they had come -across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their -loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up -in arms.</p> - -<p>As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions, -a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the -opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that -this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her -again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be -searching for herself and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment -in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs. Wannop. On the -links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely -hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his -rather cropped head and his masked, rather shapeless features, he -affected her queerly as being both in and out of place. He seemed to go -with the ham, the meat-pie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the -roses; but the Turner pictures, the æsthetic curtain and Mrs. -Duchemin's flowing robes, amber and rose in the hair did not go with him -at all. Even the Chippendale chairs hardly did. And she felt herself -thinking oddly, beneath her perturbations, of a criminal and the voice -of the Rev. Horsley that <i>his</i> Harris tweeds went all right with her -skirt, and she was glad that she had on a clean, cream-coloured silk -blouse, not a striped pink cotton.</p> - -<p>She was right as to that.</p> - -<p>In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one -checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect -corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, -before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in -their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.</p> - -<p>The night before, Tietjens shad given several thoughts to this young -woman. General Campion had assigned her to him as <i>maîtresse en -tître</i>. He was said to have ruined himself, broken up his home and -spent his wife's money on her. Those were lies. On the other hand they -were not inherent impossibilities. Upon occasion and given the right -woman, quite sound men have done such things. He might, heaven knows, -himself be so caught. But that he should have ruined himself over an -unnoticeable young female who had announced herself as having been a -domestic servant, and wore a pink cotton blouse . . . that had seemed to -go beyond the bounds of even the unreason of club gossip!</p> - -<p>That was the strong, first impression! It was all very well for his -surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she -was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens -held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes -was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common -people couldn't. . . . But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop -was a tweeny maid. Say a lady's help, by nature. She was of good family, -for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the -year 1417—no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men -of good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by -nature. That was one of the queernesses of heredity. . . . And, though -Tietjens had even got as far as to realise that Miss Wannop must be a -heroine who had sacrificed her young years to her mother's gifts, and no -doubt to a brother at school—for he had guessed as far as -that—even then Tietjens couldn't make her out as more than a lady -help. Heroines are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but -if they let themselves get careworn in face and go shabby. . . . Well, they -must wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven. On -this earth you could hardly accept them as wives for men of your own set. -Certainly you wouldn't spend your own wife's money on them. That was -what it really came to.</p> - -<p>But, brightened up as he now suddenly saw her, with silk for the pink -cotton, shining coiled hair for the white canvas hat, a charming young -neck, good shoes beneath neat ankles, a healthy flush taking the place -of yesterday's pallor of fear for her comrade; an obvious equal in the -surroundings of quite good people; small, but well-shaped and healthy; -immense blue eyes fixed without embarrassment on his own. . . .</p> - -<p>"By Jove . . ." he said to himself: "It's true! What a jolly little -mistress she'd make!"</p> - -<p>He blamed Campion, Sandbach and the club gossips for the form the -thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the -world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and -female in its inexorable rings of talk it will be because there is -something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of -suggestion!</p> - -<p>He took a look at Mrs. Duchemin and considered her infinitely -commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered, -many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear -clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of -cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and -considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster -liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough.</p> - -<p>He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs. Duchemin:</p> - -<p>"Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin answered:</p> - -<p>"No! I've asked Miss Fox to pour out. She's nearly stone deaf." Miss Fox -was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. "You're to amuse Mr. -Tietjens."</p> - -<p>Tietjens noticed that Mrs. Duchemin had an agreeable throat-voice; it -penetrated the noises of Mr. Horsley as the missel-thrush's note -penetrates a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop -made a little grimace.</p> - -<p>Mr. Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side -to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was -bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens' turn again in a moment to -hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs. Haglen at Nobeys. -But Tietjens' turn did not come. . . .</p> - -<p>A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fivish lady, with agreeable -eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed, -entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr. Horsley on his -declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by -the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones:</p> - -<p>"Which is Mr. Macmaster, the critic?" and then, in the dead lull to -Tietjens: "Are you Mr. Macmaster, the critic? No! . . . Then <i>you</i> -must be."</p> - -<p>Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself -had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it -was an affair so strictly business-like that he took it without any -offence. She was remarking to Macmaster:</p> - -<p>"Oh, Mr. Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week," and she -had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room.</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop said:</p> - -<p>"What have you done with Gertie?"</p> - -<p>"Gertie!" Mrs. Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a -dream. "Oh yes! She's fast asleep. She'll sleep till four. I told Hannah -to give a look at her now and then."</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop's hands fell open at her side.</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>mother</i>!" forced itself from her.</p> - -<p>"Oh, yes," Mrs. Wannop said, "we'd agreed to tell old Hannah we didn't -want her to-day. So we had!" She said to Macmaster: "Old Hannah is our -charwoman," wavered a little and then went on brightly: "Of course it -will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a -little bit of previous explanation . . ." and she dragged off -Macmaster. . . .</p> - -<p>That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to -be driven to the rectory—for she herself could not drive a -horse—Miss Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men -at breakfast, one whose name she didn't know; the other, a Mr. -Macmaster, a celebrated critic. Mrs. Wannop had called up to her:</p> - -<p>"A critic? Of what?" her whole sleepy being electrified.</p> - -<p>"I don't know," her daughter had answered. "Books, I daresay. . . ."</p> - -<p>A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn't -stand, had made twenty yards at several bounds, the handy man who drove -had said:</p> - -<p>"Yer mother's 'owlin' after yer." But Miss Wannop had answered that it -didn't matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. -She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional -look at Gertie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be -told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that -Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep -in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did, the news would be -all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on -them.</p> - -<p>But Mrs. Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer -within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The -moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the -rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped -her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police.</p> - -<p>Her arrival worried Mrs. Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all -her guests to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance -of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs. Wannop, who was uninvited, -refused to be separated from Mr. Macmaster. Mr. Macmaster had told her -that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the -heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs. Wannop that an article on -her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She -was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr. Macmaster how to write about -herself, and twice after Mrs. Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr. -Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs. Wannop had conducted him back to the -embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her -chair next to Macmaster that Mrs. Duchemin was able to retain for -herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by -calling out:</p> - -<p>"Mr. Horsley, <i>do</i> take Mrs. Wannop to the seat beside you and feed -her," that Mrs. Duchemin got Mrs. Wannop out of Mr. Duchemin's own seat -at the head of the table, for Mrs. Wannop, having perceived this seat to -be vacant and next to Mr. Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale -arm-chair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt -disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs. Duchemin's husband loose -amongst the other guests.</p> - -<p>Mr. Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady -with such firmness that Mrs. Wannop conceived of him as a very -disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley's seat was next to Miss -Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of -silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these -machines. This seat, too, Mrs. Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that, -by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would -be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She -found, however, that she couldn't, and so resigned herself to taking the -chair that had been reserved for Miss Gertie Wilson, who was to have -been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom, -occasionally saying to her daughter:</p> - -<p>"I think it's very bad management. I think this party's very badly -arranged." Mr. Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed -before her; Tietjens she did not even look at.</p> - -<p>Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner -of a panelled wall, Mrs. Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and -overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest, -though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing:</p> - -<p>"It wasn't perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get -nothing out of my husband. He's apt . . . especially on -Saturdays. . . ."</p> - -<p>She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might -occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing <i>did</i> occur. Then an -admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her -life with a knowledge that he needn't have had—to be a slur on her -memory in his mind. . . . But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her -the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled -to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish -her sentence. But Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, dear lady!" (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed -thus!) "One understands . . . One is surely trained and adapted to -understand . . . that these great scholars, these abstracted -cognoscenti . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin breathed a great "Ah!" of relief. Macmaster had used the -exactly right words.</p> - -<p>"And," Macmaster was going on, "merely to spend a short hour; a swallow -flight . . . 'As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty -portal' . . . You know the lines . . . in these, your perfect -surroundings . . ."</p> - -<p>Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that -men should speak; in that way—steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring, -steel-blue eyes beneath black brows!—that men should look. She was -half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep, -truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely; -their scent came to her.</p> - -<p>A voice came to her:</p> - -<p>"You <i>do</i> do the thing in style, I must say."</p> - -<p>The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating -man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. -He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a -little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sèvres, pinkish, -delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to -him: "Oh . . . a little caviare! A peach!" a long time before, with the -vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her -person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.</p> - -<p>She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with -large, fishish eyes at the caviare before her.</p> - -<p>"How do you get <i>that</i>, for instance?" he asked.</p> - -<p>"Oh!" she answered: "If it wasn't my husband's doing it would look like -ostentation. I'd find it ostentatious for myself." She found a smile, -radiant, yet muted. "He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a -telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at -dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice -too. It's such pretty stuff . . . and then by seven the car goes to -Ashford Junction. . . . All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast -before ten."</p> - -<p>She didn't want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; -she couldn't, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the -kindredly running phrases—as if out of books she had read!—of -the smaller man.</p> - -<p>"Ah, but it isn't," Tietjens said, "ostentation. It's the great -Tradition. You mustn't ever forget that your husband's Breakfast -Duchemin of Magdalen."</p> - -<p>He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he -meant to be agreeable.</p> - -<p>"Sometimes I wish I could," she said. "He doesn't get anything out of it -himself. He's ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at -all. It makes me quite anxious . . . for Saturdays."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I know."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed—and almost with sharpness:</p> - -<p>"You <i>know</i>!"</p> - -<p>He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:</p> - -<p>"Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!" he said. "He was -one of Ruskin's road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of -them all!"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin cried out: "Oh!" Fragments of the worst stories that in -his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went -through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate -life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned -sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, with undefined -outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and -external! She felt herself say to herself: "I will do you an injury, if -ever——" For already she had felt herself swaying the -preferences, the thoughts and the future of the man on her other side. -He was the male, tender, in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the -meat for consumption, like the sweet pulp of figs. . . . It was -inevitable; it was essential to the nature of her relationship with her -husband that Mrs. Duchemin should have these feelings. . . .</p> - -<p>She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from -behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:</p> - -<p>"<i>Post coitum tristis</i>! Ha! Ha! That's what it is?" The voice -repeated the words and added sardonically: "You know what <i>that</i> -means?" But the problem of her husband had become secondary; the real -problem was: "What was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of -her to his friend, when, for long hours, they were away?"</p> - -<p>He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low:</p> - -<p>"I wouldn't look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to -dealing with the situation."</p> - -<p>His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother's. And at once -Mrs. Duchemin knew—that <i>he</i> knew that already close ties were -developing between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks -in emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of -those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right -intuitions. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens said: "You heard!"</p> - -<p>To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked:</p> - -<p>"You know what that means?" Macmaster had answered clearly, but with the -snappy intonation of a reproving Don:</p> - -<p>"Of course I know what it means. It's no discovery!" That was exactly -the right note. Tietjens—and Mrs. Duchemin too—could hear Mr. -Duchemin, invisible behind his rampart of blue spikes and silver, give -the answering snuffle of a reproved schoolboy. A hard-faced, small man, -in grey tweed that buttoned, collar-like, tight round his throat, -standing behind the invisible chair, gazed straight forward into -infinity.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said to himself:</p> - -<p>"By God! Parry! the Bermondsey light middle-weight! He's there to carry -Duchemin off if he becomes violent!"</p> - -<p>During the quick look that Tietjens took round the table Mrs. Duchemin -gave, sinking lower in her chair, a short gasp of utter relief. Whatever -Macmaster was going to think of her, he thought now. He knew the worst! -It was settled, for good or ill. In a minute she would look round at -him.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"It's all right, Macmaster will be splendid. We had a friend up at -Cambridge with your husband's tendencies, and Macmaster could get him -through <i>any</i> social occasion. . . . Besides, we're all gentlefolk -here!"</p> - -<p>He had seen the Rev. Horsley and Mrs. Wannop both interested in their -plates. Of Miss Wannop he was not so certain. He had caught, bent -obviously on himself, from large, blue eyes, an appealing glance. He -said to himself: "She must be in the secret. She's appealing to me not -to show emotion and upset the apple-cart! It is a shame that she should -be here: a girl!" and into his answering glance he threw the message: -"It's all right as far as this end of the table is concerned."</p> - -<p>But Mrs. Duchemin had felt come into herself a little stiffening of -morale. Macmaster by now knew the worst; Duchemin was quoting snuffingly -to him the hot licentiousness of the <i>Trimalchion</i> of Petronius; -snuffing into Macmaster's ear. She caught the phrase: <i>Festinans, puer -calide</i>. . . . Duchemin, holding her wrist with the painful force of the -maniac, had translated it to her over and over again. . . . No doubt, -that too, this hateful man beside her would have guessed!</p> - -<p>She said: "Of course we should be all gentlefolk here. One naturally -arranges that. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens began to say:</p> - -<p>"Ah! But it isn't so easy to arrange nowadays. All sorts of bounders get -into all sorts of holies of holies!"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin turned her back on him right in the middle of his -sentence. She devoured Macmaster's face with her eyes, in an infinite -sense of calm.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Macmaster four minutes before had been the only one to see the entrance, -from a small panelled door that had behind it another of green baize, of -the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, and following him a man whom Macmaster, too, -recognised at once as Parry, the ex-prize-fighter. It flashed through -his mind at once that this was an extraordinary conjunction. It flashed -through his mind, too, that it was extraordinary that anyone so -ecstatically handsome as Mrs. Duchemin's husband should not have earned -high preferment in a church always hungry for male beauty. Mr. Duchemin -was extremely tall, with a slight stoop of the proper clerical type. His -face was of alabaster; his grey hair, parted in the middle, fell -brilliantly on his high brows; his glance was quick, penetrating, -austere; his nose very hooked and chiselled. He was the exact man to -adorn a lofty and gorgeous fane, as Mrs. Duchemin was the exact woman to -consecrate an episcopal drawing-room. With his great wealth, scholarship -and tradition. . . . "Why then?" went through Macmaster's mind in a -swift pinprick of suspicion, "isn't he at least a dean?"</p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin had walked swiftly to his chair which Parry, as swiftly -walking behind him, drew out. His master slipped into it with a -graceful, sideways motion. He shook his head at grey Miss Fox who had -moved a hand towards an ivory urn-tap. There was a glass of water beside -his plate, and round it his long, very white fingers closed. He stole a -quick glance at Macmaster, and then looked at him steadily with -glittering eyes. He said: "Good-morning, doctor," and then, drowning -Macmaster's quiet protest: "Yes! Yes! The stethoscope meticulously -packed into the top-hat and the shining hat left in the hall."</p> - -<p>The prize-fighter, in tight box-cloth leggings, tight whipcord breeches, -and a short tight jacket that buttoned up at the collar to his -chin—the exact stud-groom of a man of property, gave a quick glance -of recognition to Macmaster and then to Mr. Duchemin's back another quick -look, raising his eyebrows. Macmaster, who knew him very well because he -had given Tietjens boxing lessons at Cambridge, could almost hear him -say: "A queer change this, sir! Keep your eyes on him a second!" and, -with the quick, light, tip-toe of the pugilist he slipped away to the -sideboard. Macmaster stole a quick glance on his own account at Mrs. -Duchemin. She had her back to him, being deep in conversation with -Tietjens. His heart jumped a little when, looking back again, he saw Mr. -Duchemin half raised to his feet, peering round the fortifications of -silver. But he sank down again in his chair, and surveying Macmaster -with an expression of cunning singular on his ascetic features, -exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"And your friend? Another medical man! All with stethoscope complete. It -takes, of course, two medical men to certify . . ."</p> - -<p>He stopped and with an expression of sudden, distorted rage, pushed -aside the arm of Parry, who was sliding a plate of sole-fillets on to -the table beneath his nose.</p> - -<p>"Take away," he was beginning to exclaim thunderously, "these -conducements to the filthy lusts of . . ." But with another cunning and -apprehensive look at Macmaster, he said: "Yes! yes! Parry! That's right. -Yes! Sole! A touch of kidney to follow. Another! Yes! Grape-fruit! With -sherry!" He had adopted an old Oxford voice, spread his napkin over his -knees and hastily placed in his mouth a morsel of fish.</p> - -<p>Macmaster with a patient and distinct intonation said that he must be -permitted to introduce himself. He was Macmaster, Mr. Duchemin's -correspondent on the subject of his little monograph. Mr. Duchemin -looked at him, hard, with an awakened attention that gradually lost -suspicion and became gloatingly joyful:</p> - -<p>"Ah, yes, Macmaster!" he said. "Macmaster. A budding critic. A little of -a hedonist perhaps? And yes . . . you wired that you were coming. Two -friends! Not medical men! Friends!" He moved his face closer to -Macmaster and said:</p> - -<p>"How tired you look! Worn! Worn!"</p> - -<p>Macmaster was about to say that he was rather hard-worked when, in a -harsh, high cackle close to his face there came the Latin words. Mrs. -Duchemin—and Tietjens!—had heard. Macmaster knew then what he -was up against. He took another look at the prize-fighter; moved his head -to one side to catch a momentary view of the gigantic Mr. Horsley, whose -size took on a new meaning. Then he settled down in his chair and ate a -kidney. The physical force present was no doubt enough to suppress Mr. -Duchemin should he become violent. And trained! It was one of the -curious, minor coincidences of life that, at Cambridge, he had once -thought of hiring this very Parry to follow round his dear friend Sim. -Sim, the most brilliant of sardonic ironists, sane, decent and -ordinarily a little prudish on the surface, had been subject to just -such temporary lapses as Mr. Duchemin. On society occasions he would -stand up and shout or sit down and whisper the most unthinkable -indecencies. Macmaster, who had loved him very much, had run round with -Sim as often as he could, and had thus gained skill in dealing with -these manifestations. . . . He felt suddenly a certain pleasure! He -thought he might gain prestige in the eyes of Mrs. Duchemin if he dealt -quietly and efficiently with this situation. It might even lead to an -intimacy. He asked nothing better!</p> - -<p>He knew that Mrs. Duchemin had turned towards him: he could feel her -listening and observing him; it was as if her glance was warm on his -cheek. But he did not look round; he had to keep his eyes on the -gloating face of her husband. Mr. Duchemin was quoting Petronius, -leaning towards his guest. Macmaster consumed kidneys stiffly.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"That isn't the amended version of the iambics. Willamovitz Möllendorf -that we used . . ."</p> - -<p>To interrupt him Mr. Duchemin put his thin hand courteously on -Macmaster's arm. It had a great cornelian seal set in red gold on the -third finger. He went on, reciting in ecstasy; his head a little on one -side as if he were listening to invisible choristers. Macmaster really -disliked the Oxford intonation of Latin. He looked for a short moment at -Mrs. Duchemin; her eyes were upon him; large, shadowy, full of -gratitude. He saw, too, that they were welling over with wetness.</p> - -<p>He looked quickly back at Duchemin. And suddenly it came to him; she was -suffering! She was probably suffering intensely. It had not occurred to -him that she would suffer—partly because he was without nerves -himself, partly because he had conceived of Mrs. Duchemin as firstly -feeling admiration for himself. Now it seemed to him abominable that she -should suffer.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin was in an agony. Macmaster had looked at her intently and -looked away! She read into his glance contempt for her situation, and -anger that he should have been placed in such a position. In her pain -she stretched out her hand and touched his arm.</p> - -<p>Macmaster was aware of her touch; his mind seemed filled with sweetness. -But he kept his head obstinately averted. For her sake he did not dare -to look away from the maniacal face. A crisis was coming. Mr. Duchemin -had arrived at the English translation. He placed his hands on the -tablecloth in preparation for rising; he was going to stand on his feet -and shout obscenities wildly to the other guests. It was the exact -moment.</p> - -<p>Macmaster made his voice dry and penetrating to say:</p> - -<p>"'Youth of tepid loves' is a lamentable rendering of <i>puer calide</i>! -It's lamentably antiquated . . ."</p> - -<p>Duchemin choked and said:</p> - -<p>"What? What? What's that?"</p> - -<p>"It's just like Oxford to use an eighteenth century crib. I suppose -that's Whiston and Ditton? Something like that . . ." He observed -Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering—as if he were -coming awake in a strange place! He added:</p> - -<p>"Anyhow it's wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have -some galantine. I'm going to. Your sole's cold."</p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin looked down at his plate.</p> - -<p>"Yes! Yes!" he muttered. "Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce!" The -prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable quiet fellow; -as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What -became of Maggie . . . Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was Rossetti's -model for <i>Alla Finestra del Cielo</i>?"</p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted -eyes:</p> - -<p>"<i>Alla Finestra</i>!" he exclaimed: "Oh yes! I've got the -water-colour. I saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot. . . ." He -looked again at his plate, started at sight of the galantine and began to -eat ravenously: "A beautiful girl!" he said: "Very long necked . . . She -wasn't of course . . . eh . . . respectable! She's living yet, I think. -Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of -course! . . . In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of -that class. . . ." He went muttering on, his head above his plate. -Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled -to turn to Mrs. Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly:</p> - -<p>"If he'll eat a little: get his stomach filled . . . It calls the blood -down from the head. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, forgive! It's dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive!"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"No! No! . . . Why; it's what I'm <i>for</i>!"</p> - -<p>A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life:</p> - -<p>"Oh, you <i>good</i> man!" she said in her profound tones, and they -remained gazing at each other.</p> - -<p>Suddenly, from behind Macmaster's back Mr. Duchemin shouted:</p> - -<p>"I say he made a settlement on her, <i>dum casta et sola</i>, of course. -Whilst she remained chaste and alone!"</p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had -seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on -his feet, panting and delighted:</p> - -<p>"Chaste!" He shouted. "Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion -in the word . . .'" He surveyed the opulent broadness of his tablecloth; -it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of -meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long -captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford -Movement voice: "But chastity . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop suddenly said:</p> - -<p>"Oh!" and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she -continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her -and said:</p> - -<p>"You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned -than my poor readers would care for . . ." Mr. Horsley had been -preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a -description of an article he had been writing about the <i>Mosella</i> of -Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She -talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned -across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, -said to her as loudly as he could:</p> - -<p>"I've got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if -you'll . . ."</p> - -<p>The completely deaf Miss Fox—who had had her training by -writing—remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin:</p> - -<p>"I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of -minute insects. . . ."</p> - -<p>"When my revered preceptor," Mr. Duchemin thundered on "drove away in -the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: 'We will live like -the blessed angels!' How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin suddenly screamed:</p> - -<p>"Oh . . . <i>no</i>!"</p> - -<p>As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others -paused—for a breath. Then they continued talking with polite -animation and listening with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the -highest achievement and justification of English manners!</p> - -<p>Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and -shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that -he and the Rev. Horsley could get Mr. Duchemin away, but there'd be a -hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: "Wait!" and, turning to Mrs. -Duchemin he said: "I can stop him. Shall I?" She said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! Yes! Anything!" He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a -thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered -into the prize-fighter's hairy ear that was held down to him:</p> - -<p>"Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As <i>hard</i> as you can -without breaking your thumb . . ."</p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin had just declaimed:</p> - -<p>"I, too, after my nuptials . . ." He began to wave his arms, pausing and -looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs. Duchemin had -just screamed.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Mr. Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined -himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of -he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes.</p> - -<p>"He won't get up again." Macmaster whispered to the appreciative -pugilist. "He'll want to. But he'll be afraid."</p> - -<p>He said to Mrs. Duchemin:</p> - -<p>"Dearest lady! It's all over. I assure you of that. It's a scientific -nerve counter-irritant."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said:</p> - -<p>"Forgive!" with one deep sob: "You can never respect . . ." She felt her -eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his -executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath -suspended itself. . . .</p> - -<p>Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers -beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the -fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed -themselves.</p> - -<p>In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first -with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained -that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if -not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not -to ensue, sharp physical pain—which of course is a nervous matter, -too! . . .</p> - -<p>Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master's ear:</p> - -<p>"It's time you prepared your sermon for to-morrow, sir," and Mr. -Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick -carpet to the small door.</p> - -<p>Then Macmaster said to her:</p> - -<p>"You come from Edinburgh? You'll know the Fifeshire coast then."</p> - -<p>"Do I not?" she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the -whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a -Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, -and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool -hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if -much of her life went. She said: "You'll be knowing Kingussie House, -just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child."</p> - -<p>He answered:</p> - -<p>"Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur -within."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And . . . -And indeed there are other things I will tell you."</p> - -<p>She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm -buckled on again:</p> - -<p>"Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our -youths."</p> - -<p>He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:</p> - -<p>"Then you're an older friend than I," he asked, "though I've known him -since I was fourteen, and I don't believe you could be a better. He's a -good fellow. . ."</p> - -<p>She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and -for his warning—she <i>knew</i> it was a warning—to her to -spare his friend.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop gave a distinct, but not an alarming scream. Mr. Horsley had -been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the -Moselle in Roman times. The <i>Mosella</i> of Ausonius; the subject of the -essay he was writing is mostly about fish. . . .</p> - -<p>"No," he shouted, "it's been said to be the roach. But there are no -roach in the river now." "<i>Vannulis viridis, oculisque</i>. No. It's the -other way round: <i>Red</i> fins . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop's scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly -over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate!—were enough -to interrupt him.</p> - -<p>"<i>Tietjens</i>!" she again screamed. "Is it possible? . . ."</p> - -<p>She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the -young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had -turned to speak to Mrs. Duchemin she had recognised his aquiline -half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding-breakfast. -To the table that knew it by heart—though Tietjens himself -didn't!—she recited the story of how his father had saved her -life, and was her mascot. And she offered the son—for to the -father she had never been allowed to make any return—her house, -her purse, her heart, her time, her all. She was so completely sincere -that, as the party broke up, she just nodded to Macmaster and, catching -Tietjens forcibly by the arm, said perfunctorily to the critic:</p> - -<p>"Sorry I can't help you any more with the article. But my dear Chrissie -must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute!"</p> - -<p>She moved off, Tietjens grappled to her, her daughter following as a -young swan follows its parents. In her gracious manner Mrs. Duchemin had -received the thanks of her guests for her wonderful breakfast and had -hoped that now that they had found their ways there. . . .</p> - -<p>The echoes of the dispersed festival seemed to whisper in the room. -Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin faced each other, their eyes wary—and -longing.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"It's dreadful to have to go now. But I have an engagement."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! I know! With your great friends."</p> - -<p>He answered:</p> - -<p>"Oh, only with Mr. Waterhouse and General Campion . . . and Mr. -Sandbach, of course . . ."</p> - -<p>She had a moment of fierce pleasure at the thought that Tietjens was not -to be of the company: <i>her</i> man would be out-soaring the vulgarian of -his youth, of his past that she didn't know. . . . Almost harshly she -exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"I don't want you to be mistaken about Kingussie House. It was just a -holiday school. Not a grand place."</p> - -<p>"It was very costly," he said, and she seemed to waver on her feet.</p> - -<p>"Yes! yes!" she said, nearly in a whisper "But you're so grand now! I -was only the child of very poor bodies. Johnstons of Midlothian. But -very poor bodies. . . . I . . . He bought me, you might say. You know. -. . . Put me to very rich schools: when I was fourteen . . . my people -were glad. . . . But I think if my mother had known when I married . . ." -She writhed her whole body. "Oh, dreadful! dreadful!" she exclaimed. -"I want you to know . . ."</p> - -<p>His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart. . . .</p> - -<p>Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to -say: "I must see you this evening. . . . I shall be mad with anxiety -about you." She whispered: "Yes! yes! . . . In the yew walk." Her eyes -were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. "You are the . . . -first . . . man . . ." she breathed.</p> - -<p>"I will be the only one for ever," he said.</p> - -<p>He began to see himself: in the tall room, with the long curtains: a -round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture -with great depths: the entwined figures.</p> - -<p>They drew apart to gaze at each other: holding hands. . . . The voice of -Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Macmaster! You're to dine at Mrs. Wannop's to-night. Don't dress; I -shan't." He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had -interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white -patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair.</p> - -<p>Macmaster said:</p> - -<p>"All right. It's near here, isn't it? . . . I've got an engagement just -after . . ." Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be -working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse . . .</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said with swift jealousy:</p> - -<p>"You let him order you about . . ." Tietjens was gone.</p> - -<p>Macmaster said absently:</p> - -<p>"Who? Chrissie? . . . Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me. . . . We -make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of -the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby. . . ." Feeling that she didn't -appreciate his friend he was abstractly piling on commendations: "He's -making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England -could make. But he's going . . ."</p> - -<p>An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet -triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly -that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself -quote:</p> - -<p>"'Since when we stand side by side!'" His voice trembled.</p> - -<p>"Ah yes!" came in her deep tones: "The beautiful lines . . . They're -true. We must part. In this world . . ." They seemed to her lovely and -mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, -arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:</p> - -<p>"We must wait." He added fiercely: "But to-night, at dusk!" He imagined -the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight -under the window.</p> - -<p>"Yes! yes!" she said. "There's a little white gate from the lane." She -imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects -half seen. So much of glamour she could allow herself.</p> - -<p>Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they -would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, -talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but -with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh. . . . -And then: long, circumspect years. . . .</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer -sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the -stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="VI">VI</a></h4> - - -<p>Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned -out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the -best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, -won't corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a -great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the -young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon -as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it -lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket. Miss Wannop moved -off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the -left hand a ten foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms -just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On -the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. -The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: "Pink! pink!": the -young woman had an agreeable back.</p> - -<p>This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through -Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, -clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; -she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that -each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably -appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their -promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church—two clergy—the -State: two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids. . . . Each -knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, -greenfinch, yellow-ammer (<i>not</i>, my dear, hammer! <i>ammer</i> from -the Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, -pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher." (These <i>charming</i> local dialect -names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white -blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, -wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that -the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture -on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our Lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle: -bachelor's button (but in <i>Sussex</i> they call it ragged robin, my -dear): So interesting! cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French -<i>pasque</i>, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may -thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of -course over; black briony; wild clematis: later it's old man's beard; -purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal -shepherds give a grosser name. <i>So</i> racy of the soil!) . . . Walk, -then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up -with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets! -Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably -extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, -to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: -tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. -(<i>No</i>! <i>Not</i> genuine willow-pattern, of <i>course</i>, Mr. -Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream -with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of -public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid -port . . . for the <i>gentleman</i>! . . . and the jaws hardly able to open -after the too enormous breakfast at 10.15. Mid-day now!</p> - -<p>"God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. -"'Land of Hope and Glory!'—F natural descending to tonic, C major: -chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C -major. . . . All absolutely correct! Double basses, 'cellos, all -violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special -<i>vox humana</i> and key-bugle effect. . . . Across the counties came the -sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Pipe exactly right. It must -be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young -woman's back. English mid-day midsummer. Best climate in the world! No -day on which man may not go abroad!" Tietjens paused and aimed with his -hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its -undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe -lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman -killed among crinolines!</p> - -<p>"Now I'm a bloody murderer!" Tietjens said. "Not gory! Green-stained -with vital fluid of innocent plant . . . And by God! Not a woman in the -country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!" He -slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the -sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and -marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!</p> - -<p>"By God," he said, "Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition; -H.M. City Man. . . . All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God -we've got a navy! . . . But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows! -Britannia needs no bulwarks . . . Then thank God for the upright young -man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories -as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here in -earth . . . as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of -the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! -Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's -helmets. . . . No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss! . . . -Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of -Sodom. All splendid! I bet she's virtuous. But you don't have to bet. It -isn't done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! -Attractive back. Virginal cockiness. . . . Yes, better occupation for -mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till -you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat. . . . You could see it in -her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em! Thank God then for the -Tory, upright young married man and the Suffragette kid . . . Backbone -of England! . . ."</p> - -<p>He killed another flower.</p> - -<p>"But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both! . . . That kid and I! And -General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, -M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale. . . . And forty toothless fogies in -the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your -names cut out of them, my boy! . . . My dear boy: I so regret: your -father's oldest friend. . . . By Jove, the pistachio nut of that -galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought -I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich. . . . But no! Gloomy -reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same -reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over -the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills . . . -<i>Das Pillen-Land</i>, the Germans call us. Very properly . . . And, -damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life . . . and -forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day -long! . . . Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as -Duchemin! . . . I'd never have thought that . . . No wonder meat's -turned to uric acid . . . prime cause of neurasthenia. . . . What a -beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He's finished. Poor devil: he'd better -have ogled this kid. He could have sung: 'Highland Mary' a better tune -than 'This is the end of every man's desire' . . . You can cut it on his -tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a -paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute. . . ."</p> - -<p>He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought -not to be walking with this girl!</p> - -<p>"But damn it all," he said to himself, "she makes a good screen for -Sylvia . . . who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off -all their beastly visiting lists already . . . as a suffragette!"</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: -left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the -other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt -had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him. . . . Her nimble -foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. -To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: -the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the -sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside this thistle-tops. No; damn -it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier -does, the eyes of a chaffinch. . . . Infinitely pathetic!</p> - -<p>Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: "Pink! pink!"</p> - -<p>The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:</p> - -<p>"Damn your eyes! <i>Have</i> them put out, then!" The beastly bird that -made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like -any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, -botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: "Damn -your eyes! <i>Have</i> your chastity impugned them? What do you speak to -strange men in public for! You know you can't do it in this country. If -it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each -other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot. . . . well, you -could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to -every man you met. . . . 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore . . .' To -every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth: -<i>that</i> would deflower you!" He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. -"Well! <i>be</i> deflowered then: <i>lose</i> your infantile reputation. -You've spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled . . . with the benefit of -Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids -of England. . . . They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man, -in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or -other. . . . Then <i>be</i> a screen for Sylvia: <i>get</i> struck off the -visiting books! The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I -am! I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it. . . ."</p> - -<p>Nevertheless, when at the road-side he stood level with Miss Wannop who -did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left -with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:</p> - -<p>"Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads!" She pointed with her -chin along the opposite hedgerow. "Fifty yards!" she said.</p> - -<p>"Come along!" he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come -into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would -happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach -all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one -alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected. He said to -himself:</p> - -<p>"By God! If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee!" and -he hastened. "Just the beastly thing that <i>would</i> happen." The road -probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most -extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they're going -to hurry—but <i>why</i> hurry!—do it in the shade of field -hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could -go ahead. In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she -didn't intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but -certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she cool -and denunciatory in her pretty blouse. . . .</p> - -<p>There was a dog-cart coming behind them!</p> - -<p>Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had -said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the -breakfast-table. . . . The dog-cart contained the police: after them! -She didn't waste time looking round: she wasn't a fool like Atalanta in -the egg race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a -yard and a half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked: -breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn't the sense -to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, -panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being -made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops -cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshireman didn't -know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. -Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol. . . . Oh hang. . . .</p> - -<p>The voice of Mrs. Wannop—of course it was only mother! Twenty feet -on high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good, round face like a -peony—said:</p> - -<p>"Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her . . . but she gave you -seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father's -ambition!" She thought of them as children running races. She beamed -down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who -had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St. Peter.</p> - -<p>"My dear boy!" she said, "my dear boy; it's such a satisfaction to have -you under my roof!"</p> - -<p>The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs. -Wannop said unconcernedly: "Stephen Joel! I haven't done talking."</p> - -<p>Tietjens was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse's -sweat-smeared stomach.</p> - -<p>"You soon will have," he said, "with the girth in that state. Your neck -will be broken."</p> - -<p>"Oh, I don't think so," Mrs. Wannop said. "Joel only bought the turn-out -yesterday."</p> - -<p>Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity:</p> - -<p>"Here; get down, you," he said. He held, himself, the head of the horse -whose nostrils were wide with emotion: it rubbed its forehead almost -immediately against his chest. He said: "Yes! yes! There! there!" Its -limbs lost their tautness. The aged driver scrambled down from the high -seat, trying to come down at first forward and then backwards. Tietjens -fired indignant orders at him:</p> - -<p>"Lead the horse into the shade of that tree. Don't touch his bit: his -mouth's sore. Where did you get this job lot? Ashford market: thirty -pounds: it's worth more. . . . But, blast you, don't you see you've got -a thirteen hands pony's harness for a sixteen and a half hands horse. -Let the bit out: three holes: it's cutting the animal's tongue in half. -. . . This animal's a rig. Do you know what a rig is? If you give it -corn for a fortnight it will kick you and the cart and the stable to -pieces in five minutes one day." He led the conveyance, Mrs. Wannop -triumphantly complacent and all, into a patch of shade beneath elms.</p> - -<p>"Loosen that bit, confound you," he said to the driver. "Ah! you're -afraid."</p> - -<p>He loosened the bit himself, covering his fingers with greasy harness -polish which he hated. Then he said:</p> - -<p>"Can you hold his head or are you afraid of that too? You <i>deserve</i> -to have him bite your hands off." He addressed Miss Wannop: "Can -<i>you</i>?" She said: "No! I'm afraid of horses. I can drive any sort of -car: but I'm afraid of horses." He said: "Very proper!" He stood back and -looked at the horse: it had dropped its head and lifted its near hind foot, -resting the toe on the ground: an attitude of relaxation.</p> - -<p>"He'll stand now!" he said. He undid the girth, bending down -uncomfortably, perspiring and greasy: the girth-strap parted in his -hand.</p> - -<p>"It's true," Mrs. Wannop said. "I'd have been dead in three minutes if -you hadn't seen that. The cart would have gone over backwards . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens took out a large, complicated, horn-handled knife like a -schoolboy's. He selected a punch and pulled it open. He said to the -driver:</p> - -<p>"Have you got any cobbler's thread? Any string? Any copper wire? A -rabbit wire, now? Come, you've got a rabbit wire or you're not a handy -man."</p> - -<p>The driver moved his slouch hat circularly in negation. This seemed to -be Quality who summons you for poaching if you own to possessing rabbit -wires.</p> - -<p>Tietjens laid the girth along the shaft and punched into it with his -punch.</p> - -<p>"Woman's work!" he said to Mrs. Wannop, "but it'll take you home and -last you six months as well . . . But I'll sell this whole lot for you -to-morrow."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop sighed:</p> - -<p>"I suppose it'll fetch a ten pound note . . ." She said: "I ought to -have gone to market myself."</p> - -<p>"No!" Tietjens answered: "I'll get you fifty for it or I'm no -Yorkshireman. This fellow hasn't been swindling you. He's got you deuced -good value for money, but he doesn't know what's suited for ladies; a -white pony and a basket-work chaise is what you want."</p> - -<p>"Oh, I like a bit of spirit," Mrs. Wannop said.</p> - -<p>"Of course you do," Tietjens answered: "but this turn-out's too -much."</p> - -<p>He sighed a little and took out his surgical needle.</p> - -<p>"I'm going to hold this band together with this," he said. "It's so -pliant it will make two stitches and hold for ever. . . ."</p> - -<p>But the handy man was beside him, holding out the contents of his -pockets: a greasy leather pouch, a ball of beeswax, a knife, a pipe, a -bit of cheese and a pale rabbit wire. He had made up his mind that -<i>this</i> Quality was benevolent and he made offering of all his -possessions.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said: "Ah," and then, while he unknotted the wire:</p> - -<p>"Well! Listen . . . you bought this turn-out of a higgler at the back -door of the Leg of Mutton Inn."</p> - -<p>"Saracen's 'Ed!" the driver muttered.</p> - -<p>"You got it for thirty pounds because the higgler wanted money bad. -<i>I</i> know. And dirt cheap. . . . But a rig isn't everybody's driving. -All right for a vet or a horse-coper. Like the cart that's too tall! . . . -But you did damn well. Only you're not what you were, are you, at -thirty? And the horse looked to be a devil and the cart so high you -couldn't get out once you were in. And you kept it in the sun for two -hours waiting for your mistress."</p> - -<p>"There wer' a bit o' lewth 'longside stable wall," the driver -muttered.</p> - -<p>"Well! He didn't like waiting," Tietjens said placably. "You can be -thankful your old neck's not broken. Do this band up, one hole less for -the bit I've taken in."</p> - -<p>He prepared to climb into the driver's seat, but Mrs. Wannop was there -before him, at an improbable altitude on the sloping watch-box with -strapped cushions.</p> - -<p>"Oh, no, you don't," she said, "no one drives me and my horse but me or -my coachman when I'm about. Not even you, dear boy."</p> - -<p>"I'll come with you then," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"Oh, no, you don't," she answered. "No one's neck's to be broken in this -conveyance but mine and Joel's," she added: "perhaps to-night if I'm -satisfied the horse is fit to drive."</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop suddenly exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>no</i>, mother." But the handy man having climbed in, Mrs. -Wannop flirted her whip and started the horse. She pulled up at once and -leaned over to Tietjens:</p> - -<p>"<i>What</i> a life for that poor woman," she said. "We must <i>all</i> -do all we can for her. She could have her husband put in a lunatic asylum -to-morrow. It's sheer self-sacrifice that she doesn't."</p> - -<p>The horse went off at a gentle, regular trot.</p> - -<p>Tietjens addressed Miss Wannop:</p> - -<p>"What hands your mother's got," he said, "it isn't often one sees a -woman with hands like that on a horse's mouth. . . . Did you see how she -pulled up? . . ."</p> - -<p>He was aware that, all this while, from the road-side, the girl had been -watching him with shining eyes: intently even: with fascination.</p> - -<p>"I suppose you think that a mighty fine performance," she said.</p> - -<p>"I didn't make a very good job of the girth," he said. "Let's get off -this road."</p> - -<p>"Setting poor, weak women in their places," Miss Wannop continued. -"Soothing the horse like a man with a charm. I suppose you soothe women -like that too. I pity your wife. . . . The English country male! And -making a devoted vassal at sight of the handy man. The feudal system all -complete. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Well, you know, it'll make him all the better servant to you if he -thinks you've friends in the know. The lower classes are like that. -Let's get off this road."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"You're in a mighty hurry to get behind the hedge. Are the police after -us or aren't they? Perhaps you were lying at breakfast: to calm the -hysterical nerves of a weak woman."</p> - -<p>"I wasn't lying," he said, "but I hate roads when there are -field-paths . . ."</p> - -<p>"That's a phobia, like any woman's," she exclaimed.</p> - -<p>She almost ran through the kissing-gate and stood awaiting him:</p> - -<p>"I suppose," she said, "if you've stopped off the police with your high -and mighty male ways you think you've destroyed my romantic young dream. -You haven't. I don't <i>want</i> the police after me. I believe I'd -<i>die</i> if they put me in Wandsworth . . . I'm a coward."</p> - -<p>"Oh, no, you aren't," he said, but he was following his own train of -thought, just as she wasn't in the least listening to him. "I daresay -you're a heroine all right. <i>Not</i> because you persevere in actions the -consequences of which you fear. But I daresay you can touch pitch and -not be defiled."</p> - -<p>Being too well brought up to interrupt she waited till he had said all -he wanted to say, then she exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Let's settle the preliminaries. It's obvious mother means us to see a -great deal of you. <i>You're</i> going to be a mascot too, like your -father. I suppose you think you are: you saved me from the police -yesterday, you appear to have saved mother's neck to-day. You appear, too, -to be going to make twenty pounds profit on a horse deal. You say you will -and you seem to be that sort of a person . . . Twenty pounds is no end in a -family like ours . . . Well, then, you appear to be going to be the -regular <i>bel ami</i> of the Wannop family . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I hope not."</p> - -<p>"Oh, I don't mean," she said, "that you're going to rise to fame by -making love to all the women of the Wannop family. Besides, there's only -me. But mother will press you into all sorts of odd jobs: and there will -always be a plate for you at the table. Don't shudder! I'm a regular -good cook—<i>cuisine bourgeoise</i> of course. I learned under a real -professed cook, though a drunkard. That meant I used to do half the -cooking and the family was particular. Eating people are: county -councillors, half of them, and the like. So I know what men are . . ." -She stopped and said good-naturedly: "But do, for goodness' sake, get it -over. I'm sorry I was rude to you. But it <i>is</i> irritating to have to -stand like a stuffed rabbit while a man is acting like a regular -Admirable Crichton, and cool and collected, with the English country -gentleman air and all."</p> - -<p>Tietjens winced. The young woman had come a little too near the knuckle -of his wife's frequent denunciations of himself. And she exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"No! That's not fair! I'm an ungrateful pig! You didn't show a bit more -side really than a capable workman must who's doing his job in the midst -of a crowd of incapable duffers. But just get it out, will you? Say once -and for all that—you know the proper, pompous manner: you are not -without sympathy with our aims: but you disapprove—oh, immensely, -strongly—of our methods."</p> - -<p>It struck Tietjens that the young woman was a good deal more interested -in the cause—of votes for women—than he had given her credit -for. He wasn't much in the mood for talking to young women, but it was with -considerably more than the surface of his mind that he answered:</p> - -<p>"I don't. I approve entirely of your methods: but your aims are -idiotic."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"You don't know, I suppose, that Gertie Wilson, who's in bed at our -house, is wanted by the police: not only for yesterday, but for putting -explosives in a whole series of letter-boxes?"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"I didn't . . . but it was a perfectly proper thing to do. She hasn't -burned any of my letters or I might be annoyed: but it wouldn't -interfere with my approval."</p> - -<p>"You don't think," she asked earnestly, "that we . . . mother and -I . . . are likely to get heavy sentences for shielding her. It would be -beastly bad luck on mother. Because she's an anti. . ."</p> - -<p>"I don't know about the sentence," Tietjens said, "but we'd better get -the girl off your premises as soon as we can. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, you'll <i>help</i>?"</p> - -<p>He answered:</p> - -<p>"Of course, your mother can't be incommoded. She's written the only -novel that's been fit to read since the eighteenth century."</p> - -<p>She stopped and said earnestly:</p> - -<p>"Look here. <i>Don't</i> be one of those ignoble triflers who say the -vote won't do women any good. Women have a rotten time. They do, really. -If you'd seen what I've seen, I'm not talking through my hat." Her voice -became quite deep: she had tears in her eyes: "<i>Poor</i> women -<i>do</i>!" she said, "little insignificant creatures. We've <i>got</i> -to change the divorce laws. We've <i>got</i> to get better conditions. -<i>You</i> couldn't stand it if you knew what I know."</p> - -<p>Her emotion vexed him, for it seemed to establish a sort of fraternal -intimacy that he didn't at the moment want. Women do not show emotion -except before their familiars.</p> - -<p>He said drily:</p> - -<p>"I daresay I shouldn't. But I don't know, so I can!"</p> - -<p>She said with deep disappointment:</p> - -<p>"Oh, you <i>are</i> a beast! And I shall never beg your pardon for -saying that. I don't believe you mean what you say, but merely to say it is -heartless."</p> - -<p>This was another of the counts of Sylvia's indictment and Tietjens -winced again. She explained:</p> - -<p>"You don't know the case of the Pimlico army clothing factory workers or -you wouldn't say the vote would be no use to women."</p> - -<p>"I know the case perfectly well," Tietjens said: "It came under my -official notice, and I remember thinking that there never was a more -signal instance of the uselessness of the vote to anyone."</p> - -<p>"We can't be thinking of the same case," she said.</p> - -<p>"We are," he answered. "The Pimlico army clothing factory is in the -constituency of Westminster; the Under-Secretary for War is member for -Westminster; his majority at the last election was six hundred. The -clothing factory employed seven hundred men at 1s. 6d. an hour, all -these men having votes in Westminster. The seven hundred men wrote to -the Under-Secretary to say that if their screw wasn't raised to two bob -they'd vote solid against him at the next election. . . ."</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop said: "Well then!"</p> - -<p>"So," Tietjens said: "The Under-Secretary had the seven hundred men at -eighteenpence fired and took on seven hundred women at tenpence. What -good did the vote do the seven hundred men? What good did a vote ever do -anyone?"</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop checked at that and Tietjens prevented her exposure of his -fallacy by saying quickly:</p> - -<p>"Now, if the seven hundred women, backed by all the other ill-used, -sweated women of the country, had threatened the Under-Secretary, burned -the pillar-boxes, and cut up all the golf greens round his -country-house, they'd have had their wages raised to half-a-crown next -week. That's the only straight method. It's the feudal system at work."</p> - -<p>"Oh, but we couldn't cut up <i>golf</i> greens," Miss Wannop said. "At -least the W.S.P.U. debated it the other day, and decided that anything so -unsporting would make us <i>too</i> unpopular. I was for it personally."</p> - -<p>Tietjens groaned:</p> - -<p>"It's maddening," he said, "to find women, as soon as they get in -Council, as muddle-headed and as afraid to face straight issues as -men! . . ."</p> - -<p>"You won't, by-the-by," the girl interrupted, "be able to sell our horse -to-morrow. You've forgotten that it will be Sunday."</p> - -<p>"I shall have to on Monday, then," Tietjens said. "The point about the -feudal system . . ."</p> - -<p>Just after lunch—and it was an admirable lunch of the cold lamb, -new potatoes and mint-sauce variety, the mint-sauce made with white wine -vinegar and as soft as kisses, the claret perfectly drinkable and the -port much more than that, Mrs. Wannop having gone back to the late -professor's wine merchants—Miss Wannop herself went to answer the -telephone. . . .</p> - -<p>The cottage had no doubt been a cheap one, for it was old, roomy and -comfortable; but effort had no doubt, too, been lavished on its low -rooms. The dining-room had windows on each side and a beam across; the -dining silver had been picked up at sales, the tumblers were old -cut-glass; on each side of the ingle was a grandfather's chair. The -garden had red brick paths, sunflowers, hollyhocks and scarlet gladioli. -There was nothing to it all, but the garden-gate was well hung.</p> - -<p>To Tietjens all this meant effort. Here was a woman who, a few years -ago, was penniless, in the most miserable of circumstances, supporting -life with the most exiguous of all implements. What effort hadn't it -meant! and what effort didn't it mean? There was a boy at Eton . . . a -senseless, but a gallant effort.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop sat opposite him in the other grandfather's chair; an -admirable hostess, an admirable lady. Full of spirit in dashes; but -tired. As an old horse is tired that, taking three men to harness it in -the stable yard, starts out like a stallion, but soon drops to a -jog-trot. The face tired, really; scarlet-cheeked with the good air, but -seamed downward. She could sit there at ease, the plump hands covered -with a black lace shawl, and descending on each side of her lap, as much -at ease as any other Victorian great lady. But at lunch she had -let drop that she had written for eight hours every day for the last -four years—till that day—without missing a day. To-day being -Saturday, she had no leader to write:</p> - -<p>"And, my darling boy," she had said to him. "I'm giving it to you. I'd -give it to no other soul but your father's son. Not even to . . ." And -she had named the name that she most respected. "And that's the truth," -she had added. Nevertheless, even over lunch, she had fallen into -abstractions, heavily and deeply, and made fantastic mis-statements, -mostly about public affairs. . . . It all meant a tremendous -record. . . .</p> - -<p>And there he sat, his coffee and port on a little table beside him; the -house belonging to him. . . .</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"My dearest boy . . . you've so much to do. Do you think you ought -really to drive the girls to Plimsoll to-night? They're young and -inconsiderate; work comes first."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"It isn't the distance . . ."</p> - -<p>"You'll find that it is," she answered humorously. "It's twenty miles -beyond Tenterden. If you don't start till ten when the moon sets, you -won't be back till five, even if you've no accidents. . . . The horse is -all right, though . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Wannop, I ought to tell you that your daughter and I are being -talked about. Uglily!"</p> - -<p>She turned her head to him; rather stiffly. But she was only coming out -of an abstraction.</p> - -<p>"Eh?" she said, and then: "Oh! About the golf-links episode. . . . It -must have looked suspicious. I daresay you made a fuss, too, with the -police, to head them off her." She remained pondering for a moment, -heavily, like an old pope:</p> - -<p>"Oh, you'll live it down," she said.</p> - -<p>"I ought to tell you," he persisted, "that it's more serious than you -think. I fancy I ought not to be here."</p> - -<p>"Not here!" she exclaimed. "Why, where else in the world should you be? -You don't get on with your wife; I know. She's a regular wrong 'un. Who -else could look after you as well as Valentine and I?"</p> - -<p>In the acuteness of that pang, for, after all, Tietjens cared more for -his wife's reputation than for any other factor in a complicated world, -Tietjens asked rather sharply why Mrs. Wannop had called Sylvia a wrong -'un. She said in rather a protesting, sleepy way:</p> - -<p>"My dear boy, nothing! I've guessed that there are differences between -you; give me credit for some perception. Then, as you're perfectly -obviously a right 'un, she must be a wrong 'un. That's all, I assure -you."</p> - -<p>In his relief Tietjens' obstinacy revived. He liked this house; he liked -this atmosphere; he liked the frugality, the choice of furniture, the -way the light fell from window to window; the weariness after hard work; -the affection of mother and daughter; the affection, indeed, that they -both had for himself, and he was determined, if he could help it, not to -damage the reputation of the daughter of the house.</p> - -<p>Decent men, he held, don't do such things, and he recounted with some -care the heads of the conversation he had had with General Campion in -the dressing-room. He seemed to see the cracked wash-bowls in their -scrubbed oak settings. Mrs. Wannop's face seemed to grow greyer, more -aquiline; a little resentful! She nodded from time to time; either to -denote attention or else in sheer drowsiness:</p> - -<p>"My dear boy," she said at last, "it's pretty damnable to have such -things said about you. I can see that. But I seem to have lived in a -bath of scandal all my life. Every woman who has reached my age has that -feeling. . . Now it doesn't seem to matter . . ." She really nodded -nearly off: then she started. "I don't see . . . I really don't see how -I can help you as to your reputation. I'd do it if I could: believe me. -. . . But I've other things to think of. . . . I've this house to keep -going and the children to keep fed and at school. I can't give all the -thought I ought to to other people's troubles. . . ."</p> - -<p>She started into wakefulness and right out of her chair.</p> - -<p>"But what a beast I am!" she said, with a sudden intonation that was -exactly that of her daughter; and, drifting with a Victorian majesty of -shawl and long skirt behind Tietjens' high-backed chair, she leaned over -it and stroked the hair on his right temple:</p> - -<p>"My dear boy," she said. "Life's a bitter thing. I'm an old novelist and -know it. There you are working yourself to death to save the nation with -a wilderness of cats and monkeys howling and squalling your personal -reputation away. . . . It was Dizzy himself said these words to me at -one of our receptions. 'Here I am, Mrs. Wannop,' he said. . . And . . ." -She drifted for a moment. But she made another effort: "My dear boy," -she whispered, bending down her head to get it near his ear: "My dear -boy; it doesn't matter; it doesn't really matter. You'll live it down. -The only thing that matters is to do good work. Believe an old woman -that has lived very hard; 'Hard lying money' as they call it in the -navy. It sounds like cant, but it's the only real truth. . . . You'll -find consolation in that. And you'll live it all down. Or perhaps you -won't; that's for God in His mercy to settle. But it won't matter; -believe me, as thy day so shall thy strength be." She drifted into other -thoughts; she was much perturbed over the plot of a new novel and much -wanted to get back to the consideration of it. She stood gazing at the -photograph, very faded, of her husband in side-whiskers and an immense -shirt-front, but she continued to stroke Tietjens' temple with a -subliminal tenderness.</p> - -<p>This kept Tietjens sitting there. He was quite aware that he had tears -in his eyes; this was almost too much tenderness to bear, and, at bottom -his was a perfectly direct, simple and sentimental soul. He always had -bedewed eyes at the theatre, after tender love scenes and so avoided the -theatre. He asked himself twice whether he should or shouldn't make -another effort, though it was almost beyond him. He wanted to sit still.</p> - -<p>The stroking stopped; he scrambled on to his feet:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Wannop," he said, facing her, "it's perfectly true. I oughtn't to -care what these swine say about me, but I do. I'll reflect about what -you say till I get it into my system . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Yes, yes! My dear," and continued to gaze at the photograph:</p> - -<p>"But," Tietjens said; he took her mittened hand and led her back to her -chair: "What I'm concerned for at the moment is not my reputation, but -your daughter Valentine's."</p> - -<p>She sank down into the high chair, balloon-like and came to rest.</p> - -<p>"Val's reputation!" she said, "Oh! you mean they'll be striking -<i>her</i> off their visiting lists. It hadn't struck me. So they will!" -She remained lost in reflection for a long time.</p> - -<p>Valentine was in the room, laughing a little. She had been giving the -handy man his dinner, and was still amused at his commendations of -Tietjens.</p> - -<p>"You've got one admirer," she said to Tietjens. "'Punched that rotten -strap,' he goes on saying, 'like a gret ol' yaffle punchin' a 'ollow -log!'" He's had a pint of beer and said it between each gasp. She -continued to narrate the quaintnesses of Joel which appealed to her; -informed Tietjens that "yaffle" was Kentish for great green woodpecker; -and then said:</p> - -<p>"You haven't got any friends in Germany, have you?" She was beginning to -clear the table.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Yes; my wife's in Germany; at a place called Lobscheid."</p> - -<p>She placed a pile of plates on a black japanned tray.</p> - -<p>"I'm so sorry," she said, without an expression of any deep regret. -"It's the ingenious clever stupidities of the telephone. I've got a -telegraph message for you then. I thought it was the subject for -mother's leader. It always comes through with the initials of the paper -which are not unlike Tietjens, and the girl who always sends it is -called Hopside. It seemed rather inscrutable, but I took it to have to -do with German politics and I thought mother would understand it. . . . -You're not both asleep, are you?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens opened his eyes; the girl was standing over him, having -approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which -she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the -letters of the message ran together. The message was:</p> - -<p>"Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia -Hopside Germany."</p> - -<p>Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed -meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the -table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities -on the telephone.</p> - -<p>"Of course if I'd had any sense," the girl said, "I should have known it -couldn't have been mother's leader note; she never gets one on a -Saturday."</p> - -<p>Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each -word a pause:</p> - -<p>"It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me."</p> - -<p>"Lucky you!" the girl said, "I wish I was you. I've never been in the -Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg." She went off with her great -tray load, the table cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she -had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was -extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That -was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would -have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her -words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realised -that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it -was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil . . . though the devil of -course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is -probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of -mental oppressions . . . if God then desired (and one couldn't object -but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a -cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness. . . . But He had done it; no -doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are -heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just? . . . Perhaps -God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences.</p> - -<p>There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their -breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, -toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile -inefficiency; with gross piles of hot-house flowers—that he detested -for their exotic waxennesses!—with white enamelled panels that he -disliked and framed, weak prints—quite genuine of course, my dear, -guaranteed so by Sotheby—pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, -selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs. -Satterthwaite, in négligé, but with an immense hat; reading the -<i>Times</i> with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could -settle down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she -could not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands -behind her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as -cruel as the usual degenerate Derby winner. In-bred for generations for one -purpose: to madden men of one type. . . . Pacing backwards and forwards, -exclaiming: "I'm bored! Bored!"; sometimes even breaking the breakfast -plates . . . And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with -imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and -clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife's -questions. . . . And in his forehead the continual pressure; the -determination to sit put; the <i>décor</i> of the room seeming to burn into -his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon -his forehead. . . .</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop was talking to him now; he did not know what she said; he -never knew afterwards what he had answered.</p> - -<p>"God!" he said within himself, "if it's sexual sins God punishes, He -indeed is just and inscrutable!" . . . Because he had had physical -contact with this woman before he married her; in a railway carriage; -coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl!</p> - -<p>Where was the physical attraction of her gone to now? Irresistible; -reclining back as the shires rushed past. . . . His mind said that she -had lured him on. His intellect put the idea from him. No gentleman -thinks such things of his wife.</p> - -<p>No gentleman thinks. . . . By God; she must have been with child by -another man. . . . He had been fighting the conviction down all the last -four months. . . . He knew now that he had been fighting the conviction -all the last four months whilst, anæsthetised, he had bathed in figures -and wave-theories. . . . Her last words had been: her very last words: -late: all in white she had gone up to her dressing-room, and he had -never seen her again; her last words had been about the child . . . -"Supposing," she had begun . . . He didn't remember the rest. But he -remembered her eyes. And her gesture as she peeled off her long white -gloves. . . .</p> - -<p>He was looking at Mrs. Wannop's ingle; he thought it a mistake in taste, -really, to leave logs in an ingle during the summer. But then what are -you to do with an ingle in summer? In Yorkshire cottages they shut the -ingles up with painted doors. But that is stuffy, too!</p> - -<p>He said to himself:</p> - -<p>"By God! I've had a stroke!" and he got out of his chair to test his -legs. . . . But he hadn't had a stroke. It must then, he thought, be -that the pain of his last consideration must be too great for his mind -to register, as certain great physical pains go unperceived. Nerves, -like weighing machines, can't register more than a certain amount, then -they go out of action. A tramp who had had his leg cut off by a train -had told him that he had tried to get up, feeling nothing at all. . . . -The pain comes back though . . .</p> - -<p>He said to Mrs. Wannop, who was still talking:</p> - -<p>"I beg your pardon. I really missed what you said."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop said:</p> - -<p>"I was saying that that's the best thing I can do for you."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"I'm really very sorry: it was that that I missed. I'm a little in -trouble you know."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"I know: I know. The mind wanders; but I wish you'd listen. I've got to -go to work, so have you. I said: after tea you and Valentine will walk -into Rye to fetch your luggage."</p> - -<p>Straining his intelligence, for, in his mind, he felt a sudden strong -pleasure: sunlight on pyramidal red roof in the distance: themselves -descending in a long diagonal, a green hill: God, yes, he wanted open -air. Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I see. You take us both under your protection. You'll bluff -it out."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop said rather coolly:</p> - -<p>"I don't know about you both. It's you I'm taking under my protection -(it's <i>your</i> phrase!) As for Valentine: she's made her bed; she must -lie on it. I've told you all that already. I can't go over it again."</p> - -<p>She paused, then made another effort:</p> - -<p>"It's disagreeable," she said, "to be cut off the Mountby visiting list. -They give amusing parties. But I'm too old to care and they'll miss my -conversation more than I do theirs. Of course, I back my daughter -against the cats and monkeys. Of course, I back Valentine through thick -and thin. I'd back her if she lived with a married man or had -illegitimate children. But I don't approve, I don't approve of the -suffragettes: I despise their aims: I detest their methods. I don't -think young girls ought to talk to strange men. Valentine spoke to you -and look at the worry it has caused you. I disapprove. I'm a woman: but -I've made my own way: other women could do it if they liked or had the -energy. I disapprove! But don't believe that I will ever go back on any -suffragette, individual, in gangs; my Valentine or any other. Don't -believe that I will ever say a word against them that's to be -repeated—<i>you</i> won't repeat them. Or that I will ever write a -word against them. No, I'm a woman and I stand by my sex!" She got up -energetically:</p> - -<p>"I must go and write my novel," she said. "I've Monday's instalment to -send off by train to-night. You'll go into my study: Valentine will give -you paper; ink; twelve different kinds of nibs. You'll find Professor -Wannop's books all round the room. You'll have to put up with Valentine -typing in the alcove. I've got two serials running, one typed, the other -in manuscript."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"But <i>you</i>!"</p> - -<p>"I," she exclaimed, "I shall write in my bedroom on my knee. I'm a woman -and can. You're a man and have to have a padded chair and sanctuary. . . . -You feel fit to work? Then: you've got till five, Valentine will get -tea then. At half-past five you'll set off to Rye. You'll be back with -your luggage and your friend and your friend's luggage at seven."</p> - -<p>She silenced him imperiously with:</p> - -<p>"Don't be foolish. Your friend will certainly prefer this house and -Valentine's cooking to the pub and the pub's cooking. And he'll save on -it. . . . It's <i>no</i> extra trouble. I suppose your friend won't inform -against that wretched little suffragette girl upstairs." She paused and -said: "You're <i>sure</i> you can do your work in the time and drive -Valentine and her to that place . . . Why it's necessary is that the -girl daren't travel by train and we've relations there who've never been -connected with the suffragettes. The girl can live hid there for a bit. -. . . But sooner than you shouldn't finish your work I'd drive them -myself . . ."</p> - -<p>She silenced Tietjens again: this time sharply:</p> - -<p>"I tell you it's <i>no</i> extra trouble. Valentine and I <i>always</i> -make our own beds. We don't like servants among our intimate things. We can -get three times as much help in the neighbourhood as we want. We're liked -here. The extra work you give will be met by extra help. We could have -servants if we wanted. But Valentine and I like to be alone in the house -together at night. We're very fond of each other."</p> - -<p>She walked to the door and then drifted back to say:</p> - -<p>"You know I can't get out of my head that unfortunate woman and her -husband. We must <i>all</i> do what we can for them." Then she started and -exclaimed: "But, good heavens, I'm keeping you from your work . . . The -study's in there, through that door."</p> - -<p>She hurried through the other doorway and no doubt along a passage, -calling out:</p> - -<p>"Valentine! Valentine! Go to Christopher in the study. At once . . . at -. . ." Her voice died away.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="VII">VII</a></h4> - - -<p>Jumping down from the high step of the dog-cart the girl completely -disappeared into the silver: she had on an otter-skin toque, dark, that -should have been visible. But she was gone more completely than if she -had dropped into deep water, into snow—or through tissue paper. More -suddenly, at least! In darkness or in deep water a moving paleness would -have been visible for a second: snow or a paper hoop would have left an -opening. Here there had been nothing.</p> - -<p>The constation interested him. He had been watching her intently and -with concern for fear she should miss the hidden lower step, in which -case she would certainly bark her shins. But she had jumped clear of the -cart: with unreasonable pluckiness, in spite of his: "Look out how you -get down." He wouldn't have done it himself: he couldn't have faced -jumping down into that white solidity . . .</p> - -<p>He would have asked: "Are you all right?" but to express more concern -than the "look out," which he had expended already, would have detracted -from his stolidity. He was Yorkshire and stolid: she south country and -soft: emotional: given to such ejaculations as "I hope you're not hurt," -when the Yorkshireman only grunts. But soft because she was south -country. She was as good as a man—a south country man. She was ready -to acknowledge the superior woodenness of the north. . . . That was their -convention: so he did not call down: "I hope you're all right," though -he had desired to.</p> - -<p>Her voice came, muffled, as if from the back of the top of his head: the -ventriloquial effect was startling:</p> - -<p>"Make a noise from time to time. It's ghostly down here and the lamp's -no good at all. It's almost out."</p> - -<p>He returned to his constations of the concealing effect of water vapour. -He enjoyed the thought of the grotesque appearance he must present in -that imbecile landscape. On his right an immense, improbably brilliant -horn of a moon, sending a trail as if down the sea, straight to his -neck: beside the moon a grotesquely huge star: in an extravagant -position above them the Plough, the only constellation that he knew; -for, though a mathematician, he despised astronomy. It was not -theoretical enough for the pure mathematician and not sufficiently -practical for daily life. He had of course calculated the movements of -abstruse heavenly bodies: but only from given figures: he had never -looked for the stars of his calculations. . . . Above his head and all -over the sky were other stars: large and weeping with light, or as the -dawn increased, so paling that at times, you saw them; then missed them. -Then the eye picked them up again.</p> - -<p>Opposite the moon was a smirch or two of cloud; pink below, dark purple -above; on the more pallid, lower blue of the limpid sky.</p> - -<p>But the absurd thing was this mist! . . . It appeared to spread from -his neck, absolutely level, absolutely silver, to infinity on -each side of him. At great distances on his right black tree-shapes, -in groups—there were four of them—were exactly like coral -islands on a silver sea. He couldn't escape the idiotic comparison: -there wasn't any other.</p> - -<p>Yet it didn't actually spread from his neck: when he now held his hands, -nipple-high, like pallid fish they held black reins which ran downwards -into nothingness. If he jerked the rein, the horse threw its head up. -Two pricked ears were visible in greyness: the horse being sixteen two -and a bit over, the mist might be ten foot high. Thereabouts. . . . He -wished the girl would come back and jump out of the cart again. Being -ready for it he would watch her disappearance more scientifically. He -couldn't of course ask her to do it again: that was irritating. The -phenomenon would have proved—or it might of course disprove—his -idea of smoke screens. The Chinese of the Ming dynasty were said to have -approached and overwhelmed their enemies under clouds of—of course, -not acrid—vapour. He had read that the Patagonians, hidden by smoke, -were accustomed to approach so near to birds or beasts as to be able to -take them by hand. The Greeks under Paleologus the . . .</p> - -<p>Miss Wannop's voice said—from beneath the bottom board of -the cart:</p> - -<p>"I wish you'd make some noise. It's lonely down here, besides being -possibly dangerous. There might be dicks on each side of the road."</p> - -<p>If they were on the marsh there certainly would be dykes—why did -they call ditches "dykes," and why did she pronounce it "dicks"?—on -each side of the road. He could think of nothing to say that wouldn't -express concern and he couldn't do that by the rules of the game. He tried -to whistle "John Peel"! But he was no hand at whistling. He sang:</p> - -<p>"D'ye ken, John Peel at the break of day . . ." and felt like a fool. -But he kept on at it, the only tune that he knew. It was the Yorkshire -Light Infantry quick-step: the regiment of his brothers in India. He -wished he had been in the army: but his father hadn't approved of having -more than two younger sons in the army. He wondered if he would ever run -with John Peel's hounds again: he had once or twice. Or with any of the -trencher-fed foot packs of the Cleveland district, of which there had -been still several when he had been a boy. He had been used to think of -himself as being like John Peel with his coat so grey . . . Up through -the heather, over Wharton's place; the pack running wild; the heather -dripping; the mist rolling up . . . another kind of mist than this south -country silver sheet. Silly stuff! Magical! That was the word. A silly -word. . . . South country . . . In the north the old grey mists rolled -together, revealing black hillsides!</p> - -<p>He didn't suppose he'd have the wind now: this rotten bureaucratic life! -. . . If he had been in the army like the two brothers, Ernest and -James, next above him . . . But no doubt he would not have liked the -army. Discipline! . . . He supposed he would have put up with the -discipline: a gentleman had to. Because <i>noblesse oblige</i>: not for -fear of consequences . . . But army officers seemed to him pathetic. They -spluttered and roared: to make men jump smartly: at the end of -apoplectic efforts the men jumped smartly. But there was the end -of it. . . .</p> - -<p>Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: -if you looked at it with the eye of the artist . . . With the exact eye! -It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; of orange: delicate -reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts -like snow. . . . The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work. -The only work for a man. Why then, were artists soft: effeminate: not -men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the -school-teacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an -old woman!</p> - -<p>And the bureaucrat then? Growing fat and soft like himself, or dry and -stringy like Macmaster or old Ingleby? They did men's work: exact -observation: return no. 17642 with figures exact. Yet they grew -hysterical: they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells, -asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand -and two wasn't ready. Nevertheless men liked the bureaucratic life: his -own brother, Mark, head of the family: heir to Groby. . . . Fifteen -years older: a quiet stick: wooden: brown: always in a bowler hat, as -often as not with his racing-glasses hung around him. Attending his -first-class office when he liked: too good a man for any administration -to lose by putting on the screw. . . . But heir to Groby: what would -that stick make of the place? . . . Let it, no doubt, and go on pottering -from the Albany to race meetings—where he never betted—to -Whitehall, where he was said to be indispensable. . . . Why -indispensable? Why in heaven's name? That stick who had never hunted, -never shot: couldn't tell coulter from plough-handle and lived in his -bowler hat! . . . A "sound" man: the archetype of all sound men. Never -in his life had anyone shaken his head at Mark and said:</p> - -<p>"You're <i>brilliant</i>!" Brilliant! That stick! No, he was -indispensable!</p> - -<p>"Upon my soul!" Tietjens said to himself, "that girl down there is the -only intelligent living soul I've met for years." . . . A little -pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite -intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was -wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both -sides! . . . But, positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human -beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer -efficiency in killing: the other for having the constructive desire and -knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If -you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure -faith that she would kill it: emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and -sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she'd -find something to do for it . . . The two types of mind: remorseless -enemy: sure screen: dagger . . . sheath!</p> - -<p>Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hadn't in -years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to—as you talk down to a -child: as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse . . . -as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their -way. . . .</p> - -<p>But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd? -Not artist: not soldier: not bureaucrat: not certainly indispensable -anywhere: apparently not even sound in the eyes of these dim-minded -specialists . . . An exact observer. . . .</p> - -<p>Hardly even that for the last six and a half hours:</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethan</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Das war ein schweigsams Reiten . . ."</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>he said aloud.</p> - -<p>How could you translate that: you couldn't translate it: no one could -translate Heine:</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"It was the summer night came over me:</span><br /> -<span class="i3">That was silent riding . . ."</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>A voice cut into his warm, drowsy thought:</p> - -<p>"Oh, you <i>do</i> exist. But you've spoken too late. I've run into the -horse." He must have been speaking aloud. He had felt the horse -quivering at the end of the reins. The horse, too, was used to her by -now. It had hardly stirred . . . He wondered when he had left off -singing "John Peel." . . . He said:</p> - -<p>"Come along, then: have you found anything?"</p> - -<p>The answer came:</p> - -<p>"Something . . . But you can't talk in this stuff . . . I'll -just . . ."</p> - -<p>The voice died away as if a door had shut. He waited: consciously -waiting: as an occupation! Contritely and to make a noise he rattled the -whip-stock in its bucket. The horse started and he had to check in -quickly: a damn fool he was. Of course a horse would start if you -rattled a whip-stock. He called out:</p> - -<p>"Are you all right?" The cart might have knocked her down. He had, -however, broken the convention. Her voice came from a great distance:</p> - -<p>"I'm all right. Trying the other side . . ."</p> - -<p>His last thought came back to him. He had broken their convention: he -had exhibited concern: like any other man. . . . He said to himself:</p> - -<p>"By God! Why not take a holiday: why not break all conventions?"</p> - -<p>They erected themselves intangibly and irrefragably. He had not known -this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to: and already the -convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she -warm and clinging. . . . Yet she was obviously as cool a hand as -himself: cooler no doubt, for at bottom he was certainly a -sentimentalist.</p> - -<p>A convention of the most imbecile type . . . Then break all conventions: -with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight -hours . . . almost exactly forty-eight hours till he started for -Dover. . . .</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"And I must to the greenwood go,</span><br /> -<span class="i3">Alone: a banished man!"</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>By the descending moon: it being then just after cockcrow of midsummer -night—what sentimentality!—it must be half-past four on Sunday. -He had worked out that to catch the morning Ostend boat at Dover he must -leave the Wannops' at 5.15 on Tuesday morning, in a motor for the -junction. . . . What incredible cross-country train connections! Five hours -for not forty miles, He had then forty-eight and three-quarter hours! Let -them be a holiday! A holiday from himself above all: a holiday from his -standards: from his convention with himself. From clear observation: -from exact thought: from knocking over all the skittles of the -exactitudes of others: from the suppression of emotions. . . . From all -the wearinesses that made him intolerable to himself. . . . He felt his -limbs lengthen, as if they too had relaxed.</p> - -<p><br /></p> - -<p>Well, already he had had six and a half hours of it. They had started at -10 and, like any other man, he had enjoyed the drive, though it had been -difficult to keep the beastly cart balanced, the girl had had to sit -behind with her arm round the other girl who screamed at every oak -tree. . . .</p> - -<p>But he had—if he put himself to the question—mooned along -under the absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven: to the -scent of hay: to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of -course—in June he changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a -heron twice, overhead. They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn -stacks, of heavy, rounded oaks, of hop oasts that are half church tower, -half finger-post. And the road silver grey, and the night warm. . . . It -was midsummer night that had done that to him. . . .</p> - - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i1"><i>Hat mir's angethan.</i></span><br /> -<span class="i1"><i>Das war ein schweigsames Reiten.</i> . . .</span> -</div></div> - - -<p>Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the -parson's, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had -talked very little. . . . Not unpleasant people the parson's: an uncle -of the girl's: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but -without the individuality . . . A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly -meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a -man. All in candlelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat -up some stairs . . . a great deal of laughter of girls . . . then a -re-start an hour later than had been scheduled. . . . Well, it hadn't -mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them: the good -horse—<i>really</i> it was a good horse!—putting its shoulders -into the work. . . .</p> - -<p>They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl -from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her -in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train. . . .</p> - -<p>There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near -their off-lamp.</p> - -<p>"What a large bat!" she had said. "<i>Noctilux major</i>. . ."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn't it -<i>phalœna</i> . . ." She had answered:</p> - -<p>"From White . . . The <i>Natural History of Selborne</i> is the only -natural history I ever read. . . ."</p> - -<p>"He's the last English writer that could write," said Tietjens.</p> - -<p>"He calls the downs 'those majestic and amusing mountains,'" she said. -"Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? -Phal . . . i . . . i . . . na! To rhyme with Dinah!"</p> - -<p>"It's '<i>sublime</i> and amusing mountains,' not 'majestic and -amusing,'" Tietjens said. "I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public -schoolboys of to-day, from the German."</p> - -<p>She answered:</p> - -<p>"You would! Father used to say it made him sick."</p> - -<p>"Cæsar equals Kaiser," Tietjens said. . . .</p> - -<p>"Bother your Germans," she said, "they're no ethnologists; they're -rotten at philology!" She added: "Father used to say so," to take away -from an appearance of pedantry.</p> - -<p>A silence then! She had right over her head a rug that her aunt had lent -her; a silhouette beside him, with a cocky nose turned up straight out -of the descending black mass. But for the square toque she would have -had the silhouette of a Manchester cotton-hand: the toque gave it a -different line; like the fillet of Diana. It was piquant and agreeable -to ride beside a quite silent lady in the darkness of the thick Weald -that let next to no moonlight through. The horse's hoofs went clock, -clock: a good horse. The near lamp illuminated the russet figure of a -man with a sack on his back, pressed into the hedge, a blinking lurcher -beside him.</p> - -<p>"Keeper between the blankets!" Tietjens said to himself: "All these -south country keepers sleep all night. . . . And then you give them a -five quid tip for the week-end shoot. . . ." He determined that, as to -that, too he would put his foot down. No more week-ends with Sylvia in -the mansions of the Chosen People. . . .</p> - -<p>The girl said suddenly; they had run into a clearing of the deep -underwoods:</p> - -<p>"I'm not stuffy with you over that Latin, though you were unnecessarily -rude. And I'm not sleepy. I'm loving it all."</p> - -<p>He hesitated for a minute. It was a silly-girl thing to say. She didn't -usually say silly-girl things. He ought to snub her for her own -sake. . . .</p> - -<p>He had said:</p> - -<p>"I'm rather loving it too!" She was looking at him; her nose had -disappeared from the silhouette. He hadn't been able to help it; the -moon had been just above her head; unknown stars all round her; the -night was warm. Besides, a really manly man may condescend at times! He -rather owes it to himself. . . .</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"That was nice of you! You might have hinted that the rotten drive was -taking you away from your so important work. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, I can think as I drive," he said. She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh!" and then: "The reason why I'm unconcerned over your rudeness about -my Latin is that I know I'm a much better Latinist than you. You can't -quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in. . . . -It's <i>vastum</i>, not <i>longum</i> . . . 'Terra tribus scopulis vastum -procurrit' . . . It's <i>alto</i>, not <i>caelo</i> . . . 'Uvidus ex alto -desilientis. . . .' How could Ovid have written <i>ex caelo</i>? The 'c' -after the 'x' sets your teeth on edge."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"<i>Excogitabo</i>!"</p> - -<p>"That's purely canine!" she said with contempt.</p> - -<p>"Besides," Tietjens said, "<i>longum</i> is much better than -<i>vastum</i>. I hate cant adjectives like 'vast.' . . ."</p> - -<p>"It's like your modesty to correct Ovid," she exclaimed. "Yet you say -Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets to <i>be</i> poets. -That's because they <i>were</i> sentimental and used adjectives like -<i>vastum</i>. . . . What's 'Sad tears mixed with kisses' but the sheerest -sentimentality!"</p> - -<p>"It ought, you know," Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, "to be -'Kisses mingled with sad tears' . . . 'Tristibus et lacrimis oscula -mixta dabis. . . .'"</p> - -<p>"I'm hanged if I ever could," she exclaimed explosively. "A man like you -could die in a ditch and I'd never come near. You're desiccated even for -a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans."</p> - -<p>"Oh, well, I'm a mathematician," Tietjens said. "Classics is not my -line!"</p> - -<p>"It <i>isn't</i>," she answered tartly.</p> - -<p>A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words:</p> - -<p>"You used 'mingled' instead of 'mixed' to translate <i>mixta</i>. I -shouldn't think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they're as -rotten at that as at everything else, father used to say."</p> - -<p>"Your father was Balliol, of course," Tietjens said with the snuffy -contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived -most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment -and an olive branch.</p> - -<p>Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still -between him and the moon, remarked:</p> - -<p>"I don't know if you know that for some minutes we've been running -nearly due west. We ought to be going south-east by a bit south. I -suppose you <i>do</i> know this road. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Every inch of it," she said, "I've been on it over and over again on my -motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross road is called -Grandfather's Wantways. We've got eleven miles and a quarter still to -do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it -goes in and out amongst them; hundreds of them. You know the exports of -the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles and -chimney backs. The railings round St. Paul's are made of Sussex iron."</p> - -<p>"I knew that, of course," Tietjens said: "I come of an iron county -myself. . . . Why didn't you let me run the girl over in the side-car, -it would have been quicker?"</p> - -<p>"Because," she said, "three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the -milestone at Hog's Corner: doing forty."</p> - -<p>"It must have been a pretty tidy smash!" Tietjens said. "Your mother -wasn't aboard?"</p> - -<p>"No," the girl said, "suffragette literature. The side-car was full. It -<i>was</i> a pretty tidy smash. Hadn't you observed I still limp -a little?" . . .</p> - -<p>A few minutes later she said:</p> - -<p>"I haven't the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to -notice the road. And I don't care. . . . Here's a signpost though; pull -into it. . . ."</p> - -<p>The lamps would not, however, shine on the arms of the post; they were -burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens -gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and, -going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering -ghostlinesses. . . .</p> - -<p>The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs -clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was -astonishing; it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it: -ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly. -The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket.</p> - -<p>"Did you do that on purpose?" he asked the girl. "Or can't you hold a -horse?"</p> - -<p>"I can't drive a horse," the girl said; "I'm afraid of them. I can't -drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I <i>knew</i> you'd say -you'd rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with -me."</p> - -<p>"Then do you mind," Tietjens said, "telling me if you know this road at -all?"</p> - -<p>"Not a bit!" she answered cheerfully. "I never drove it in my life. I -looked it up on the map before we started because I'm sick to death of -the road we went by. There's a one-horse 'bus from Rye to Tenterden, and -I've walked from Tenterden to my uncle's over and over again. . . ."</p> - -<p>"We shall probably be out all night then," Tietjens said. "Do you mind? -The horse may be tired. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, the poor horse! . . . I <i>meant</i> us to be out all night. . . . -But the poor horse. . . . What a brute I was not to think of it."</p> - -<p>"We're thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter -from a place whose name I couldn't read; six and three-quarters from -somewhere called something like Uddlemere. . . ." Tietjens said. "This -is the road to Uddlemere."</p> - -<p>"Oh, that was Grandfather's Wantways all right," she declared. "I know -it well. It's called 'Grandfather's' because an old gentleman used to -sit there called Gran'fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to -sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden -market was abolished in 1845—the effect of the repeal of the Corn -Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that."</p> - -<p>Tietjens sat patiently: He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a -heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had -not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.</p> - -<p>"Would you mind," he said then, "telling me . . ."</p> - -<p>"If," she interrupted, "that was really Gran'fer Wantways: -midland English. 'Vent' equals four cross-roads: high French -<i>carrefour</i>. . . . Or, perhaps, that isn't the right word. But it's -the way your mind works. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You have, of course, often walked from your uncle's to Gran'fer's -Wantways," Tietjens said, "with your cousins, taking brandy to the -invalid in the old toll-gate house. That's how you know the story of -Grand'fer. You said you had never driven it; but you <i>have</i> walked it. -That's the way <i>your</i> mind works, isn't it?"</p> - -<p>She said: "<i>Oh</i>!"</p> - -<p>"Then," Tietjens went on, "would you mind telling me—for the sake -of the poor horse—whether Uddlemere is or isn't on our road home. I -take it you don't know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it -is the right road."</p> - -<p>"The touch of pathos," the girl said, "is a wrong note. It's you who're -in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn't. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:</p> - -<p>"It <i>is</i> the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. -You wouldn't let the horse go another five steps if it wasn't. You're as -soppy about horses as . . . as I am."</p> - -<p>"There's at least that bond of sympathy between us," she said drily. -"Gran'fer's Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore; -Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; -twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name -is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from -'O'er the mere.' Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to -put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: 'O'er -the mere.' Obviously absurd! . . . Putrid! '<i>O'er the</i>' by Grimm's law -impossible as '<i>Udi</i>'; '<i>mere</i>' not a middle Low German word -at all. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Why," Tietjens said, "are you giving me all this information?"</p> - -<p>"Because," the girl said, "it's the way your mind works. . . . It picks -up useless facts as silver after you've polished it picks up sulphur -vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent -patterns and makes Toryism out of them. . . . I've never met a Cambridge -Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up -again out of bones. That's what father used to say; he was an Oxford -Disraelian Conservative Imperialist. . . ."</p> - -<p>"I know of course," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"Of course you know," the girl said. "You know everything. . . . And -you've worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was -unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. <i>You</i> want to be -a Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and -the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you'll never -stir a finger except to say I told you so."</p> - -<p>She touched him suddenly on the arm:</p> - -<p>"<i>Don't</i> mind me!" she said. "It's reaction. I'm so happy. I'm so -happy."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"That's all right! That's all right!" But for a minute or two it wasn't -really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; -but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of -the defects of your qualities—even merely with the velvet. He added: -"Your mother works you very hard."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"How you <i>understand</i>. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a -sea-anemone!" She said: "Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for -four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the -movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her -day's work for slips of the pen. . . . And on the top of it the raid and -the anxiety. . . . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother <i>had</i> -gone to prison. . . . Oh, I'd have gone mad. . . . Week-days and -Sundays. . . ." She stopped: "I'm apologising, really," she went on. "Of -course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great -Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all. . . . It -<i>did</i> make you a rather awful figure, you know . . . and the relief to -find you're . . . oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. . . . I'd -dreaded this drive. . . . I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been -in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn't let off steam -I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart. . . . I could -still . . ."</p> - -<p>"You couldn't," Tietjens said. "You couldn't see the cart."</p> - -<p>They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them -with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to -sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its -romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they -could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to -a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing -the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse -would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man -that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale. . . . They agreed that -they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured -hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more -luminous. . . . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the -stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged -into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical -sea. . . . Tietjens had said:</p> - -<p>"You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a -milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the -horse. . . ." She had plunged in . . .</p> - -<p>And he had sat, feeling he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the -light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts—intent, like Miss -Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday -morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; -a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a -horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the -horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man -in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of -stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler's epigrams. You -couldn't have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or -if not that, the claret. . . . The claret in south country inns was -often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept. . . .</p> - -<p>On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his -wife's maid at Dover. . . .</p> - -<p>He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like -other men; free of his conventions, his strait waist-coatings. . . .</p> - -<p>The girl said:</p> - -<p>"I'm coming up now! I've found out something. . . ." He watched intently -the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the -impenetrability of mist to the eye.</p> - -<p>Her otter skin cap had beads of dew: beads of dew were on her hair -beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with -fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the -wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.</p> - -<p>Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but -irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Steady, the Buffs!" in his surprise.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Well, you might as well have given me a hand." "I found," she went on, -"a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and then the lamp went out. We're not -on the marsh because we're between quick hedges. That's all I've found. -. . . But I've worked out what makes me so tart with you. . . ."</p> - -<p>He couldn't believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of -that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to -catch her to him and had been foiled by her. . . . She ought to be -indignant, amused, even pleased. . . . She ought to show some -emotion. . . .</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"It was your silencing me with that absurd non-sequitur about the -Pimlico clothing factory. It was an insult to my intelligence."</p> - -<p>"You recognised that it was a fallacy!" Tietjens said. He was looking -hard at her. He didn't know what had happened to him. She took a long -look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was as if for a moment -destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him. -"Can't," he argued with destiny, "a man want to kiss a schoolgirl in a -scuffle. . . ." His own voice, a caricature of his own voice, seemed to -come to him: "Gentlemen don't . . ." He exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Don't gentlemen? . . ." and then stopped because he realised that he -had spoken aloud.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>gentlemen</i> do!" she said, "use fallacies to glide over tight -places in arguments. And they browbeat schoolgirls with them. It's that, -that underneath, has been exasperating me with you. You regarded me at -that date—three-quarters of a day ago—as a schoolgirl."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I don't now!" He added: "Heaven knows I don't now!"</p> - -<p>She said: "No; you don't now!"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"It didn't need your putting up all that blue stocking erudition to -convince me. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Blue stocking!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "There's nothing of the -blue stocking about me. I know Latin because father spoke it with us. It -was your pompous blue socks I was pulling."</p> - -<p>Suddenly she began to laugh. Tietjens was feeling sick, physically sick. -She went on laughing. He stuttered:</p> - -<p>"What is it?"</p> - -<p>"The sun!" she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun; not -a red sun: shining, burnished.</p> - -<p>"I don't see . . ." Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"What there is to laugh at?" she asked. "It's the day! . . . The longest -day's begun . . . and to-morrow's as long. . . . The summer solstice, -you know. . . . After to-morrow the days shorten towards winter. But -to-morrow's as long. . . . I'm so glad . . ."</p> - -<p>"That we've got through the night? . . ." Tietjens asked.</p> - -<p>She looked at him for a long time. "You're not so dreadfully ugly, -really," she said.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"What's that church?"</p> - -<p>Rising out of the mist on a fantastically green knoll, a quarter of a -mile away, was an unnoticeable place of worship: an oak shingle tower -roof that shone grey like lead: an impossibly bright weathercock, -brighter than the sun. Dark elms all round it, holding wetnesses of -mist.</p> - -<p>"Icklesham!" she cried softly. "Oh, we're nearly home. Just above -Mountby . . . That's the Mountby drive. . . ."</p> - -<p>Trees existed, black and hoary with the dripping mist. Trees in the -hedgerow and the avenue that led to Mountby: it made a right-angle just -before coming into the road and the road went away at right-angles -across the gate.</p> - -<p>"You'll have to pull to the left before you reach the avenue," the girl -said. "Or as like as not the horse will walk right up to the house. The -higgler who had him used to buy Lady Claudine's eggs. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens exclaimed barbarously:</p> - -<p>"Damn Mountby. I wish we'd never come near it," and he whipped the horse -into a sudden trot. The hoofs sounded suddenly loud. She placed her hand -on his gloved driving hand. Had it been his flesh she wouldn't have done -it.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever . . . But you're a good man. -And very clever. . . . You will get through. . . ."</p> - -<p>Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a -black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them: mathematically straight, -just rising from the mist. He shouted: mad: the blood in his head. His -shout was drowned by the scream of the horse: he had swung it to the -left. The cart turned up: the horse emerged from the mist: head and -shoulders: pawing. A stone sea-horse from the fountain of Versailles! -Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity: the girl looking at it, -leaning slightly forward.</p> - -<p>The horse didn't come over backwards: he had loosened the reins. It -wasn't there any more. The damndest thing that <i>could</i> happen! He had -known it would happen. He said:</p> - -<p>"We're all right now!" There was a crash and scraping: like twenty -tea-trays: a prolonged sound. They must be scraping along the mud-guard -of the invisible car. He had the pressure of the horse's mouth: the -horse was away: going hell for leather. He increased the pressure. The -girl said:</p> - -<p>"I know I'm all right with you."</p> - -<p>They were suddenly in bright sunlight: cart: horse: commonplace -hedgerows. They were going uphill: a steep brae. He wasn't certain she -hadn't said: "Dear!" or "My dear!" Was it possible after so short . . .? -But it had been a long night. He was, no doubt, saving her life too. He -increased his pressure on the horse's mouth gently: up to all his twelve -stone: all his strength. The hill told too. Steep, white road between -shaven grass banks!</p> - -<p>Stop; damn you! Poor beast . . . The girl fell out of the cart. No! -jumped clear! Out to the animal's head. It threw its head up. Nearly off -her feet: she was holding the bit. . . . She couldn't! Tender -mouth . . . afraid of horses. . . . He said:</p> - -<p>"Horse cut!" Her face like a little white blancmange!</p> - -<p>"Come quick," she said.</p> - -<p>"I must hold a minute," he said, "might go off if I let go to get down. -Badly cut?"</p> - -<p>"Blood running down solid! Like an apron," she said.</p> - -<p>He was at last at her side. It was true. But not so much like an apron. -More like a red, varnished stocking. He said:</p> - -<p>"You've a white petticoat on. Get over the hedge; jump it, and take it -off . . ."</p> - -<p>"Tear it into strips?" she asked. "Yes!"</p> - -<p>He called to her; she was suspended halfway up the bank:</p> - -<p>"Tear one half off first. The rest into strips."</p> - -<p>She said: "All right!" She didn't go over the quickset as neatly as he -had expected. No take off. But she was over. . . .</p> - -<p>The horse, trembling, was looking down, its nostrils distended, at the -blood pooling from its near foot. The cut was just on the shoulder. He -put his left arm right over the horse's eyes. The horse stood it, almost -with a sigh of relief. . . . A wonderful magnetism with horses. Perhaps -with women too? God knew. He was almost certain she had said "Dear."</p> - -<p>She said: "Here." He caught a round ball of whitish, stuff. He undid it. -Thank God: what sense! A long, strong, white band. . . . What the devil -was the hissing. . . . A small, closed car with crumpled mud-guards: -noiseless nearly: gleaming black . . . God curse it: it passed them: -stopped ten yards down . . . the horse rearing back: mad! Clean -mad . . . something like a scarlet and white cockatoo, fluttering out of -the small car door . . . a general. In full tog. White feathers! Ninety -medals! Scarlet coat! Black trousers with red stripe. Spurs too, -by God!</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"God damn you, you bloody swine. Go away!"</p> - -<p>The apparition, past the horse's blinkers, said:</p> - -<p>"I can, at least, hold the horse for you. I went past to get you out of -Claudine's sight."</p> - -<p>"Damn good-natured of you," Tietjens said as rudely as he could. "You'll -have to pay for the horse."</p> - -<p>The General exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Damn it all! Why should I? You were driving your beastly camel right -into my drive."</p> - -<p>"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"I was on private ground," the General shouted. "Besides I did." An -enraged, scarlet scarecrow, very thin, he was holding the horse's -bridle. Tietjens was extending the half petticoat, with a measuring eye, -before the horse's chest. The General said:</p> - -<p>"Look here! I've got to take the escort for the Royal party at St. -Peter-in-Manor, Dover. They're laying the Buff's colours on the altar or -something."</p> - -<p>"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said. "Why didn't you bring your -chauffeur? He's a capable man. . . . You talk very big about the widow -and child. But when it comes to robbing them of fifty quid by -slaughtering their horse . . ."</p> - -<p>The General said:</p> - -<p>"What the devil were you doing coming into our drive at five in the -morning?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens, who had applied the half petticoat to the horse's chest, -exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Pick up that thing and give it me." A thin roll of linen was at his -feet: it had rolled down from the hedge.</p> - -<p>"Can I leave the horse?" the General asked.</p> - -<p>"Of course you can," Tietjens said. "If I can't quiet a horse better -than you can run a car . . ."</p> - -<p>He bound the new linen strips over the petticoat: the horse dropped its -head, smelling his hand. The General, behind Tietjens, stood back on his -heels, grasping his gold-mounted sword. Tietjens went on twisting and -twisting the bandage.</p> - -<p>"Look here," the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens' -ear, "what am I to tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl."</p> - -<p>"Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter -hounds," Tietjens said; "that's a matutinal job. . . ."</p> - -<p>The General's voice had a really pathetic intonation:</p> - -<p>"On a Sunday!" he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: "I shall -tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin's church at -Pett."</p> - -<p>"If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession, -do," Tietjens said. "But you'll have to pay for the horse."</p> - -<p>"I'm damned if I will," the General shouted. "I tell you you were -driving into my drive."</p> - -<p>"Then I <i>shall</i>," Tietjens said, "and you know the construction -you'll put on <i>that</i>."</p> - -<p>He straightened his back to look at the horse.</p> - -<p>"Go away," he said, "say what you like. Do what you like! But as you go -through Rye send up the horse-ambulance from the vet's. Don't forget -that. I'm going to save this horse. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You know, Chris," the General said, "you're the most wonderful hand -with a horse . . . There isn't another man in England . . ."</p> - -<p>"I know it," Tietjens said. "Go away. And send up that ambulance. . . . -There's your sister getting out of your car. . . ."</p> - -<p>The General began:</p> - -<p>"I've an awful lot to get explained . . ." But, at a thin scream of: -"General! General!" he pressed on his sword hilt to keep it from between -his long, black, scarlet-striped legs, and running to the car pushed -back into its door a befeathered, black bolster. He waved his hand to -Tietjens:</p> - -<p>"I'll send the ambulance," he called.</p> - -<p>The horse, its upper leg swathed with criss-crosses of white through -which a purple stain was slowly penetrating, stood motionless, its head -hanging down, mule-like, under the blinding sun. To ease it Tietjens -began to undo the trace. The girl hopped over the hedge and, scrambling -down, began to help him.</p> - -<p>"Well. <i>My</i> reputation's gone," she said cheerfully.</p> - -<p>"I know what Lady Claudine is. . . . Why did you try to quarrel with the -General? . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, you'd better," Tietjens said wretchedly, "have a law-suit with him. -It'll account for . . . for your not going to Mountby . . ."</p> - -<p>"You think of everything," she said.</p> - -<p>They wheeled the cart backwards off the motionless horse. Tietjens moved -it two yards forward—to get it out of sight of its own blood. Then -they sat down side by side on the slope of the bank.</p> - -<p>"Tell me about Groby," the girl said at last.</p> - -<p>Tietjens began to tell her about his home. . . . There was, in front of -it, an avenue that turned into the road at right angles. Just like the -one at Mountby.</p> - -<p>"My great-great-grandfather made it," Tietjens said. "He liked privacy -and didn't want the house visible by vulgar people on the road . . . -just like the fellow who planned Mountby, no doubt. . . . But it's -beastly dangerous with motors. We shall have to alter it . . . just at -the bottom of a dip. We can't have horses hurt. . . . You'll see . . ." -It came suddenly into his head that he wasn't perhaps the father of the -child who was actually the heir to that beloved place over which -generation after generation had brooded. Ever since Dutch William! A -damn Nonconformist swine!</p> - -<p>On the bank his knees were almost level with his chin. He felt himself -slipping down.</p> - -<p>"If I ever take you there . . ." he began.</p> - -<p>"Oh, but you never will," she said.</p> - -<p>The child wasn't his. The heir to Groby! All his brother's were -childless . . . There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant -to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count -twenty-three. And there came up a whispering roar. . . . But not his -child! Perhaps he hadn't even the power to beget children. His married -brothers hadn't. . . . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury -to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility -were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss -Wannop had her arm over his shoulder.</p> - -<p>"My dear!" she said, "you won't ever take me to Groby . . . It's -perhaps . . . oh . . . short acquaintance; but I feel you're the -splendidest . . ."</p> - -<p>He thought: "It <i>is</i> rather short acquaintance."</p> - -<p>He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall, -eel-skin, blonde figure of his wife. . . .</p> - -<p>The girl said:</p> - -<p>"There's a fly coming!" and removed her arm.</p> - -<p>A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General -Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted -a pound to take them to Mrs. Wannop's, waked out of his beauty sleep and -all. The knacker's cart was following.</p> - -<p>"You'll take Miss Wannop home at once," Tietjens said, "she's got her -mother's breakfast to see to. . . . I shan't leave the horse till the -knacker's van comes."</p> - -<p>The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip.</p> - -<p>"Aye," he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket. -"Always the gentleman . . . a merciful man is merciful also to his -beast. . . . But I wouldn't leave my little wooden 'ut, nor miss my -breakfast, for no beast. . . . Some do and some . . . do not."</p> - -<p>He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique -conveyance.</p> - -<p>Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight, -beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at -last, a lot of blood.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want -the money. . . ."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"But it wouldn't be playing the game!"</p> - -<p>A long time afterwards he said:</p> - -<p>"Damn all principles!" And then:</p> - -<p>"But one has to keep on going. . . . Principles are like a skeleton map -of a country—you know whether you're going east or north."</p> - -<p>The knacker's cart lumbered round the corner.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="PART_II">PART II</a></h4> - - - - -<h4><a id="I_II">I</a></h4> - - -<p>Sylvia Tietjens rose from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along -it, carrying her plate. She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her -skirts as long as she possibly could: she didn't, she said, with her -height, intend to be taken for a girl guide. She hadn't, in complexion, -in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute. You -couldn't discover in the skin of her face any deadness: in her eyes the -shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had -purposely increased her air of scornful insolence. That was because she -felt that her hold over men increased to the measure of her coldness. -Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she -entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was -Sylvia's pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all -the women in it realised with mortification—that they needn't! For if -coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: "Nothing doing!" as -barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn't more plainly have -conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured -rubbish.</p> - -<p>Once, on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire, where the moors come above -the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a -man had bidden her observe the demeanour of the herring gulls below. -They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with -none of the dignity of gulls. Some of them even let fall the herrings -that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the -blue motion. The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing -for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a -pale flame against the sky was a bird. The man told her that that was -some sort of fish-eagle or hawk. Its normal habit was to chase the gulls -which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon -the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water. At the moment -the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it -had been.</p> - -<p>Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle. It -pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet -screamed and dropped their herrings . . . The whole affair reminded her -of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard. . . . -Not that there was the breath of a scandal against herself; that she -very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice -men—the "really nice men" of commerce—was her hobby.</p> - -<p>She practiced every kind of "turning down" on these creatures: the -really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal's brown eyes, -the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and the -admirable records—as long as you didn't enquire <i>too</i> closely. -Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man—she -<i>had</i> smiled at him in mistake for some one more trustable—had -followed in a taxi, hard on her motor, and flushed with wine, glory and the -firm conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common -property, had burst into her door from the public stairs. . . . She had -overtopped him by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she -seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that -scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: a -<i>chaud-froid</i> effect. He had come in like a stallion, red eyed, and -all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned -rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other.</p> - -<p>Yet she hadn't really told him more than the way one should behave to -the wives of one's brother officers then actually in the line, a point -of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh. But it -must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother—when his mother -had been much younger, of course—speaking from paradise, and his -conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness. This, however, -had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn't, therefore, -interested her. She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains.</p> - -<p>She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressement which -a man would develop about herself at the first glance—the amount and -the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of -the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on -introduction couldn't conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a -measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner, -diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket, -diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so, -rather more quickly away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow -stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong—from the milder note to -the more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of "turnings down." The poor -fellows next day would change their bootmakers, their sock merchants, -their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts: they would -sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with -their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that -calamity came from the fact that she hadn't deigned to look into their -eyes. . . . Perhaps hadn't dared was the right word!</p> - -<p>Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have -been. She knew that, like her intimates—all the Elizabeths, Alixs, -and Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly -journals—she was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their -intimacy as of their eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed -paper. They went about in bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather -boas floating above them, though to be sure no one <i>wore</i> feather -boas; they shortened their hairs and their skirts and flattened, as far -as possible, their chest developments, which <i>does</i> give, oh, you -know . . . a <i>certain</i> . . . They adopted demeanours as -like as possible—and yet how unlike—to those of waitresses in -tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads in police court reports -of raids what <i>those</i> are! Probably they were, in action, as -respectable as any body of women; <i>more</i> respectable, probably, -than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly spotless by -comparison with their own upper servants whose morals, merely as -recorded in the divorce court statistics—<i>that</i> she had from -Tietjens—would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch -villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that she was sure her butler -would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an -angel—and, as such, delicately minded—wouldn't have the face -to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan's -offences. . . .</p> - -<p>And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn't really -even believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn't -believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call -the <i>maîtresse en tître</i> of any particular man. Passion wasn't, -at least, their strong suit: they left that to more—or to -less—august circles. The Duke of A . . . and all the little -A's . . . might be the children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of -B . . . instead of the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of -A . . . Mr. C, the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally -be the father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor -E . . . The Whig front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells -and Cavendishes trading off these—again French—<i>collages -sérieux</i> against the matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and -Mr. G. . . . But those amorous of heavily titled and born front benchers -were rather of august politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never -got hold of them: the parties to them didn't, for one thing, photograph -well, being old, uglyish and terribly, badly dressed. They were matter -rather for the memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to -see the light for fifty years. . . .</p> - -<p>The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other -as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their -affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the -country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard -of such country houses, but she didn't know of any. She imagined that -they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had -patronymics ending in schen . . . stein . . . and baum. There were -getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She -had in her that much of the papist.</p> - -<p>Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden -marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in -the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord -mayors and common councilmen. They were the product usually of the more -informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne—of -champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual -circumstances—fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty -marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental -lewdness.</p> - -<p>In her own case—years ago now—she had certainly been taken -advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a -brute she acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had -developed: intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When; in a -scare that had been as much her mother's as her own, she had led Tietjens -on and married him in Paris to be out of the way—though it was -fortunate that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the -scene of her mother's marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an -ostensible reason!—there had been dreadful scenes right up to the -very night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to -see the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with -grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and -the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been -very near death. She had wanted death.</p> - -<p>And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the -paper—her mother's influence with the pompous front bencher of the -Upper House, her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions -that were recorded in gazettes—nay, she had only involuntarily to -think of that night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her -nails into her palms and groan slightly. . . . She had to invent a chronic -stitch in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and -seemed to herself to degrade her. . . .</p> - -<p>The miserable memory would come, ghost-like, at any time, anywhere. She -would see Drake's face, dark against the white things; she would feel -the thin night-gown lipping off her shoulder; but most of all she would -seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might -be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the -longing for the brute who had mangled her: the dreadful pain of the -mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had -seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely -without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him. . . . She -had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to -experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake. . . .</p> - -<p>Her "turnings down" then of the really nice men, if it were a sport, was -a sport not without a spice of danger. She imagined that, after a -success, she must feel much of the exhilaration that men told her they -felt after bringing off a clean right and left, and no doubt she felt -some of the emotions that the same young men felt when they were out -shooting with beginners. Her personal chastity she now cherished much as -she cherished her personal cleanliness and persevered in her Swedish -exercises after her baths before an open window, her rides afterwards, -and her long nights of dancing which she would pursue in any room that -was decently ventilated. Indeed, the two sides of life were, in her -mind, intimately connected: she kept herself attractive by her skilfully -selected exercises and cleanlinesses: and the same fatigues, healthful -as they were, kept her in the mood for chastity of life. She had done so -ever since her return to her husband; and this not because of any -attachment to her husband or to virtue as such, as because she had made the -pact with herself out of caprice and meant to keep it. She <i>had</i> to -have men at her feet: that was, as it were, the price of her—purely -social—daily bread: as it was the price of the daily bread of her -intimates. She was, and had been for many years, absolutely continent. -And so very likely were, and had been, all her Moiras, and Megs, and Lady -Marjories—but she was perfectly aware that they had to have, above -their assemblies as it were, a light vapour of the airs and habits of -the brothel. The public demanded that . . . a light vapour, like the -slight traces of steam that she had seen, glutinously adhering to the -top of the water in the crocodile-houses of the Zoo.</p> - -<p>It was, indeed, the price; and she was aware that she had been lucky. -Not many of the hastily-married young women of her set really kept their -heads above water <i>in</i> her set: for a season you would read that Lady -Marjorie and Captain Hunt, after her presentation at Court on the -occasion of her marriage, were to be seen at Roehampton, at Goodwood and -the like: photographs of the young couple, striding along with the -palings of the Row behind them, would appear for a month or so. Then the -records of their fashionable doings would transfer themselves to the -lists of the attendants and attachés of distant vice-regal courts in -tropics bad for the complexion. "And then no more of he and she," as -Sylvia put it.</p> - -<p>In her case it hadn't been so bad, but it had been nearish. She had -had the advantage of being an only daughter of a very rich woman: her -husband wasn't just any Captain Hunt to stick on a vice-regal staff. He -was in a first-class office and when Angélique wrote notes on the young -menage she could—Angélique's ideas of these things being -hazy—always refer to the husband as the future Lord Chancellor or -Ambassador to Vienna. And their little, frightfully expensive -establishment—to which her mother, who had lived with them had -very handsomely contributed—had floated them over the first -dangerous two years. They had entertained like mad, and two -much-canvassed scandals had had their beginnings in Sylvia's small -drawing-room. She had been quite established when she had gone off with -Perowne. . . .</p> - -<p>And coming back had not been so difficult. She had expected it would be, -but it hadn't. Tietjens had stipulated for large rooms in Gray's Inn. -That hadn't seemed to her to be reasonable; but she imagined that he -wanted to be near his friend and, though she had no gratitude to -Tietjens for taking her back and nothing but repulsion from the idea of -living in his house, as they were making a bargain, she owed it to -herself to be fair. She had never swindled a railway company, brought -dutiable scent past a custom-house or represented to a second-hand -dealer that her clothes were less worn than they were, though with her -prestige she could actually have done this. It was fair that Tietjens -should live where he wished and live there they did, their very tall -windows looking straight into those of Macmaster across the Georgian -quadrangle.</p> - -<p>They had two floors of a great building, and that gave them a great deal -of space, the breakfast-room, in which during the war they also lunched, -was an immense room, completely lined with books that were nearly all -calf-backed, with an immense mirror over an immense, carved, yellow and -white marble mantelpiece, and three windows that, in their great height, -with the spideriness of their divisions and their old, bulging -glass—some of the panes were faintly violet in age—gave to the -room an eighteenth century distinction. It suited, she admitted, Tietjens, -who was an eighteenth century figure of the Dr. Johnson type—the only -eighteenth century type of which she knew, except for that of the beau -something who wore white satin and ruffles, went to Bath and must have -been indescribably tiresome.</p> - -<p>Above, she had a great white drawing-room, with fixings that she knew -were eighteenth century and to be respected. For Tietjens—again she -admitted—had a marvellous gift for old furniture: he despised it as -such, but he knew it down to the ground. Once when her friend Lady Moira -had been deploring the expense of having her new, little house furnished -from top to toe under the advice of Sir John Robertson, the specialist -(the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some -American), Tietjens, who had come in to tea and had been listening -without speaking, had said, with the soft good nature, rather -sentimental in tone, that once in a blue moon he would bestow on her -prettiest friends:</p> - -<p>"You had better let me do it for you."</p> - -<p>Taking a look round Sylvia's great drawing-room, with the white panels, -the Chinese lacquer screens, the red lacquer and ormolu cabinets and the -immense blue and pink carpet (and Sylvia knew that if only for the three -panels by a fellow called Fragonard, bought just before Fragonards had -been boomed by the late King, her drawing-room was something -remarkable). Lady Moira had said to Tietjens, rather flutteringly and -almost with the voice with which she began one of her affairs:</p> - -<p>"Oh, if you only <i>would</i>."</p> - -<p>He had done it, and he had done it for a quarter of the estimate of Sir -John Robertson. He had done it without effort, as if with a roll or two -of his elephantine shoulders, for he seemed to know what was in every -dealer's and auctioneer's catalogue by looking at the green halfpenny -stamp on the wrapper. And, still more astonishingly, he had made love to -Lady Moira—they had stopped twice with the Moiras in Gloucestershire -and the Moiras had three times week-ended with Mrs. Satterthwaite as the -Tietjens' <i>invités</i>. . . . Tietjens had made love to Lady Moira quite -prettily and sufficiently to tide Moira over until she was ready to -begin her affair with Sir William Heathly.</p> - -<p>For the matter of that, Sir John Robertson, the specialist in old -furniture, challenged by Lady Moira to pick holes in her beautiful -house, had gone there, poked his large spectacles against cabinets, -smelt the varnish of table tops and bitten the backs of chairs in his -ancient and short-sighted way, and had then told Lady Moira that -Tietjens had bought her nothing that wasn't worth a bit more than he had -given for it. This increased their respect for the old fellow: it -explained his several millions. For, if the old fellow proposed to make -out of a friend like Moira a profit of 300 per cent.—limiting it to -that out of sheer affection for a pretty woman—what wouldn't he -make out of a natural—and national—enemy like a United States -senator!</p> - -<p>And the old man took a great fancy to Tietjens himself—which -Tietjens, to Sylvia's bewilderment, did not resent. The old man would come -in to tea and, if Tietjens were present, would stay for hours talking about -old furniture. Tietjens would listen without talking. Sir John would -expatiate over and over again about this to Mrs. Tietjens. It was -extraordinary. Tietjens went purely by instinct: by taking a glance at a -thing and chancing its price. According to Sir John one of the most -remarkable feats of the furniture trade had been Tietjens' purchase of -the Hemingway bureau for Lady Moira. Tietjens, in his dislikeful way, -had bought this at a cottage sale for £3 10s., and had told Lady Moira -it was the best piece she would ever possess: Lady Moira had gone to the -sale with him. Other dealers present had hardly looked at it: Tietjens -certainly hadn't opened it. But at Lady Moira's, poking his spectacles -into the upper part of the glazed piece, Sir John had put his nose -straight on the little bit of inserted yellow wood by a hinge, bearing -signature, name and date: "Jno. Hemingway, Bath, 1784." Sylvia -remembered them because Sir John told her so often. It was a lost -"piece" that the furnishing world had been after for many years.</p> - -<p>For that exploit the old man seemed to love Tietjens. That he loved -Sylvia herself, she was quite aware. He fluttered round her tremulously, -gave fantastic entertainments in her honour and was the only man she had -never turned down. He had a harem, so it was said, in an enormous house -at Brighton or somewhere. But it was another sort of love he bestowed on -Tietjens: the rather pathetic love that the aged bestow on their -possible successors in office.</p> - -<p>Once Sir John came into tea and quite formally and with a sort of -portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and -that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should come -into partnership with him with the reversion of the business—not, -of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking -a detail or two of Sir John's proposed arrangement. Then he had said, -with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a -pretty woman, that he didn't think it would do. There would be too much -beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him -than his office . . . but there was too much beastly money about it.</p> - -<p>Once more, a little to Sylvia's surprise—but men are queer -creatures!—Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable, -though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with -a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn't have Tietjens he couldn't; -and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going -to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce -on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had -entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that -Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old -furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia -a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens <i>did</i> come to be in want -of money . . .</p> - -<p>Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people—as they -sometimes did—told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he -was merely unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the -products of caprice—like her own and, since she knew that most of her -own manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of -thinking much about him.</p> - -<p>But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a -consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This -came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of -Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had -discussed the change at Lobscheid—or rather when Sylvia had -unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!—he had -predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the -affair of her mother's cousin's opera box that had most impressed her. -He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering -with her social level, and he was convinced that he was not going to. He -had thought about it a good deal.</p> - -<p>She hadn't much listened to him. She had thought, firstly, that he was a -fool and, secondly, that he <i>did</i> mean to hurt her. And she -acknowledged that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with -another man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his -name and the shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms. -Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such -equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure.</p> - -<p>But at Lobscheid he had talked a lot of nonsense, as it had seemed to -her: a mixture of prophecy and politics. The Chancellor of the Exchequer -of that date had been putting pressure on the great landlords: the great -landlords had been replying by cutting down their establishments and -closing their town houses—not to any great extent, but enough to make -a very effective gesture of it, and so as to raise a considerable clamour -from footmen and milliners. The Tietjens—both of them—were of -the great landowning class: they could adopt that gesture of shutting up -their Mayfair house and going to live in a wilderness. All the more if -they made their wilderness a thoroughly comfortable affair!</p> - -<p>He had counselled her to present this aspect of the matter to her -mother's cousin, the morosely portentous Rugeley. Rugeley was a great -landowner—almost the greatest of all; and he was a landowner obsessed -with a sense of his duties both to his dependants and his even remote -relatives. Sylvia had only, Tietjens said, to go to the Duke and tell -him that the Chancellor's exactions had forced them to this move, but -that they had done it partly as a protest, and the Duke would accept it -almost as a personal tribute to himself. <i>He</i> couldn't, even as a -protest, be expected to shut up Mexborough or reduce his expenses. But, -if his humbler relatives spiritedly did, he would almost certainly make -it up to them. And Rugeley's favours were on the portentous scale of -everything about him. "I shouldn't wonder," Tietjens had said, "if he -didn't lend you the Rugeley box to entertain in."</p> - -<p>And that is exactly what had happened.</p> - -<p>The Duke—who must have kept a register of his remotest -cousins—had, shortly before their return to London, heard that -this young couple had parted with every prospect of a large and -disagreeable scandal. He had approached Mrs. Satterthwaite—for -whom he had a gloomy affection—and he had been pleased to hear -that the rumour was a gross libel. So that, when the young couple -actually turned up again—from Russia!—Rugeley, who perceived -that they were not only together, but to all appearances quite united, -was determined not only to make it up to them, but to show, in order to -abash their libellers as signal a mark of his favour as he could -without inconvenience to himself. He, therefore, twice—being a -widower—invited Mrs. Satterthwaite to entertain for him, Sylvia to -invite the guests, and then had Mrs. Tietjens' name placed on the roll -of those who could have the Rugeley box at the opera, on application at -the Rugeley estate office, when it wasn't wanted. This was a very great -privilege and Sylvia had known how to make the most if it.</p> - -<p>On the other hand, on the occasion of their conversation at Lobscheid, -Tietjens had prophesied what at the time seemed to her a lot of tosh. It -had been two or three years before, but Tietjens had said that about the -time grouse-shooting began, in 1914, a European conflagration would take -place which would shut up half the houses in Mayfair and beggar their -inhabitants. He had patiently supported his prophecy with financial -statistics as to the approaching bankruptcy of various European powers -and the growingly acquisitive skill and rapacity of the inhabitants of -Great Britain. She had listened to that with some attention: it had -seemed to her rather like the usual nonsense talked in country -houses—where, irritatingly, he never talked. But she liked to be able -to have a picturesque fact or two with which to support herself when she -too, to hold attention, wanted to issue moving statements as to -revolutions, anarchies and strife in the offing. And she had noticed -that when she magpied Tietjens' conversations more serious men in -responsible positions were apt to argue with her and to pay her more -attention than before. . . .</p> - -<p>And now, walking along the table with her plate in her hand, she could -not but acknowledge that, triumphantly—and very comfortably for -her!—Tietjens had been right! In the third year of the war it was -very convenient to have a dwelling, cheap, comfortable, almost august and -so easy to work that you could have, at a pinch, run it with one maid, -though the faithful Hullo Central had not let it come to that yet. . . .</p> - -<p>Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold -cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad: she wavered a little to -one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents -fly at Tietjens' head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted -slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace.</p> - -<p>"I'm bored," she said. "Bored! Bored!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens had moved slightly as she had thrown: the cutlets and most -of the salad leaves had gone over his shoulder. But one, couched, very -green leaf was on his shoulder-strap, and the oil and vinegar -from the plate—Sylvia <i>knew</i> that she took too much of all -condiments—had splashed from the revers of his tunic to his green -staff-badges. She was glad that she had hit him as much as that: it -meant that her marksmanship had not been quite rotten. She was glad, -too, that she had missed him. She was also supremely indifferent. It had -occurred to her to do it and she had done it. Of that she was glad!</p> - -<p>She looked at herself for some time in the mirror of bluish depths. She -pressed her immense bandeaux with both hands on to her ears. She was all -right: high-featured: alabaster complexion—but that was mostly the -mirror's doing—beautiful, long, cool hands—what man's forehead -wouldn't long for them? . . . And that hair! What man wouldn't think of -it, unloosed on white shoulders! . . . Well, Tietjens wouldn't! Or, -perhaps, he did . . . she hoped he did, curse him, for he never saw that -sight. Obviously sometimes, at night, with a little whisky taken he must -want to!</p> - -<p>She rang the bell and bade Hullo Central sweep the plateful from the -carpet; Hullo Central, tall and dark, looking with wide-open eyes, -motionlessly at nothing.</p> - -<p>Sylvia went along the bookshelves, pausing over a book back, "<i>Vitae -Hominum Notiss</i> . . ." in gilt, irregular capitals pressed deep into the -old leather. At the first long window she supported herself by the -blind-cord. She looked out and back into the room.</p> - -<p>"There's that veiled woman!" she said, "going into eleven. . . . It's -two o'clock, of course. . . ."</p> - -<p>She looked at her husband's back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was -getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn't going to miss a motion or -a stiffening.</p> - -<p>"I've found out who it is!" she said, "and who she goes to. I got it out -of the porter." She waited. Then she added:</p> - -<p>"It's the woman you travelled down from Bishop's Auckland with. On the -day war was declared."</p> - -<p>Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that -out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing.</p> - -<p>His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since -he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust -heaps. He said:</p> - -<p>"So you saw me!" But that, too, was mere politeness.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine's saw you! It was old -Campion who said she was a Mrs. . . . I've forgotten the name."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the -corridor!"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster's, or the mistress of both of -you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common. . . . She's got -a mad husband, hasn't she? A clergyman."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"She hasn't!"</p> - -<p>Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in -these discussions never manœuvred for position, said:</p> - -<p>"She has been Mrs. Macmaster over six months."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"She married him then the day after her husband's death."</p> - -<p>She drew a long breath and added:</p> - -<p>"I don't care. . . . She has been coming here every Friday for three -years. . . . I tell you I shall expose her unless that little beast pays -you to-morrow the money he owes you. . . . God knows you need it!" She -said then hurriedly, for she didn't know how Tietjens might take that -proposition:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Wannop rang up this morning to know who was . . . oh! . . . the -evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. Who, by the by, is Mrs. Wannop's -secretary? She wants to see you this afternoon. About war babies!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Wannop hasn't got a secretary. It's her daughter who does her -ringing-up."</p> - -<p>"The girl," Sylvia said, "you were so potty about at that horrible -afternoon Macmaster gave. Has she had a war baby by you? They all say -she's your mistress."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"No, Miss Wannop isn't my mistress. Her mother has had a commission to -write an article about war babies. I told her yesterday there weren't -any war babies to speak of, and she's upset because she won't be able to -make a sensational article. She wants to try and make me change my -mind."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"It <i>was</i> Miss Wannop at that beastly affair of your friend's?" -Sylvia asked. "And I suppose the woman who received was Mrs. -What's-er-name: your other mistress. An unpleasant show. I don't think much -of your taste. The one where all the horrible geniuses in London were? -There was a man like a rabbit talked to me about how to write poetry."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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 -not <i>that</i>! Don't let it be that. Put her back. She's too young for -you. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"I should not have thought they counted," Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>"Of course they count," Tietjens said. "They write for the Press. They -can get anybody anything . . . except themselves!"</p> - -<p>"Like you!" Sylvia said; "exactly like you! They're a lot of bribed -squits."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"I never knew a beastlier atmosphere," Sylvia said. "It <i>reeked</i> of -rabbit's food."</p> - -<p>"You're quite mistaken," Tietjens said; "that is the Russian leather of -the backs of the specially bound presentation copies in the <i>large</i> -bookcase."</p> - -<p>"I don't know what you're talking about," Sylvia said. "What <i>are</i> -presentation copies? I should have thought you'd had enough of the -beastly Russian smells Kiev stunk of."</p> - -<p>Tietjens considered for a moment.</p> - -<p>"No! I don't remember it," he said. "Kiev? . . . Oh, it's where we -were . . ."</p> - -<p>"You put half your mother's money," Sylvia said, "into the Government of -Kiev 12½ per cent. City Tramways. . . ."</p> - -<p>At that Tietjens certainly winced, a type of wincing that Sylvia hadn't -wanted.</p> - -<p>"You're not fit to go out to-morrow," she said. "I shall wire to old -Campion."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"<i>That</i> sort of woman!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"I don't like that sort of thing going on under my windows," Sylvia -said.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said quickly:</p> - -<p>"Don't try!" In a slower tone she added: "I don't in the least want to -know. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Why," Sylvia said, "did you lend Macmaster all that money?" Sylvia -asked. . . .</p> - -<p>"Mind you," Tietjens continued his own speech, "it's perfectly proper. -That's the way patronage <i>is</i> distributed 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. And <i>she</i> is 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 ask <i>somebody</i> for advice. Well, one day you'll want to -present some débutante. And you won't get a ticket. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Who's Brownie's uncle?" Tietjens asked. "Lord . . . Lord . . . The -banker! I know Brownie's in his uncle's bank."</p> - -<p>"Port Scatho!" Sylvia said. "I wish you wouldn't act forgetting people's -names. You overdo it."</p> - -<p>Tietjens' face went a shade whiter. . . .</p> - -<p>"Port Scatho," he said, "is the chairman of the Inn Billeting -Committees, of course. And you wrote to him? . . ."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"Lord Port Scatho knows about my relationship," Tietjens began.</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"To please you?" Tietjens asked. "<i>Do</i> bankers do that sort of -thing? It's a new light on British society. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"He wants you to divorce me and marry him?" Tietjens asked.</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"I suppose they have," Tietjens said, vaguely; "of course they would -have. . . ."</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"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!"</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Thanks! I prefer to remain in it. . . . How else am I to get a -living? . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"Good God! What are you talking about? . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens went on:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"We can't! We couldn't . . ."</p> - -<p>"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? . . ."</p> - -<p>"But . . ." Sylvia cried out. "You're a Franco-maniac. . . . You're -thought to be a French agent. . . . That's what's bitching your -career!"</p> - -<p>"I am?" Tietjens asked uninterestedly. He added: "Yes, that probably -<i>would</i> bitch my career. . . ." He went on, with a little more -animation and a little more of his mind:</p> - -<p>"Ah! <i>that</i> will be a war worth seeing. . . . None of their drunken -rat-fighting for imbecile boodlers . . ."</p> - -<p>"It would drive mother mad!" Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia interjected violently:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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 with <i>them</i> and you -haven't gone mad!"</p> - -<p>"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:</p> - -<p>"Do you know a poem called <i>Somewhere</i>? It begins: 'Somewhere -or other there must surely be . . .'"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I'm sorry. No! I haven't been able to get up my poetry again."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"<i>Don't!</i>" 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.</p> - -<p>To keep the conversation going, she said:</p> - -<p>"I suppose the Wannop girl is making bandages or being a Waac. -Something forceful."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"I suppose you're always talking it over with her? You see her every -day."</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>She said, however:</p> - -<p>"You don't suggest, Glorvina, that I'm the distressed rich with a -foreign name!"</p> - -<p>The great lady had said:</p> - -<p>"My dear Sylvia; it isn't so much you as your husband. Your last exploit -with the Esterhazys and Metternichs has pretty well done for <i>him</i>. -You forget that the present powers that be are not logical. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia remembered that she had sprung up from her leather saddle-back -chair, exclaiming:</p> - -<p>"You mean to say that those unspeakable swine think that -<i>I'm</i> . . ."</p> - -<p>Glorvina said patiently:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Sylvia remembered that she had said:</p> - -<p>"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. . . .</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens, his face pallid, was fingering a piece of toast. He -muttered:</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>Sylvia screamed with a passion of hatred:</p> - -<p>"For God's sake say <i>Metternich</i> . . . you're driving me mad!"</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"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; I -<i>shan't</i> be 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! <i>War babies</i>!" he exclaimed. "I've already -sent the statistics off to you! No! there <i>isn't</i> a marked increase of -the illegitimacy rate, except in patches. The rate's appallingly high in -the lowlands of Scotland; but it always <i>is</i> appallingly 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: "<i>Or</i>," 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. . . .</p> - -<p>Listening to that conversation had extraordinarily cleared Sylvia's -mind. She said, almost sorrowfully:</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>She looked at him now almost incredulously, but with great coolness. Why -<i>shouldn't</i> he, 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. . . .</p> - -<p>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—<i>par impossible</i>!—a pastoral play not so -badly produced. Tietjens was a fabulous monster. . . .</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>She arranged her thoughts. To get one point settled in her mind, she -asked:</p> - -<p>"What really happened to you in France? What is really the matter with -your memory? Or your brain, is it?"</p> - -<p>He said carefully:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"But <i>you</i>! . . . without a brain! . . ." As this was not a -question he did not answer.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>She said now:</p> - -<p>"Do you mind telling me what actually happened to you?"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"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? . . ."</p> - -<p>"I want to!" Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"The point about it is that I <i>don't</i> know 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."</p> - -<p>"You <i>mean</i> that?" Sylvia asked. "It's not just a way of -talking?"</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"You might not call them my friends," Sylvia said.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You needn't spare the Germans for me!" Sylvia said. "You needn't spare -any man who has killed another man."</p> - -<p>"I was, then, dreadfully worried," Tietjens went on. "I was composing a -preface for a book on Arminianism. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>"No, I hadn't written a book," Tietjens said, "and I didn't know what -Arminianism was. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You know perfectly well what the Arminian heresy is," Sylvia said -sharply; "you explained it all to me years ago."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"But good heavens," Sylvia cried out, "do you mean they carried a dead -nurse past you? . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"But this isn't believable," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry, but I can't -believe it. . . . You were an officer: they <i>couldn't</i> have carried a -wounded nurse under your nose. They must have known your sister Caroline -was a nurse and was killed. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"But you only lost one brother," Sylvia said. "I went into mourning for -him and your sister. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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 '<i>Faith</i>'! 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."</p> - -<p>Sylvia, who was thinking of other things, asked:</p> - -<p>"What <i>was</i> the name?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"I don't know, I don't know to this day. . . . The point is that when I -knew that I didn't know <i>that</i> name, I was as ignorant, as -<i>uninstructed</i>, 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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, Christopher!" Sylvia said. "<i>You</i> read that Encyclopædia; it's -pitiful. You used to despise it so."</p> - -<p>"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. I <i>try</i> to 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."</p> - -<p>"Have you <i>really</i>," Sylvia asked, "lost two brothers in -action?"</p> - -<p>"Yes," Tietjens answered. "Curly and Longshanks. You never saw them -because they were always in India. And they weren't noticeable. . . ."</p> - -<p>"<i>Two</i>!" Sylvia said. "I only wrote to your father about one called -Edward. And your sister Caroline. In the same letter. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Christopher!" Sylvia asked, "do you still think your mother died of a -broken heart because I left you?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Good God; no. I never thought so and I don't think so. I <i>know</i> -she didn't."</p> - -<p>"<i>Then</i>!" 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."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens wiped his brow with his handkerchief.</p> - -<p>"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 used -<i>me</i>!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens looked at her attentively, as if with magpie anguish.</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"That's, of course, true!"</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"You believe that!"</p> - -<p>"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. <i>You</i> know 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 of <i>this</i> mare's -mouth sometimes! You've ridden me like that for seven years. . . ."</p> - -<p>She stopped and then went on again:</p> - -<p>"Don't you know, Christopher Tietjens, that there is only one man from -whom a woman could take '<i>Neither I condemn thee</i>' and not hate him -more than she hates the fiend! . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens so looked at her that he contrived to hold her attention.</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Her hands dropped dispiritedly to her sides.</p> - -<p>"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. -<i>Let's</i> be 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. . . ."</p> - -<p>She could see that he was giving her his whole mind.</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>She recoiled a little in her chair.</p> - -<p>"Then!" she said, "you're the wicked man I've always made believe to -think you, though I didn't."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"No! . . . Let me try to put it to you as I see it."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"No! . . . I've been a wicked woman. I have ruined you. I am not going -to listen to you."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"I daresay you have ruined me. That's nothing to me. I am completely -indifferent."</p> - -<p>She cried out:</p> - -<p>"Oh! Oh! . . . Oh!" on a note of agony.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said doggedly:</p> - -<p>"I don't care. I can't help it. Those are—those <i>should</i> -be—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 have <i>got</i> to -plunder the French or millions of our people must starve: they have -<i>got</i> to resist us successfully or be wiped out. . . . It's the -same with you and me. . . ."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"You mean to say that you don't think I was wicked when I . . . when I -trepanned is what mother calls it? . . ."</p> - -<p>He said loudly:</p> - -<p>"<i>No</i>! . . . 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!"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I don't. . . . I want to speak to you about that."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"You <i>don't</i>. . . ."</p> - -<p>He said calmly:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Sylvia was saying:</p> - -<p>"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:</p> - -<p>"Tell him to wait five minutes in the drawing-room."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Who is it?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"If . . . if your second brother is killed. . . . But your eldest -brother . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"You mean that I may bring the child up as a Catholic."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"A <i>Roman</i> Catholic. . . . You'll teach him, please, to use that -term before myself if I ever see him again. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, I thank God that he has softened your heart. This will take the -curse off this house."</p> - -<p>Tietjens shook his head:</p> - -<p>"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? . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, -was pretty bad to the Papist owners. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>"Who is he?" Sylvia asked.</p> - -<p>Tietjens was collecting his thoughts.</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"You said 'our' child, not 'the' child. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said with a great deal of concern:</p> - -<p>"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 . . ."</p> - -<p>"It <i>is</i>," 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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>He stopped and said:</p> - -<p>"For I must to the greenwood go. Alone a banished man. . . . But have -him well protected against the evil eye. . . ."</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said with a friendly weariness:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia stood up, her eyes blazing out of a pallid face of stone:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Tietjens shook his head with the slow heaviness of an aged man.</p> - -<p>"You may for me . . ." he said. "You might ring the bell, will you? -Don't go away. . . ."</p> - -<p>He sat with the blue gloom of that enclosed space all over him, lumped -heavily in his chair.</p> - -<p>"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?"</p> - -<p>"Calumny!" Sylvia said. She spoke with intense bitterness. . . . "Chaste -as ice and cold as . . . as you are. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"<i>Don't</i>!"</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Hullo Central was at the door. Tietjens told her to ask Lord Port Scatho -to step down. . . .</p> - -<p>"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 . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia screamed piercingly:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="II_II">II</a></h4> - - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"I want to see you, Tietjens, for a minute on business."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I can give you ten minutes. . . ."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Tietjens perhaps . . ."</p> - -<p>He waved the open letter towards Mrs. Tietjens. Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"No! Mrs. Tietjens will remain." He desired to say something more -friendly. He said: "Sit down."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"I shan't be stopping a minute. But really . . ." and he moved the -letter, but not with so wide a gesture, towards Sylvia.</p> - -<p>"I have no secrets from Mrs. Tietjens," Tietjens said.</p> - -<p>"Absolutely none . . ."</p> - -<p>ord Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"No . . . No, of course not . . . But . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Similarly, Mrs. Tietjens has no secrets from me. Again absolutely -none."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"I don't, of course, tell Tietjens about my maid's love affairs or what -the fish costs every day."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"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:</p> - -<p>"One has to clear up. I'm going out."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho said hastily:</p> - -<p>"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!" <i>That</i> wouldn't help Port -Scatho. . . .</p> - -<p>Sylvia said suddenly:</p> - -<p>"You don't understand, apparently. My husband is going out to the front -line. To-morrow morning. It's for the second time."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho sat down suddenly on a chair beside the table. With his -fresh face and brown eyes suddenly anguished he exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"But, my dear fellow! You! Good God!" and then to Sylvia: "I beg your -pardon!" To clear his mind he said again to Tietjens: "<i>You</i>! 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 that <i>that</i> -explained 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. . . .</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"In the circumstances then . . . the little matter I came about . . . -I couldn't of course think . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"No; don't go. The matter you came about—I know all about it of -course—had better be settled."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho sat down again: his jaw fell slowly: under his bronzed -complexion his skin became a shade paler. He said at last:</p> - -<p>"You know what I came about? But then . . ."</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"But you <i>can't</i> be . . . aware . . . Not of this -letter. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens left the letter on the cloth, from there he could read the -large handwriting on the blue-grey paper:</p> - -<p>"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:</p> - -<p>"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!"</p> - -<p>The gentle brown things remained on his face; then they filled with an -expression of deep pain. Port Scatho cried:</p> - -<p>"But good God! Then . . ."</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>Tietjens, leaning heavily forward, made his eyes as enigmatic as he -could; he said very slowly and very clearly:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Tietjens is, of course, not aware of <i>all</i> the -circumstances."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho threw himself back in his chair.</p> - -<p>"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!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens, who found himself, said:</p> - -<p>"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. . . ."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho turned agitatedly on Sylvia.</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"Listen to Port Scatho for a minute. I need time to think of my course -of action!"</p> - -<p>He needed, for the first time in his life, time to think of his course -of action.</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>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. There <i>could</i> not 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 General -<i>hadn't</i> sounded 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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>"By God! If I ever get you under my command. . . ."</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>"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: "<i>What</i> a fellow you are for -getting into obscure rows! What in the world do you do it for?"</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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!</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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 the -<i>asticoteries</i>, 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. . . .</p> - -<p>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. . . .</p> - -<p>Remembering the clear sunlight of those naïvetés—though in his -blue gloom he had abated no jot of the ambition—Tietjens sighed -deeply as he came back for a moment to regard his dining-room. Really, it -was to see how much time he had left in which to think out what to say to -Port Scatho. . . . Port Scatho had moved his chair over to beside Sylvia -and, almost touching her, was leaning over and recounting the griefs of his -sister who was married to a lunatic. Tietjens gave himself again for a -moment to the luxury of self-pity. He considered that he was -dull-minded, heavy, ruined, and so calumniated that at times he believed -in his own infamy, for it is impossible to stand up for ever against the -obloquy of your land and remain unhurt in the mind. If you hunch your -shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. . . .</p> - -<p>His mind stopped for a moment and his eyes gazed dully at Sylvia's -letter which lay open on the tablecloth. His thoughts came together, -converging on the loosely-written words:</p> - -<p>"For the last nine months a woman . . ."</p> - -<p>He wondered swiftly what he had already said to Port Scatho: only that -he had known of his wife's letter; not when! And that he approved! Well, -on principle! He sat up. To think that one could be brought down to -thinking so slowly!</p> - -<p>He ran swiftly over what had happened in the train from Scotland and -before. . . .</p> - -<p>Macmaster had turned up one morning beside their breakfast table in the -farm house, much agitated, looking altogether too small in a cloth cap -and a new grey tweed suit. He had wanted £50 to pay his bill with: at -some place up the line above . . . above . . . Berwick suddenly flashed -into Tietjens' mind. . . .</p> - -<p>That was the geographic position. Sylvia was at Bamborough on the coast -(junction Wooler); he, himself, to the north-west, on the moors. -Macmaster to the north-east of him, just over the border: in some -circumspect beauty spot where you did not meet people. Both Macmaster -and Mrs. Duchemin would know that country and gurgle over its beastly -literary associations. . . . The Shirra! Maida! Pet Marjorie . . . -Faugh! Macmaster would, no doubt, turn an honest penny by writing -articles about it and Mrs. Duchemin would hold his hand. . . .</p> - -<p>She had become Macmaster's mistress, as far as Tietjens knew, after a -dreadful scene in the rectory, Duchemin having mauled his wife like a -savage dog, and Macmaster in the house. . . . It was natural: a Sadic -reaction as it were. But Tietjens rather wished they hadn't. Now it -appeared they had been spending a week together . . . or more. Duchemin -by that time was in an asylum. . . .</p> - -<p>From what Tietjens had made out they had got out of bed early one -morning to take a boat and see the sunrise on some lake and had passed -an agreeable day together quoting, "Since when we stand side by side -only hands may meet" and other poems of Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, -no doubt to justify their sin. On coming home they had run their boat's -nose into the tea-table of the Port Scathos with Mr. Brownlie, the -nephew, just getting out of a motor to join them. The Port Scatho group -were spending the night at the Macmasters' hotel which backed on to the -lake. It was the ordinary damn sort of thing that must happen in these -islands that are only a few yards across.</p> - -<p>The Macmasters appear to have lost their heads frightfully, although -Lady Port Scatho had been as motherly as possible to Mrs. Duchemin; so -motherly, indeed, that if they had not been unable to observe anything, -they might have recognised the Port Scathos as backers rather than spies -upon themselves. It was, no doubt, however, Brownlie who had upset them: -he wasn't very civil to Macmaster, whom he knew as a friend of Tietjens. -He had dashed up from London in his motor to consult his uncle, who was -dashing down from the west of Scotland, about the policy of the bank in -that moment of crisis. . . .</p> - -<p>Macmaster, anyhow, did not spend the night in the hotel, but went to -Jedburgh or Melrose or some such place, turning up again almost before -it was light to have a frightful interview about five in the morning -with Mrs. Duchemin, who, towards three, had come to a disastrous -conclusion as to her condition. They had lost their nerves for the first -time in their association, and they had lost them very badly indeed, the -things that Mrs. Duchemin said to Macmaster seeming almost to have -passed belief. . . .</p> - -<p>Thus, when Macmaster turned up at Tietjens' breakfast, he was almost out -of his mind. He wanted Tietjens to go over in the motor he had brought, -pay the bill at the hotel, and travel down to town with Mrs. Duchemin, -who was certainly in no condition to travel alone. Tietjens was also to -make up the quarrel with Mrs. Duchemin and to lend Macmaster £50 in -cash, as it was then impossible to change cheques anywhere. Tietjens got -the money from his old nurse, who, because she distrusted banks, carried -great sums in £5 notes in a pocket under her under-petticoat.</p> - -<p>Macmaster, pocketing the money, had said:</p> - -<p>"That makes exactly two thousand guineas that I owe you. I'm making -arrangements to repay you next week. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens remembered that he had rather stiffened and had said: "For -God's sake don't. I beg you not to. Have Duchemin properly put under -trustees in lunacy, and leave his capital alone. I really beg you. You -don't know what you'll be letting yourselves in for. You don't owe me -anything and you can always draw on me."</p> - -<p>Tietjens never knew what Mrs. Duchemin had done about her husband's -estate over which she had at that date had a power of attorney; but he -had imagined that, from that time on, Macmaster had felt a certain -coldness for himself and that Mrs. Duchemin had hated him. During -several years Macmaster had been borrowing hundreds at a time from -Tietjens. The affair with Mrs. Duchemin had cost her lover a good deal: -he had week-ended almost continuously in Rye at the expensive hostel. -Moreover, the famous Friday parties for geniuses had been going on for -several years now, and these had meant new furnishings, bindings, -carpets, and loans to geniuses—at any rate before Macmaster had had -the ear of the Royal Bounty. So the sum had grown to £2,000, and now to -guineas. And, from that date, the Macmasters had not offered any -repayment.</p> - -<p>Macmaster had said that he dare not travel with Mrs. Duchemin because -all London would be going south by that train. All London had. It pushed in -at every conceivable and inconceivable station all down the line—it -was the great rout of the 3-8-14. Tietjens had got on board at Berwick, -where they were adding extra coaches, and by giving a £5 note to the -guard, who hadn't been able to promise isolation for any distance, had -got a locked carriage. It hadn't remained locked for long enough to let -Mrs. Duchemin have her cry out—but it had apparently served to make -some mischief. The Sandbach party had got on, no doubt at Wooler; the -Port Scatho party somewhere else. Their petrol had run out somewhere and -sales were stopped, even to bankers. Macmaster, who after all had -travelled by the same train, hidden beneath two bluejackets, had picked -up Mrs. Duchemin at King's Cross and that had seemed the end of it.</p> - -<p>Tietjens, back in his dining-room, felt relief and also anger. -He said:</p> - -<p>"Port Scatho. Time's getting short. I'd like to deal with this letter if -you don't mind."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho came as if up out of a dream. He had found the process of -attempting to convert Mrs. Tietjens to divorce law reform very -pleasant—as he always did. He said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! . . . Oh, yes!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said slowly:</p> - -<p>"If you can listen. . . . Macmaster has been married to Mrs. Duchemin -exactly nine months. . . . Have you got that? Mrs. Tietjens did not know -this till this afternoon. The period Mrs. Tietjens complains of in her -letter is nine months. She did perfectly right to write the letter. As -such I approve of it. If she had known that the Macmasters were married -she would not have written it. I didn't know she was going to write it. -If I had known she was going to write it I should have requested her not -to. If I had requested her not to she would, no doubt, not have done so. -I did know of the letter at the moment of your coming in. I had heard of -it at lunch only ten minutes before. I should, no doubt, have heard of -it before, but this is the first time I have lunched at home in four -months. I have to-day had a day's leave as being warned for foreign -service. I have been doing duty at Ealing. To-day is the first -opportunity I have had for serious business conversation with Mrs. -Tietjens. . . . Have you got all that? . . ."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho was running towards Tietjens, his hand extended, and over -his whole shining personage the air of an enraptured bridegroom. -Tietjens moved his right hand a little to the right, thus eluding the -pink, well-fleshed hand of Port Scatho. He went on frigidly:</p> - -<p>"You had better, in addition, know as follows: The late Mr. Duchemin -was a scathological—afterwards a homicidal—lunatic. He had -recurrent fits, usually on a Saturday morning. That was because he -fasted—not abstained merely—on Fridays. On Fridays he also -drank. He had acquired the craving for drink when fasting, from -finishing the sacramental wine after communion services. That is a not -unknown occurrence. He behaved latterly with great physical violence to -Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin, on the other hand, treated him with the -utmost consideration and concern: she might have had him certified much -earlier, but, considering the pain that confinement must cause him -during his lucid intervals, she refrained. I have been an eye-witness of -the most excruciating heroisms on her part. As for the behaviour of -Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin, I am ready to certify—and I believe -society accepts—that it has been most . . . oh, circumspect and -right! . . . There has been no secret of their attachment to each other. -I believe that their determination to behave with decency during their -period of waiting has not been questioned. . . ."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"No! no! Never . . . Most . . . as you say . . . circumspect and, -yes . . . right!"</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Duchemin," Tietjens continued, "has presided at Macmaster's -literary Fridays for a long time; of course since long before they were -married. But, as you know, Macmaster's Fridays have been perfectly open: -you might almost call them celebrated. . . ."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! yes! indeed . . . I sh'd be only too glad to have a ticket for -Lady Port Scatho. . . ."</p> - -<p>"She's only got to walk in," Tietjens said. "I'll warn them: they'll be -pleased. . . . If, perhaps, you would look in to-night! They have a -special party. . . . But Mrs. Macmaster was always attended by a young -lady who saw her off by the last train to Rye. Or I very frequently saw -her off myself, Macmaster being occupied by the weekly article that he -wrote for one of the papers on Friday nights. . . . They were married on -the day after Mr. Duchemin's funeral. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You can't blame 'em!" Lord Port Scatho proclaimed.</p> - -<p>"I don't propose to," Tietjens said. "The really frightful tortures Mrs. -Duchemin had suffered justified—and indeed necessitated—her -finding protection and sympathy at the earliest possible moment. They have -deferred this announcement of their union partly out of respect for the -usual period of mourning, partly because Mrs. Duchemin feels very -strongly that, with all the suffering that is now abroad, wedding feasts -and signs of rejoicing on the part of non-participants are eminently to -be deprecated. Still, the little party of to-night is by way of being an -announcement that they are married. . . ." He paused to reflect for a -moment.</p> - -<p>"I perfectly understand!" Lord Port Scatho exclaimed. "I perfectly -approve. Believe me, I and Lady Port Scatho will do everything. . . . -Everything! . . . Most admirable people. . . . Tietjens, my dear fellow, -your behaviour . . . most handsome. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Wait a minute. . . . There was an occasion in August, '14. In a place -on the border. I can't remember the name. . . ."</p> - -<p>Lord Port Scatho burst out:</p> - -<p>"My dear fellow . . . I beg you won't. . . . I beseech you -not to . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens went on:</p> - -<p>"Just before then Mr. Duchemin had made an attack of an unparalleled -violence on his wife. It was that that caused his final incarceration. -She was not only temporarily disfigured, but she suffered serious -internal injuries and, of course, great mental disturbance. It was -absolutely necessary that she should have change of scene. . . . But I -think you will bear me out that, in that case too, their behaviour -was . . . again, circumspect and right. . . ."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"I know; I know . . . Lady Port Scatho and I agreed—even without -knowing what you have just told me—that the poor things almost -exaggerated it. . . . He slept, of course, at Jedburgh? . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! They almost exaggerated it. . . . I had to be called in -to take Mrs. Duchemin home. . . . It caused, apparently, -misunderstandings. . . ."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho—full of enthusiasm at the thought that at least two -unhappy victims of the hateful divorce laws had, with decency and -circumspectness, found the haven of their desires—burst out:</p> - -<p>"By God, Tietjens, if I ever hear a man say a word against you. . . . -Your splendid championship of your friend. . . . Your . . . your -unswerving devotion . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Wait a minute, Port Scatho, will you?" He was unbottoning the flap of -his breast pocket.</p> - -<p>"A man who can act so splendidly in one instance," Port Scatho -said. . . . "And your going to France. . . . If any one . . . if -<i>any</i> one . . . dares . . ."</p> - -<p>At the sight of a vellum-cornered, green-edged book in Tietjens' hand -Sylvia suddenly stood up; as Tietjens took from an inner flap a cheque -that had lost its freshness she made three great strides over the carpet -to him.</p> - -<p>"Oh, Chrissie! . . ." she cried out. "He hasn't . . . That beast -hasn't . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens answered:</p> - -<p>"He has . . ." He handed the soiled cheque to the banker. Port Scatho -looked at it with slow bewilderment.</p> - -<p>"'Account overdrawn,'" he read. "Brownie's . . . my nephew's -handwriting. . . . To the club . . . It's . . ."</p> - -<p>"You aren't going to take it lying down?" Sylvia said. "Oh, thank -goodness, you aren't going to take it lying down."</p> - -<p>"No! I'm not going to take it lying down," Tietjens said. "Why should -I?" A look of hard suspicion came over the banker's face.</p> - -<p>"You appear," he said, "to have been overdrawing your account. People -should not overdraw their accounts. For what sum are you overdrawn?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens handed his pass-book to Port Scatho.</p> - -<p>"I don't understand on what principle you work," Sylvia said to -Tietjens. "There are things you take lying down; this you don't."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"It doesn't matter, really. Except for the child."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"I guaranteed an overdraft for you up to a thousand pounds last -Thursday. You can't be overdrawn over a thousand pounds."</p> - -<p>"I'm not overdrawn at all," Tietjens said. "I was for about fifteen -pounds yesterday. I didn't know it."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho was turning over the pages of the pass-book, his face -completely blank.</p> - -<p>"I simply don't understand," he said. "You appear to be in credit. . . . -You appear always to have been in credit except for a small sum now and -then. For a day or two."</p> - -<p>"I was overdrawn," Tietjens said, "for fifteen pounds yesterday. I -should say for three or four hours: the course of a post, from my army -agent to your head office. During these two or three hours your bank -selected two out of six of my cheques to dishonour—both being under -two pounds. The other one was sent back to my mess at Ealing, who won't, of -course, give it back to me. That also is marked "account overdrawn," and -in the same handwriting."</p> - -<p>"But good God," the banker said. "That means your ruin."</p> - -<p>"It certainly means my ruin," Tietjens said. "It was meant to."</p> - -<p>"But," the banker said—a look of relief came into his face which -had begun to assume the aspect of a broken man's—"you must have other -accounts with the bank . . . a speculative one, perhaps, on which you -are heavily down. . . . I don't myself attend to client's accounts, -except the very huge ones, which affect the bank's policy."</p> - -<p>"You ought to," Tietjens said. "It's the very little ones you ought to -attend to, as a gentleman making his fortune out of them. I have no -other account with you. I have never speculated in anything in my life. I -have lost a great deal in Russian securities—a great deal for me. But -so, no doubt, have you."</p> - -<p>"Then . . . betting!" Port Scatho said.</p> - -<p>"I never put a penny on a horse in my life," Tietjens said. "I know too -much about them."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho looked at the faces first of Sylvia, then of Tietjens. -Sylvia, at least, was his very old friend. She said:</p> - -<p>"Christopher never bets and never speculates. His personal expenses are -smaller than those of any man in town. You could say he had no personal -expenses."</p> - -<p>Again the swift look of suspicion came into Port Scatho's open -face.</p> - -<p>"Oh," Sylvia said, "you couldn't suspect Christopher and me of being in -a plot to blackmail you."</p> - -<p>"No; I couldn't suspect that," the banker said. "But the other -explanation is just as extraordinary. . . . To suspect the bank . . . -the <i>bank</i>. . . . How do <i>you</i> account? . . ." He was addressing -Tietjens; his round head seemed to become square, below; emotion worked -on his jaws.</p> - -<p>"I'll tell you simply this," Tietjens said. "You can then repair the -matter as you think fit. Ten days ago I got my marching orders. As soon -as I had handed over to the officer who relieved me I drew cheques for -everything I owed—to my military tailor, the mess—for one pound -twelve shillings. I had also to buy a compass and a revolver, the Red Cross -orderlies having annexed mine when I was in hospital. . . ."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho said: "Good God!"</p> - -<p>"Don't you know they annex things?" Tietjens asked. He went on: "The -total, in fact, amounted to an overdraft of fifteen pounds, but I did -not think of it as such because my army agents ought to have paid my -month's army pay over to you on the first. As you perceive, they have -only paid it over this morning, the 13th. But, as you will see from my -pass-book, they have always paid about the 13th, not the 1st. Two days -ago I lunched at the club and drew that cheque for one pound fourteen -shillings and sixpence: one ten for personal expenses and the four and -six for lunch. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You were, however, actually overdrawn," the banker said sharply.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Yesterday, for two hours."</p> - -<p>"But then," Port Scatho said, "what do you want done? We'll do what we -can."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I don't know. Do what you like. You'd better make what explanation you -can to the military authority. If they court-martialled me it would hurt -you more than me. I assure you of that. There <i>is</i> an explanation."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho began suddenly to tremble.</p> - -<p>"What . . . what . . . what explanation?" he said. "You . . . damn -it . . . you draw this out. . . . Do you dare to say my bank. . . ." He -stopped, drew his hand down his face and said: "But yet . . . you're a -sensible, sound man. . . . I've heard things against you. But I don't -believe them. . . . Your father always spoke very highly of you. . . . I -remember he said if you wanted money you could always draw on him -through us for three or four hundred. . . . That's what makes it so -incomprehensible. . . . It's . . . it's . . ." His agitation grew on -him. "It seems to strike at the very heart. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Look here, Port Scatho. . . . I've always had a respect for you. Settle -it how you like. Fix the mess up for both our sakes with any formula -that's not humiliating for your bank. I've already resigned from the -club. . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said: "Oh, <i>no</i>, Christopher . . . not from the -<i>club</i>!"</p> - -<p>Port Scatho started back from beside the table.</p> - -<p>"But if you're in the right!" he said. "You <i>couldn't</i> . . . Not -resign from the club. . . . I'm on the committee. . . . I'll explain to -them, in the fullest, in the most generous . . ."</p> - -<p>"You couldn't explain," Tietjens said. "You can't get ahead of -rumour. . . . It's half over London at this moment. You know what -the toothless old fellows of your committee are. . . . Anderson! -ffolliott. . . And my brother's friend, Ruggles. . . ."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"Your brother's friend Ruggles. . . . But look here. . . . He's -something about the Court, isn't he? But look here. . . ." His mind -stopped. He said: "People shouldn't overdraw. . . . But if your father -said you could draw on him I'm really much concerned. . . . You're a -first-rate fellow. . . . I can tell that from your pass-book alone. . . . -Nothing but cheques drawn to first-class tradesmen for reasonable -amounts. The sort of pass-book I liked to see when I was a junior clerk -in the bank. . . ." At that early reminiscence feelings of pathos -overcame him and his mind once more stopped.</p> - -<p>Sylvia came back into the room; they had not perceived her going. She in -turn held in her hand a letter.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Look here, Port Scatho, don't get into this state. Give me your word to -do what you can when you've assured yourself the facts are as I say. I -wouldn't bother you at all, it's not my line, except for Mrs. Tietjens. -A man alone can live that sort of thing down, or die. But there's no -reason why Mrs. Tietjens should live, tied to a bad hat, while he's -living it down or dying."</p> - -<p>"But that's not <i>right</i>" Port Scatho said, "it's not the right way -to look at it. You can't pocket . . . I'm simply bewildered. . . ."</p> - -<p>"You've no right to be bewildered," Sylvia said. "You're worrying your -mind for expedients to save the reputation of your bank. We know your -bank is more to you than a baby. You should look after it better, then."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho, who had already fallen two paces away from the table, now -fell two paces back, almost on top of it. Sylvia's nostrils were -dilated.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Tietjens shall not resign from your beastly club. He shall not! Your -committee will request him formally to withdraw his resignation. You -understand? He will withdraw it. Then he will resign for good. He is too -good to mix with people like you. . . ." She paused, her chest working -fast. "Do you understand what you've got to do?" she asked.</p> - -<p>An appalling shadow of a thought went through Tietjens' mind: he would -not let it come into words.</p> - -<p>"I don't know . . ." the banker said. "I don't know that I can get the -committee . . ."</p> - -<p>"You've got to," Sylvia answered. "I'll tell you why . . . Christopher -was never overdrawn. Last Thursday I instructed your people to pay a -thousand pounds to my husband's account. I repeated the instruction by -letter and I kept a copy of the letter witnessed by my confidential -maid. I also registered the letter and have the receipt for it. . . . -You can see them."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho mumbled from over the letter:</p> - -<p>"It's to Brownie . . . Yes, a receipt for a letter to Brownie . . ." -She examined the little green slip on both sides. He said: "Last -Thursday. . . . To-day's Monday. . . . An instruction to sell -North-Western stock to the amount of one thousand pounds and -place to the account of . . . Then . . ."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said:</p> - -<p>"That'll do. . . . You can't angle for time any more. . . . Your nephew -has been in an affair of this sort before. . . . I'll tell you. Last -Thursday at lunch your nephew told me that Christopher's brother's -solicitors had withdrawn all the permissions for overdrafts on the books -of the Groby estate. There were several to members of the family. Your -nephew said that he intended to catch Christopher on the hop—that's -his own expression—and dishonour the next cheque of his that came in. -He said he had been waiting for the chance ever since the war and the -brother's withdrawal had given it him. I begged him not to . . ."</p> - -<p>"But, good God," the banker said, "this is unheard of . . ."</p> - -<p>"It isn't," Sylvia said. "Christopher has had five snotty, little, -miserable subalterns to defend at court-martials for exactly similar -cases. One was an exact reproduction of this. . . ."</p> - -<p>"But, good God," the banker exclaimed again, "men giving their lives for -their country. . . . Do you mean to say Brownie did this out of revenge -for Tietjens' defending at court-martials. . . . And then . . . your -thousand pounds is not shown in your husband's pass-book. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Of course it's not," Sylvia said. "It has never been paid in. On Friday -I had a formal letter from your people pointing out that North-Westerns -were likely to rise and asking me to reconsider my position. The same -day I sent an express telling them explicitly to do as I said. . . . -Ever since then your nephew has been on the 'phone begging me not to -save my husband. He was there, just now, when I went out of the room. He -was also beseeching me to fly with him."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Isn't that enough, Sylvia? It's rather torturing."</p> - -<p>"Let them be tortured," Sylvia said. "But it appears to be enough."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho had covered his face with both his pink hands. He had -exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Oh, my God! Brownie again. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens' brother Mark was in the room. He was smaller, browner and -harder than Tietjens and his blue eyes protruded more. He had in one -hand a bowler hat, in the other an umbrella, wore a pepper-and-salt suit -and had race-glasses slung across him. He disliked Port Scatho, who -detested him. He had lately been knighted. He said:</p> - -<p>"Hullo, Port Scatho," neglecting to salute his sister-in-law. His eyes, -whilst he stood motionless, rolled a look round the room and rested on a -miniature bureau that stood on a writing-table, in a recess, under and -between bookshelves.</p> - -<p>"I see you've still got that cabinet," he said to Tietjens.</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I haven't. I've sold it to Sir John Robertson. He's waiting to take it -away till he has room in his collection."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho walked, rather unsteadily, round the lunch-table and stood -looking down from one of the long windows. Sylvia sat down on her chair -beside the fireplace. The two brothers stood facing each other, -Christopher suggesting wheat-sacks, Mark, carved wood. All round them, -except for the mirror that reflected bluenesses, the gilt backs of -books. Hullo Central was clearing the table.</p> - -<p>"I hear you're going out again to-morrow," Mark said. "I want to settle -some things with you."</p> - -<p>"I'm going at nine from Waterloo," Christopher said. "I've not much -time. You can walk with me to the War Office if you like."</p> - -<p>Mark's eyes followed the black and white of the maid round the table. -She went out with the tray. Christopher suddenly was reminded of -Valentine Wannop clearing the table in her mother's cottage. Hullo -Central was no faster about it. Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Port Scatho! As you're there we may as well finish one point. I have -cancelled my father's security for my brother's overdraft."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho said, to the window, but loud enough:</p> - -<p>"We all know it. To our cost."</p> - -<p>"I wish you, however," Mark Tietjens went on, "to make over from my own -account a thousand a year to my brother as he needs it. Not more than a -thousand in any one year."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho said:</p> - -<p>"Write a letter to the bank. I don't look after clients' accounts on -social occasions."</p> - -<p>"I don't see why you don't," Mark Tietjens said. "It's the way you make -your bread and butter, isn't it?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"You may save yourself all this trouble, Mark. I am closing my account -in any case."</p> - -<p>Port Scatho spun round on his heel.</p> - -<p>"I beg that you won't," he exclaimed. "I beg that we . . . that we may -have the honour of continuing to have you draw upon us." He had the -trick of convulsively working jaws: his head against the light was like -the top of a rounded gate-post. He said to Mark Tietjens: "You may tell -your friend, Mr. Ruggles, that your brother is empowered by me to draw -on my private account . . . on my personal and private account up to any -amount he needs. I say that to show my estimate of your brother; because -I know he will incur no obligations he cannot discharge."</p> - -<p>Mark Tietjens stood motionless; leaning slightly on the crook of his -umbrella on the one side; on the other displaying, at arm's length, the -white silk lining of his bowler hat, the lining being the brightest -object in the room.</p> - -<p>"That's your affair," he said to Port Scatho. "All I'm concerned with is -to have a thousand a year paid to my brother's account till further -notice."</p> - -<p>Christopher Tietjens said, with what he knew was a sentimental voice, to -Port Scatho. He was very touched; it appeared to him that with the -spontaneous appearance of several names in his memory, and with this -estimate of himself from the banker, his tide was turning and that this -day might indeed be marked by a red stone:</p> - -<p>"Of course, Port Scatho, I won't withdraw my wretched little account -from you if you want to keep it. It flatters me that you should." He -stopped and added: "I only wanted to avoid these . . . these family -complications. But I suppose you can stop my brother's money being paid -into my account. I don't want his money."</p> - -<p>He said to Sylvia:</p> - -<p>"You had better settle the other matter with Port Scatho."</p> - -<p>To Port Scatho:</p> - -<p>"I'm intensely obliged to you, Port Scatho. . . . You'll get Lady Port -Scatho round to Macmaster's this evening if only for a minute; before -eleven. . . ." And to his brother:</p> - -<p>"Come along, Mark. I'm going down to the War Office. We can talk as we -walk."</p> - -<p>Sylvia said very nearly with timidity—and again a dark thought -went over Tietjens' mind:</p> - -<p>"Do we meet again then? . . . I know you're very busy. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Yes. I'll come and pick you out from Lady Job's, if they don't keep me -too long at the War Office. I'm dining, as you know, at Macmaster's; I -don't suppose I shall stop late."</p> - -<p>"I'd come," Sylvia said, "to Macmaster's, if you thought it was -appropriate. I'd bring Claudine Sandbach and General Wade. We're only -going to the Russian dancers. We'd cut off early."</p> - -<p>Tietjens could settle that sort of thought very quickly.</p> - -<p>"Yes, do," he said hurriedly. "It would be appreciated."</p> - -<p>He got to the door: he came back: his brother was nearly through. He -said to Sylvia, and for him the occasion was a very joyful one:</p> - -<p>"I've worried out some of the words of that song. It runs:</p> - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">'Somewhere or other there must surely be</span><br /> -<span class="i3">The face not seen: the voice not heard . . .'</span> -</div></div> - -<p>Probably it's 'the voice not ever heard' to make up the metre. . . . I -don't know the writer's name. But I hope I'll worry it all out during -the day."</p> - -<p>Sylvia had gone absolutely white.</p> - -<p>"Don't!" she said. "Oh . . . <i>don't</i>." She added coldly: "Don't -take the trouble," and wiped her tiny handkerchief across her lips as -Tietjens went away.</p> - -<p>She had heard the song at a charity concert and had cried as she heard -it. She had read, afterwards, the words in the programme and had almost -cried again. But she had lost the programme and had never come across -the words again. The echo of them remained with her like something -terrible and alluring: like a knife she would some day take out and with -which she would stab herself.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="III_II">III</a></h4> - - -<p>The two brothers walked twenty steps from the door along the empty Inn -pavements without speaking. Each was completely expressionless. To -Christopher it seemed like Yorkshire. He had a vision of Mark, standing -on the lawn at Groby, in his bowler hat and with his umbrella, whilst -the shooters walked over the lawn, and up the hill to the butts. Mark -probably never had done that; but it was so that his image always -presented itself to his brother. Mark was considering that one of the -folds of his umbrella was disarranged. He seriously debated with himself -whether he should unfold it at once and refold it—which was a great -deal of trouble to take!—or whether he should leave it till he got to -his club, where he would tell the porter to have it done at once. That -would mean that he would have to walk for a mile and a quarter through -London with a disarranged umbrella, which was disagreeable.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"If I were you I wouldn't let that banker fellow go about giving you -testimonials of that sort."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Ah!"</p> - -<p>He considered that, with a third of his brain in action, he was over a -match for Mark, but he was tired of discussions. He supposed that some -unpleasant construction would be put by his brother's friend, Ruggles, -on the friendship of Port Scatho for himself. But he had no curiosity. -Mark felt a vague discomfort. He said:</p> - -<p>"You had a cheque dishonoured at the club this morning?" Christopher -said:</p> - -<p>"Yes."</p> - -<p>Mark waited for explanations. Christopher was pleased at the speed with -which the news had travelled: it confirmed what he had said to Port -Scatho. He viewed his case from outside. It was like looking at the -smooth working of a mechanical model.</p> - -<p>Mark was more troubled. Used as he had been for thirty years to the -vociferous south he had forgotten that there were taciturnities still. -If at his Ministry he laconically accused a transport clerk of -remissness, or if he accused his French mistress—just as -laconically—of putting too many condiments on his nightly -mutton-chop, or too much salt in the water in which she boiled his -potatoes, he was used to hearing a great many excuses or negations, -uttered with energy and continued for long. So he had got into -the habit of considering himself almost the only laconic being in -the world. He suddenly remembered with discomfort—but also with -satisfaction—that his brother was his brother.</p> - -<p>He knew nothing about Christopher, for himself. He had seemed to look at -his little brother down avenues, from a distance, the child misbehaving -himself. Not a true Tietjens: born very late: a mother's child, -therefore, rather than a father's. The mother an admirable woman, but -from the South Riding. Soft, therefore, and ample. The elder Tietjens' -children, when they had experienced failures, had been wont to blame -their father for not marrying a woman of their own Riding. So, for -himself, he knew nothing of this boy. He was said to be brilliant: an -un-Tietjens-like quality. Akin to talkativeness! . . . Well, he wasn't -talkative. Mark said:</p> - -<p>"What have you done with all the brass our mother left you? Twenty -thousand, wasn't it?"</p> - -<p>They were just passing through a narrow way between Georgian houses. In -the next quadrangle Tietjens stopped and looked at his brother. Mark -stood still to be looked at. Christopher said to himself:</p> - -<p>"This man has the right to ask these questions!"</p> - -<p>It was as if a queer slip had taken place in a moving-picture. This -fellow had become the head of the house: he, Christopher, was the heir. -At that moment, their father, in the grave four months now, was for the -first time dead.</p> - -<p>Christopher remembered a queer incident. After the funeral, when they -had come back from the churchyard and had lunched, Mark—and Tietjens -could now see the wooden gesture—had taken out his cigar-case and, -selecting one cigar for himself, had passed the rest round the table. It -was as if people's hearts had stopped beating. Groby had never, till -that day, been smoked in: the father had had his twelve pipes filled and -put in the rose-bushes in the drive. . . .</p> - -<p>It had been regarded merely as a disagreeable incident: a piece of bad -taste. . . . Christopher, himself, only just back from France, would not -even have known it as such, his mind was so blank, only the parson had -whispered to him: "And Groby never smoked in till this day."</p> - -<p>But now! It appeared a symbol, and an absolutely right symbol. Whether -they liked it or not, here were the head of the house and the heir. The -head of the house must make his arrangements, the heir agree or -disagree; but the elder brother had the right to have his enquiries -answered.</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Half the money was settled at once on my child. I lost seven thousand -in Russian securities. The rest I spent. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Ah!"</p> - -<p>They had just passed under the arch that leads into Holborn. Mark, in -turn, stopped and looked at his brother and Christopher stood still to -be inspected, looking into his brother's eyes. Mark said to himself:</p> - -<p>"The fellow isn't at least afraid to look at you!" He had been convinced -that Christopher would be. He said:</p> - -<p>"You spent it on women? Or where do you get the money that you spend on -women?"</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"I never spent a penny on a woman in my life."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Ah!"</p> - -<p>They crossed Holborn and went by the backways towards Fleet Street.</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"When I say 'woman' I'm using the word in the ordinary sense. Of course -I've given women of our own class tea or lunch and paid for their cabs. -Perhaps I'd better put it that I've never—either before or after -marriage—had connection with any woman other than my wife."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Ah!"</p> - -<p>He said to himself:</p> - -<p>"Then Ruggles must be a liar." This neither distressed nor astonished -him. For twenty years he and Ruggles had shared a floor of a large and -rather gloomy building in Mayfair. They were accustomed to converse -whilst shaving in a joint toilet-room, otherwise they did not often meet -except at the club. Ruggles was attached to the Royal Court in some -capacity, possibly as sub-deputy gold-stick-in-waiting. Or he might have -been promoted in the twenty years. Mark Tietjens had never taken the -trouble to enquire. Enormously proud and shut in on himself, he was -without curiosity of any sort. He lived in London because it was -immense, solitary, administrative and apparently without curiosity as to -its own citizens. If he could have found, in the north, a city as vast -and as distinguished by the other characteristics, he would have -preferred it.</p> - -<p>Of Ruggles he thought little or nothing. He had once heard the phrase -"agreeable rattle," and he regarded Ruggles as an agreeable rattle, -though he did not know what the phrase meant. Whilst they shaved Ruggles -gave out the scandal of the day. He never, that is to say, mentioned a -woman whose virtue was not purchasable, or a man who would no: sell his -wife for advancement. This matched with Mark's ideas of the south. When -Ruggles aspersed the fame of a man of family from the north, Mark would -stop him with:</p> - -<p>"Oh, no. That's not true. He's a Craister of Wantley Fells," or another -name, as the case might be. Half Scotchman, half Jew, Ruggles was very -tall and resembled a magpie, having his head almost always on one side. -Had he been English Mark would never have shared his rooms with him: he -knew indeed few Englishmen of sufficient birth and position to have that -privilege, and, on the other hand, few Englishmen of birth and position -would have consented to share rooms so grim and uncomfortable, so -furnished with horse-hair seated mahogany, or so lit with ground-glass -skylights. Coming up to town at the age of twenty-five, Mark had taken -these rooms with a man called Peebles, long since dead, and he had never -troubled to make any change, though Ruggles had taken the place of -Peebles. The remote similarity of the names had been less disturbing to -Mark Tietjens than would have been the case had the names been more -different. It would have been very disagreeable, Mark often thought, to -share with a man called, say. Granger. As it was he still often called -Ruggles Peebles, and no harm was done. Mark knew nothing of Ruggles' -origins, then—so that, in a remote way, their union resembled that of -Christopher with Macmaster. But whereas Christopher would have given his -satellite the shirt off his back, Mark would not have lent Ruggles more -than a five pound note, and would have turned him out of their rooms if -it had not been returned by the end of the quarter. But, since Ruggles -never had asked to borrow anything at all, Mark considered him an -entirely honourable man. Occasionally Ruggles would talk of his -determination to marry some widow or other with money, or of his -influence with people in exalted stations, but, when he talked like -that, Mark would not listen to him and he soon returned to stories of -purchasable women and venial men.</p> - -<p>About five months ago Mark had said one morning to Ruggles:</p> - -<p>"You might pick up what you can about my youngest brother Christopher -and let me know."</p> - -<p>The evening before that Mark's father had called Mark to him from over -the other side of the smooking-room and had said:</p> - -<p>"You might find out what you can about Christopher. He may be in want of -money. Has it occurred to you that he's the heir to the estate! After -you, of course." Mr. Tietjens had aged a good deal after the deaths of -his children. He said: "I suppose you won't marry?" and Mark had -answered:</p> - -<p>"No; I shan't marry. But I suppose I'm a better life than Christopher. -He appears to have been a good deal knocked about out there."</p> - -<p>Armed then with this commission Mr. Ruggles appears to have displayed -extraordinary activity in preparing a Christopher Tietjens dossier. It -is not often that an inveterate gossip gets a chance at a man whilst -being at the same time practically shielded against the law of libel. -And Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of -the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips. And -Christopher Tietjens had displayed more than his usual insolence to -Ruggles. So Ruggles' coat-tails flashed round an unusual number of doors -and his top-hat gleamed before an unusual number of tall portals during -the next week.</p> - -<p>Amongst others he had visited the lady known as Glorvina.</p> - -<p>There is said to be a book, kept in a holy of holies, in which bad marks -are set down against men of family and position in England. In this book -Mark Tietjens and his father—in common with a great number of -hard-headed Englishmen of county rank—implicitly believed. -Christopher Tietjens didn't: he imagined that the activities of gentlemen -like Ruggles were sufficient to stop the careers of people whom they -disliked. On the other hand, Mark and his father looked abroad upon -English society and saw fellows, apparently with every qualification for -successful careers in one service or the other; and these fellows got no -advancements, orders, titles or preferments of any kind. Just, rather -mysteriously, they didn't make their marks. This they put down to the -workings of the book.</p> - -<p>Ruggles, too, not only believed in the existence of that compilation of -the suspect and doomed, but believed that his hand had a considerable -influence over the inscriptions in its pages. He believed that if, with -more moderation and with more grounds than usual, he uttered -denigrations of certain men before certain personages, it would at least -do those men a great deal of harm. And, quite steadily and with, indeed, -real belief in much of what he said, Ruggles had denigrated Tietjens -before these personages. Ruggles could not see why Christopher had taken -Sylvia back after her elopement with Perowne: he could not see why -Christopher had, indeed, married Sylvia at all when she was with child -by a man called Drake—just as he wasn't going to believe that -Christopher could get a testimonial out of Lord Port Scatho except by -the sale of Sylvia to the banker. He couldn't see anything but money or -jobs at the bottom of these things: he couldn't see how Tietjens -otherwise got the money to support Mrs. Wannop, Miss Wannop and her -child, and to maintain Mrs. Duchemin and Macmaster in the style they -affected, Mrs. Duchemin being the mistress of Christopher. He simply -could see no other solution. It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you -are more altruist than the society that surrounds you.</p> - -<p>Ruggles, however, hadn't any pointers as to whether or no or to what -degree he had really damaged his room-mate's brother. He had talked in -what he considered to be the right quarters, but he hadn't any evidence -that what he had said had got through. It was to ascertain that that he -had called on the great lady, for if anybody knew, she would.</p> - -<p>He hadn't definitely ascertained anything, for the great lady -was—and he knew it—a great deal cleverer than himself. The -great lady, he was allowed to discover, had a real affection for Sylvia, -her daughter's close friend, and she expressed real concern to hear that -Christopher Tietjens wasn't getting on. Ruggles had gone to visit her -quite openly to ask whether something better couldn't be done for the -brother of the man with whom he lived. Christopher had, it was admitted, -great abilities; yet neither in his office—in which he would -surely have remained had he been satisfied with his prospects—nor -in the army did he occupy anything but a very subordinate position. -Couldn't, he asked, Glorvina do anything for him? And he added: "It's -almost as if he had a bad mark against him. . . ."</p> - -<p>The great lady had said, with a great deal of energy, that she could not -do anything at all. The energy was meant to show how absolutely her -party had been downed, outed and jumped on by the party in power, so -that she had no influence of any sort anywhere. That was an -exaggeration; but it did Christopher Tietjens no good, since Ruggles -chose to take it to mean that Glorvina said she could do nothing because -there <i>was</i> a black mark against Tietjens in the book of the -inner circle to which—if anyone had—the great lady must have -had access.</p> - -<p>Glorvina, on the other hand, had been awakened to concern for Tietjens. -In the existence of a book she didn't believe: she had never seen it. -But that a black mark of a metaphorical nature might have been scored -against him she was perfectly ready to believe and, when occasion -served, during the next five months, she made enquiries about Tietjens. -She came upon a Major Drake, an intelligence officer, who had access to -the central depôt of confidential reports upon officers, and Major -Drake showed her, with a great deal of readiness, as a specimen, the -report on Tietjens. It was of a most discouraging sort and peppered over -with hieroglyphics, the main point being Tietjens' impecuniosity and his -predilection for the French; and apparently for the French Royalists. -There being at that date and with that Government a great deal of -friction with our Allies this characteristic which earlier had earned -him a certain number of soft jobs had latterly done him a good deal of -harm. Glorvina carried away the definite information that Tietjens had -been seconded to the French artillery as a liaison officer and had -remained with them for some time, but, having been shell-shocked, had -been sent back. After that a mark had been added against him: "Not to be -employed as liaison officer again."</p> - -<p>On the other hand, Sylvia's visits to Austrian officer-prisoners had -also been noted to Tietjens' account and a final note added: "Not to be -entrusted with any confidential work."</p> - -<p>To what extent Major Drake himself compiled these records the great lady -didn't know and didn't want to know. She was acquainted with the -relationships of the parties and was aware that in certain dark, -full-blooded men the passion for sexual revenge is very lasting, and she -let it go at that. She discovered, however, from Mr. Waterhouse—now -also in retreat—that he had a very high opinion of Tietjens' -character and abilities, and that just before Waterhouse's retirement he -had especially recommended Tietjens for very high promotion. That alone, in -the then state of Ministerial friendships and enmities, Glorvina knew to -be sufficient to ruin any man within range of Governmental influence.</p> - -<p>She had, therefore, sent for Sylvia and had put all these matters before -her, for she had too much wisdom to believe that, even supposing there -should be differences between the young people of which she had no -evidence at all, Sylvia could wish to do anything but promote her -husband's material interests. Moreover, sincerely benevolent as the -great lady was towards this couple, she also saw that here was a -possibility of damaging, at least, individuals of the party in power. A -person in a relatively unimportant official position can sometimes make -a very nasty stink if he is unjustly used, has determination and a small -amount of powerful backing. This Sylvia, at least, certainly had.</p> - -<p>And Sylvia had received the great lady's news with so much emotion that -no one could have doubted that she was utterly devoted to her husband -and would tell him all about it. This Sylvia had not as yet managed to -do.</p> - -<p>Ruggles in the meantime had collected a very full budget of news and -inferences to present to Mark Tietjens whilst shaving. Mark had been -neither surprised nor indignant. He had been accustomed to call all his -father's children, except the brother immediately next him, "the -whelps," and their concerns had been no concerns of his. They would -marry, beget unimportant children who would form collateral lines of -Tietjens and disappear as is the fate of sons of younger sons. And the -deaths of the intermediate brothers had been so recent that Mark was not -yet used to thinking of Christopher as anything but a whelp, a person -whose actions might be disagreeable but couldn't matter. He said to -Ruggles:</p> - -<p>"You had better talk to my father about this. I don't know that I could -keep all these particulars accurately in my head."</p> - -<p>Ruggles had been only too pleased to, and—with to give him -weight, his intimacy with the eldest son, who certified to his -reliability in money matters and his qualifications for amassing details -as to personalities, acts and promotions—that day, at tea at the -club, in a tranquil corner, Ruggles had told Mr. Tietjens senior that -Christopher's wife had been with child when he had married her; he had -hushed up her elopement with Perowne and connived at other love affairs -of hers to his own dishonour, and was suspected in high places of being -a French agent, thus being marked down as suspect in the great book. . . . -All this in order to obtain money for the support of Miss Wannop, by -whom he had had a child, and to maintain Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin on -a scale unsuited to their means, Mrs. Duchemin being his mistress. The -story that Tietjens had had a child by Miss Wannop was first suggested, -and then supported, by the fact that in Yorkshire he certainly had a son -who never appeared in Gray's Inn.</p> - -<p>Mr. Tietjens was a reasonable man: not reasonable enough to doubt -Ruggles' circumstantial history. He believed implicitly in the great -book—which has been believed in by several generations of country -gentlemen: he perceived that his brilliant son had made no advancement -commensurate with either his brilliance or his influence: he suspected -that brilliance was synonymous with reprehensible tendencies. Moreover, -his old friend, General ffolliott, had definitely told him some days -before that he ought to enquire into the goings on of Christopher. On -being pressed ffolliott had, also definitely, stated that Christopher -was suspected of very dishonourable dealings, both in money and women. -Ruggles' allegations came, therefore, as a definite confirmation of -suspicions that appeared only too well backed up.</p> - -<p>He bitterly regretted that, knowing Christopher to be brilliant, he had -turned the boy—as is the usual portion of younger sons—adrift, -with what of a competence could be got together, to sink or swim. He had, -he said to himself, always wished to keep at home and under his own eyes -this boy for whom he had had especial promptings of tenderness. His -wife, to whom he had been absolutely attached by a passionate devotion, -had been unusually wrapped up in Christopher, because Christopher had -been her youngest son, born very late. And, since his wife's death, -Christopher had been especially dear to him, as if he had carried about -his presence some of the radiance and illumination that had seemed to -attach to his mother. Indeed, after his wife's death, Mr. Tietjens had -very nearly asked Christopher and his wife to come and keep house for -him at Groby, making, of course, special testamentary provision for -Christopher in order to atone for his giving up his career at the -Department of Statistics. His sense of justice to his other children had -prevented him doing this.</p> - -<p>What broke his heart was that Christopher should not only have seduced -but should have had a child by Valentine Wannop. Very grand seigneur in -his habits, Mr. Tietjens had always believed in his duty to patronise -the arts and, if he had actually done little in this direction beyond -purchasing some chocolate-coloured pictures of the French historic -school, he had for long prided himself on what he had done for the widow -and children of his old friend. Professor Wannop. He considered, and -with justice, that he had made Mrs. Wannop a novelist, and he considered -her to be a very great novelist. And his conviction of the guilt of -Christopher was strengthened by a slight tinge of jealousy of his son: a -feeling that he would not have acknowledged to himself. For, since -Christopher, he didn't know how, for he had given his son no -introduction, had become an intimate of the Wannop household, Mrs. -Wannop had completely given up asking him, Mr. Tietjens, clamourously -and constantly for advice. In return she had sung the praises of -Christopher in almost extravagant terms. She had, indeed, said that if -Christopher had not been almost daily in the house or at any rate at the -end of the 'phone she would hardly have been able to keep on working at -full pressure. This had not overpleased Mr. Tietjens. Mr. Tietjens -entertained for Valentine Wannop an affection of the very deepest, the -same qualities appealing to the father as appealed to the son. He had -even, in spite of his sixty odd years, seriously entertained the idea of -marrying the girl. She was a lady: she would have managed Groby very -well; and, although the entail on the property was very strict indeed, -he would, at least, have been able to put her beyond the reach of want -after his death. He had thus no doubt of his son's guilt, and he had to -undergo the additional humiliation of thinking that not only had his son -betrayed this radiant personality, but he had done it so clumsily as to -give the girl a child and let it be known. That was unpardonable want of -management in the son of a gentleman. And now this boy was his heir with -a misbegotten brat to follow. Irrevocably!</p> - -<p>All his four tall sons, then, were down. His eldest tied for -good to—a quite admirable!—trollops: his two next dead: his -youngest worse than dead: his wife dead of a broken heart.</p> - -<p>A soberly but deeply religious man, Mr. Tietjens' very religion made him -believe in Christopher's guilt. He knew that it is as difficult for a -rich man to go to heaven as it is for a camel to go through the gate in -Jerusalem called the Needle's Eye. He humbly hoped that his Maker would -receive him amongst the pardoned. Then, since he was a rich—an -enormously rich—man, his sufferings on this earth must be very -great. . . .</p> - -<p>From tea-time that day until it was time to catch the midnight train for -Bishop's Auckland he had been occupied with his son Mark in the -writing-room of the club. They had made many notes. He had seen his son -Christopher, in uniform, looking broken and rather bloated, the result, -no doubt, of debauch. Christopher had passed through the other end of -the room and Mr. Tietjens had avoided his eye. He had caught the train -and reached Groby, travelling alone. Towards dusk he had taken out a -gun. He was found dead next morning, a couple of rabbits beside his -body, just over the hedge from the little churchyard. He appeared to -have crawled through the hedge, dragging his loaded gun, muzzle -forwards, after him. Hundreds of men, mostly farmers, die from that -cause every year in England. . . .</p> - -<p>With these things in his mind—or as much of them as he could keep -at once—Mark was now investigating his brother's affairs. He would -have let things go on longer, for his father's estate was by no means wound -up, but that morning Ruggles had told him that the club had had a cheque -of his brother's returned and that his brother was going out to France -next day. It was five months exactly since the death of their father. -That had happened in March, it was now August: a bright, untidy day in -narrow, high courts.</p> - -<p>Mark arranged his thoughts.</p> - -<p>"How much of an income," he said, "do you need to live in comfort? If a -thousand isn't enough, how much? Two?"</p> - -<p>Christopher said that he needed no money and didn't intend to live in -comfort. Mark said:</p> - -<p>"I am to let you have three thousand, if you'll live abroad. I'm only -carrying out our father's instructions. You could cut a hell of a splash -on three thousand in France."</p> - -<p>Christopher did not answer.</p> - -<p>Mark began again:</p> - -<p>"The remaining three thousand then: that was over from our mother's -money. Did you settle it on your girl, or just spend it on her?"</p> - -<p>Christopher repeated with patience that he hadn't got a girl.</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"The girl who had a child by you. I'm instructed, if you haven't settled -anything already—but father took it that you would have—I was -to let her have enough to live in comfort. How much do you suppose she'll -need to live in comfort? I allow Charlotte four hundred. Would four hundred -be enough? I suppose you want to go on keeping her? Three thousand isn't -a great lot for her to live on with a child."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Hadn't you better mention names?"</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"No! I never mention names. I mean a woman writer and her daughter. I -suppose the girl is father's daughter, isn't she?"</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"No. She couldn't be. I've thought of it. She's twenty-seven. We were -all in Dijon for the two years before she was born. Father didn't come -into the estate till next year. The Wannops were also in Canada at the -time. Professor Wannop was principal of a university there. I forget the -name."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"So we were. In Dijon! For my French!" He added: "Then she can't be -father's daughter. It's a good thing. I thought, as he wanted to settle -money on them, they were very likely his children. There's a son, too. -He's to have a thousand. What's he doing?"</p> - -<p>"The son," Tietjens said, "is a conscientious objector. He's on a -mine-sweeper. A bluejacket. His idea is that picking up mines is saving -life, not taking it."</p> - -<p>"Then he won't want the brass yet," Mark said, "it's to start him in any -business. What's the full name and address of your girl? Where do you -keep her?"</p> - -<p>They were in an open space, dusty, with half-timber buildings whose -demolition had been interrupted. Christopher halted close to a post that -had once been a cannon; up against this he felt that his brother could -lean in order to assimilate ideas. He said slowly and patiently:</p> - -<p>"If you're consulting with me as to how to carry out our father's -intentions, and as there's money in it you had better make an attempt to -get hold of the facts. I wouldn't bother you if it wasn't a matter of -money. In the first place, no money is wanted at this end. I can live on -my pay. My wife is a rich woman, relatively. Her mother is a very rich -woman. . . ."</p> - -<p>"She's Rugeley's mistress, isn't she?" Mark asked.</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"No, she isn't. I should certainly say she wasn't. Why should she be? -She's his cousin."</p> - -<p>"Then it's your wife who was Rugeley's mistress?" Mark asked. "Or why -should she have the loan of his box?"</p> - -<p>"Sylvia also is Rugeley's cousin, of course, a degree further removed," -Tietjens said. "She isn't anyone's mistress. You can be certain of -that."</p> - -<p>"They <i>say</i> she is," Mark answered. "They say she's a regular -tart. . . . I suppose you think I've insulted you."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"No, you haven't. . . . It's better to get all this out. We're -practically strangers, but you've a right to ask."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Then you haven't got a girl and don't need money to keep her. . . . You -could have what you liked. There's no reason why a man shouldn't have a -girl, and if he has he ought to keep her decently. . . ."</p> - -<p>Christopher did not answer. Mark leaned against the half-buried cannon -and swung his umbrella by its crook.</p> - -<p>"But," he said, "if you don't keep a girl what do you do for . . ." He -was going to say "for the comforts of home," but a new idea had come -into his mind. "Of course," he said, "one can see that your wife's -soppily in love with you." He added: "Soppily . . . one can see that -with half an eye. . . ."</p> - -<p>Christopher felt his jaw drop. Not a second before—that very -second!—he had made up his mind to ask Valentine Wannop to become his -mistress that night. It was no good, any more, he said to himself. She -loved him, he knew, with a deep; an unshakable passion, just as his -passion for her was a devouring element that covered his whole mind as -the atmosphere envelopes the earth. Were they, then, to go down to death -separated by years, with no word ever spoken? To what end? For whose -benefit? The whole world conspired to force them together! To resist -became a weariness!</p> - -<p>His brother Mark was talking on. "I know all about women," he had -announced. Perhaps he did. He had lived with exemplary fidelity to a -quite unpresentable woman, for a number of years. Perhaps the complete -study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest!</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Look here, Mark. You had better go through all my pass-books for the -last ten years. Or ever since I had an account. This discussion is no -good if you don't believe what I say."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"I don't want to see your pass-books. I believe you."</p> - -<p>He added, a second later:</p> - -<p>"Why the devil shouldn't I believe you? It's either believing you're a -gentleman or Ruggles a liar. It's only common-sense to believe Ruggles a -liar, in that case. I didn't before because I had no grounds to." -Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"I doubt if liar is the right word. He picked up things that were said -against me. No doubt he reported them faithfully enough. Things <i>are</i> -said against me. I don't know why."</p> - -<p>"Because," Mark said with emphasis, "you treat these south country swine -with the contempt that they deserve. They're incapable of understanding -the motives of a gentleman. If you live among dogs they'll think you've -the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you?" He added: -"I thought you'd been buried so long under their muck that you were as -mucky as they!"</p> - -<p>Tietjens looked at his brother with the respect one has to give to a man -ignorant but shrewd. It was a discovery: that his brother was shrewd.</p> - -<p>But, of course, he would be shrewd. He was the indispensable head of a -great department. He had to have some qualities. . . . Not cultivated, -not even instructed. A savage! But penetrating!</p> - -<p>"We must move on," he said, "or I shall have to take a cab." Mark -detached himself from his half buried cannon.</p> - -<p>"What did you do with the other three thousand?" he asked. "Three -thousand is a hell of a big sum to chuck away. For a younger son."</p> - -<p>"Except for some furniture I bought for my wife's rooms," Christopher -said, "it went mostly in loans."</p> - -<p>"Loans!" Mark exclaimed. "To that fellow Macmaster?"</p> - -<p>"Mostly to him," Christopher answered. "But about seven hundred to Dicky -Swipes, of Cullercoats."</p> - -<p>"Good God! Why to him?" Mark ejaculated.</p> - -<p>"Oh, because he was Swipes, of Cullercoats," Christopher said, "and -asked for it. He'd have had more, only that was enough for him to drink -himself to death on."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"I suppose you don't give money to every fellow that asks for it?"</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"I do. It's a matter of principle."</p> - -<p>"It's lucky," Mark said, "that a lot of fellows don't know that. You -wouldn't have much brass left for long."</p> - -<p>"I didn't have it for long," Christopher said.</p> - -<p>"You know," Mark said, "you couldn't expect to do the princely patron on -a youngest son's portion. It's a matter of taste. I never gave a -ha'penny to a beggar myself. But a lot of the Tietjens were princely. -One generation to addle brass: one to keep: one to spend. That's all -right. . . . I suppose Macmaster's wife <i>is</i> your mistress? That'll -account for it not being the girl. They keep an arm-chair for you."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"No. I just backed Macmaster for the sake of backing him. Father lent -him money to begin with."</p> - -<p>"So he did," Mark exclaimed.</p> - -<p>"His wife," Christopher said, "was the widow of Breakfast Duchemin. -<i>You</i> knew Breakfast Duchemin?"</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>I</i> knew Breakfast Duchemin," Mark said. "I suppose -Macmaster's a pretty warm man now. Done himself proud with Duchemin's -money."</p> - -<p>"Pretty proud!" Christopher said. "They won't be knowing me long -now."</p> - -<p>"But damn it all!" Mark said. "You've Groby to all intents and purposes. -<i>I'm</i> not going to marry and beget children to hinder you."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Thanks. I don't want it."</p> - -<p>"Got your knife into me?" Mark asked.</p> - -<p>"Yes. I've got my knife into you," Christopher answered. "Into the whole -bloody lot of you, and Ruggles' and ffolliott's and our father!"</p> - -<p>Mark said: "Ah!"</p> - -<p>"You don't suppose I wouldn't have?" Christopher asked.</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>I</i> don't suppose you wouldn't have," Mark answered. "I -thought you were a soft sort of bloke. I see you aren't."</p> - -<p>"I'm as North Riding as yourself!" Christopher answered.</p> - -<p>They were in the tide of Fleet Street, pushed apart by foot passengers -and separated by traffic. With some of the imperiousness of the officer -of those days Christopher barged across through motor-buses and paper -lorries. With the imperiousness of the head of a department Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Here, policeman, stop these damn things and let me get over." But -Christopher was over much the sooner and waited for his brother in the -gateway of the Middle Temple. His mind was completely swallowed up in -the endeavour to imagine the embraces of Valentine Wannop. He said to -himself that he had burnt his boats.</p> - -<p>Mark, coming alongside him, said:</p> - -<p>"You'd better know what our father wanted."</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Be quick then. I must get on." He had to rush through his War Office -interview to get to Valentine Wannop. They would have only a few hours -in which to recount the loves of two lifetimes. He saw her golden head -and her enraptured face. He wondered how her face would look, -enraptured. He had seen on it humour, dismay, tenderness, in the -eyes—and fierce anger and contempt for his, Christopher's, political -opinions. His militarism!</p> - -<p>Nevertheless they halted by the Temple fountain. That respect was due to -their dead father. Mark had been explaining. Christopher had caught some -of his words and divined the links. Mr. Tietjens had left no will, -confident that his desires as to the disposal of his immense fortune -would be carried out meticulously by his eldest son. He would have left -a will, but there was the vague case of Christopher to be considered. -Whilst Christopher had been a youngest son you arranged that he had a -good lump sum and went, with it, to the devil how he liked. He was no -longer a youngest son: by the will of God.</p> - -<p>"Our father's idea," Mark said by the fountain, "was that no settled sum -could keep you straight. His idea was that if you were a bloody pimp -living on women . . . You don't mind?"</p> - -<p>"I don't mind your putting it straightforwardly," Christopher said. He -considered the base of the fountain that was half full of leaves. This -civilisation had contrived a state of things in which leaves rotted by -August. Well, it was doomed!</p> - -<p>"If you were a pimp living on women," Mark repeated, "it was no good -making a will. You might need uncounted thousands to keep you straight. -You were to have 'em. You were to be as debauched as you wanted, but on -clean money. I was to see how much in all probability that would be and -arrange the other legacies to scale. . . . Father had crowds of -pensioners. . . ."</p> - -<p>"How much did father cut up for?" Christopher asked. Mark said:</p> - -<p>"God knows. . . . You saw we proved the estate at a million and a -quarter as far as ascertained. But it might be twice that. Or five -times! . . . With steel prices what they have been for the last three -years it's impossible to say what the Middlesbrough district property -won't produce. . . . The death duties even can't catch it up. And there -are all the ways of getting round <i>them</i>."</p> - -<p>Christopher inspected his brother with curiosity. This -brown-complexioned fellow with bulging eyes, shabby on the whole, -tightly buttoned into a rather old pepper-and-salt suit, with a badly -rolled umbrella, old race-glasses and his bowler hat the only neat thing -about him, was, indeed, a prince. With a rigid outline! All real princes -must look like that. He said:</p> - -<p>"Well! You won't be a penny the poorer by me."</p> - -<p>Mark was beginning to believe this. He said:</p> - -<p>"You won't forgive father?"</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"I won't forgive father for not making a will. I won't forgive him for -calling in Ruggles. I saw him and you in the writing-room the night -before he died. He never spoke to me. He could have. It was clumsy -stupidity. That's unforgiveable."</p> - -<p>"The fellow shot himself," Mark said. "You usually forgive a fellow who -shoots himself."</p> - -<p>"I don't," Christopher said. "Besides he's probably in heaven and don't -need my forgiveness. Ten to one he's in heaven. He was a good man."</p> - -<p>"One of the best," Mark said. "It was I that called in Ruggles -though."</p> - -<p>"I don't forgive you either," Christopher said.</p> - -<p>"But you <i>must</i>," Mark said—and it was a tremendous -concession to sentimentality—"take enough to make you comfortable."</p> - -<p>"By God!" Christopher exclaimed. "I loathe your whole beastly buttered -toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as -I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, -hot-house aired beastliness of fornication. . . ." He was carried away, -as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine -Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without -draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. . . . "You won't," he -repeated, "be a penny the poorer by me."</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Well, you needn't get shirty about it. If you won't you won't. We'd -better move on. You've only just time. We'll say that settles it. . . . -Are you, or aren't you, overdrawn at your bank? I'll make that up, -whatever you damn well do to stop it."</p> - -<p>"I'm not overdrawn," Christopher said. "I'm over thirty pounds in -credit, and I've an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a -mistake of the bank's."</p> - -<p>Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a -bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England.</p> - -<p>They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious -umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis -lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved -like marionettes practising crucifixions.</p> - -<p>"By God!" he said, "this is the last of England. . . . There's only my -department where they never make mistakes. I tell you, if there were any -mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!" He added: "But -don't you think that I'm going to give up comfort, I'm not. My Charlotte -makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she's got a -tap of French rum that's saved my life over and over again after a -beastly wet day's racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give -her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a -Frenchwoman for managing. . . . By God, I'd marry the doxy if she wasn't -a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn't hurt me. But I couldn't -stomach marrying a Papist. They're not to be trusted."</p> - -<p>"You'll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby," Christopher said. -"My son's to be brought up as a Papist."</p> - -<p>Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground.</p> - -<p>"Eh, but that's a bitter one," he said. "Whatever made ye do that? . . . -I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you -married her." He added: "I'd not like to sleep with that wife of yours. -She's too athletic. It'd be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I -suppose though you're a pair of turtle doves. . . . Eh, but I'd not have -thought ye would have been so weak."</p> - -<p>"I only decided this morning," Christopher said, "when my cheque was -returned from the bank. You won't have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about -Groby."</p> - -<p>"I can't say I have," Mark answered.</p> - -<p>"It's no good trying to explain that side of it then," Christopher said, -"there isn't time. But you're wrong in thinking Sylvia made it a -condition of our marriage. Nothing would have made me consent then. It -has made her a happy woman that I have. The poor thing thought our house -was under a curse for want of a Papist heir."</p> - -<p>"What made ye consent now?" Mark asked.</p> - -<p>"I've told you," Christopher said, "it was getting my cheque returned to -the club; that on the top of the rest of it. A fellow who can't do -better than that had better let the mother bring up the child. . . . -Besides, it won't hurt a Papist boy to have a father with dishonoured -cheques as much as it would a Protestant. They're not quite English."</p> - -<p>"That's true too," Mark said.</p> - -<p>He stood still by the railings of the public garden near the Temple -station.</p> - -<p>"Then," he said, "if I'd let the lawyers write and tell you the -guarantee for your overdraft from the estate was stopped as they wanted -to, the boy wouldn't be a Papist? You wouldn't have overdrawn."</p> - -<p>"I didn't overdraw," Christopher said. "But if you had warned me I -should have made enquiries at the bank and the mistake wouldn't have -occurred. Why didn't you?"</p> - -<p>"I meant to," Mark said. "I meant to do it myself. But I hate writing -letters. I put it off. I didn't much like having dealings with the -fellow I thought you were. I suppose that's another thing you won't -forgive me for?"</p> - -<p>"No. I shan't forgive you for not writing to me," Christopher said. "You -ought to write business letters."</p> - -<p>"I hate writing 'em," Mark said. Christopher was moving on. "There's one -thing more," Mark said. "I suppose the boy is your son?"</p> - -<p>Yes, he's my son," Christopher said.</p> - -<p>"Then that's all," Mark said. "I suppose if you're killed you won't mind -my keeping an eye on the youngster?"</p> - -<p>"I'll be glad," Christopher said.</p> - -<p>They strolled along the Embankment side by side, walking rather slowly, -their backs erected and their shoulders squared because of their -satisfaction of walking together, desiring to lengthen the walk by going -slow. Once or twice they stopped to look at the dirty silver of the -river, for both liked grim effects of landscape. They felt very strong, -as if they owned the land!</p> - -<p>Once Mark chuckled and said:</p> - -<p>"It's too damn funny. To think of our both being . . . what is it? . . . -monogamists? Well, it's a good thing to stick to one woman . . . you -can't say it isn't. It saves trouble. And you know where you are."</p> - -<p>Under the lugubrious arch that leads into the War Office quadrangle -Christopher halted.</p> - -<p>"No. I'm coming in," Mark said. "I want to speak to Hogarth. I haven't -spoken to Hogarth for some time. About the transport waggon parks in -Regent's Park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more."</p> - -<p>"They say you do it damn well," Christopher said. "They say you're -indispensable." He was aware that his; brother desired to stay with him -as long as possible. He desired it himself.</p> - -<p>"I damn well am!" Mark said. He added: "I suppose you couldn't do that -sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses."</p> - -<p>"I could," Christopher said, "but I suppose I shall go back to liaison -work."</p> - -<p>"I don't think you will," Mark said. "I could put in a word for you with -the transport people."</p> - -<p>"I wish you would," Christopher said. "I'm not fit to go back into the -front line. Besides I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry -officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of."</p> - -<p>They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and -expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that -hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a -tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to -save the ratepayers' money.</p> - -<p>With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an -expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and -distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!"</p> - -<p>The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with -little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day.</p> - -<p>Tietjens had fallen a step back off the curb of the pavement that ran -round the quadrangle. He said:</p> - -<p>"I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have -to. They're two different patterns that we see." He added: "This is my -brother Mark."</p> - -<p>She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It -was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She -said to Mark:</p> - -<p>"I didn't know Mr. Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I've never heard -him speak of you."</p> - -<p>Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his -hat.</p> - -<p>"I don't suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of <i>him</i>," he said, -"but he's my brother all right!"</p> - -<p>She stepped on to the asphalte carriage-way and caught between her -fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher's khaki sleeve.</p> - -<p>"I must speak to you," she said; "I'm going then."</p> - -<p>She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard and -ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She -pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard, it was as -if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked -round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He -had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped -into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world.</p> - -<p>The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her -voice was hard between her little teeth. She said:</p> - -<p>"Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife -says you were."</p> - -<p>Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said -vaguely:</p> - -<p>"Ethel? Who's she?" In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr. -and Mrs. Macmaster called each other always "Guggums!" Christopher had -in all probability never heard Mrs. Duchemin's Christian names since his -disaster had swept all names out of his head.</p> - -<p>He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space -sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb.</p> - -<p>The girl said:</p> - -<p>"Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs. Macmaster that is!" She was obviously -waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness:</p> - -<p>"No! Certainly not! . . . What was said?"</p> - -<p>Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the -green-stained shelter, like a child over a brookside. He was obviously -waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared -to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when -she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any -preparation at all: the girl repeated, without any preparation at all:</p> - -<p>"You'd better keep off the grass if you're the Wannop girl. Mrs. -Duchemin is my husband's mistress already. You keep off!"</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"She said that, did she?" He was wondering how Mark kept his balance, -really. The girl said nothing more. She was waiting. With an insistence -that seemed to draw him: a sort of sucking in of his personality. It was -unbearable. He made his last effort of that afternoon.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Damn it all. How could you ask such a tomfool question? <i>You</i>! I -took you to be an intelligent person. The only intelligent person I know. -Don't you <i>know</i> me?"</p> - -<p>She made an effort to retain her stiffening.</p> - -<p>"Isn't Mrs. Tietjens a truthful person?" she asked. "I thought she -looked truthful when I saw her at Vincent and Ethel's."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"What she says she believes. But she only believes what she wants to, -for the moment. If you call that truthful, she's truthful. I've nothing -against her." He said to himself: "I'm not going to appeal to her by -damning my wife."</p> - -<p>She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out -of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water.</p> - -<p>"Oh," she said, "it <i>isn't</i> true. I <i>knew</i> it wasn't true." -She began to cry.</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"Come along. I've been answering tomfool questions all day. I've got -another tomfool to see here, then I'm through."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"I can't come with you, crying like this."</p> - -<p>He answered:</p> - -<p>"Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry." He added: "Besides -there's Mark. He's a comforting ass."</p> - -<p>He delivered her over to Mark.</p> - -<p>"Here, look after Miss Wannop," he said. "You want to talk to her -anyhow, don't you?" and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shopwalker -into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn't come soon to an -unemotional ass in red, green, blue or pink tabs, who would have -fishlike eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in -tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was -a place where men cried, too!</p> - -<p>He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of -corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person -with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair: not dustbins.</p> - -<p>The dark man said to him at once:</p> - -<p>"Look here! What's the matter with the Command Depôts? You've been -lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies -about? Is it the rotten old colonels in command?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens said amiably:</p> - -<p>"Look here! I'm not a beastly spy, you know? I've had hospitality from -the rotten old colonels."</p> - -<p>The dark man said:</p> - -<p>"I daresay you have. But that's what you were sent round for. General -Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He's gone out -now, worse luck. . . . What's the matter with the Command Depôts? Is it -the men? Or is it the officers? You needn't mention names."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Kind of Campion. It isn't the officers and it isn't the men. -It's the foul system. You get men who think they've deserved well -of their country—and they damn well have!—and you crop their -heads. . . ."</p> - -<p>"That's the M.O.s." the dark man said. "They don't want lice."</p> - -<p>"If they prefer mutinies . . ." Tietjens said. "A man wants to walk with -his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don't like being regarded -as convicts. That's how they are regarded."</p> - -<p>The dark man said:</p> - -<p>"All right. Go on. Why don't you sit down?"</p> - -<p>"I'm a little in a hurry," Tietjens said. "I'm going out to-morrow and -I've got a brother and people waiting below."</p> - -<p>The dark man said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, I'm sorry. . . . But damn. You're the sort of man we want at home. -Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don't."</p> - -<p>Tietjens hesitated for a moment.</p> - -<p>"Yes!" he said eventually. "Yes, I want to go."</p> - -<p>For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his -discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It -had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the -time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal -consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; -but, whether or no, the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out -as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night -with the girl who was crying downstairs. . . .</p> - -<p>He heard in his ear, perfectly distinctly, the lines:</p> - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i3">"<i>The voice that never yet </i>. . . </span><br /> -<span class="i3"><i>Made answer to my word</i> . . ."</span> -</div></div> - -<p>He said to himself:</p> - -<p>"That was what Sylvia wanted! I've got that much!" The dark man had said -something. Tietjens repeated:</p> - -<p>"I'd take it very unkindly if you stopped my going . . . I want -to go."</p> - -<p>The dark man said:</p> - -<p>"Some do. Some do not. I'll make a note of your name in case you come -back . . . You won't mind going on with your cinder-sifting, if you do? -. . . Get on with your story as quick as you can. And get what fun you -can before you go. They say it's rotten out there. Damn awful! There's a -hell of a strafe on. That's why they want all you."</p> - -<p>For a moment Tietjens saw the grey dawn at rail-head with the distant -sound of a ceaselessly boiling pot, from miles away! The army feeling -re-descended upon him. He began to talk about Command Depôts, at great -length and with enthusiasm. He snorted with rage at the way men were -treated in these gloomy places. With ingenious stupidity!</p> - -<p>Every now and then the dark man interrupted him with:</p> - -<p>"Don't forget that a Command Depôt is a place where sick and wounded go -to get made fit. We've got to get 'em back as soon as we can."</p> - -<p>"And do you?" Tietjens would ask.</p> - -<p>"No, we don't," the other would answer. "That's what this enquiry is -about."</p> - -<p>"You've got," Tietjens would continue, "on the north side of a beastly -clay hill nine miles from Southampton three thousand men from the -Highlands, North Wales, Cumberland. . . . God knows where, as long as -it's three hundred miles from home to make them rather mad with -nostalgia. . . . You allow 'em out for an hour a day during the pub's -closing time: you shave their heads to prevent 'em appealing to local -young women who don't exist, and you don't let 'em carry the -swagger-canes! God knows why! To prevent their poking their eyes out, if -they fall down, I suppose. Nine miles from anywhere, with chalk down -roads to walk on and not a bush for shelter or shade . . . And, damn it, -if you get two men, chums, from the Seaforths or the Argylls you don't -let them sleep in the same hut, but shove 'em in with a lot of fat Buffs -or Welshmen, who stink of leeks and can't speak English. . . ."</p> - -<p>"That's the infernal medicals' orders to stop 'em talking all -night."</p> - -<p>"To make 'em conspire all night not to turn-out for parade," Tietjens -said. "And there's a beastly mutiny begun. . . . And, damn it, they're -fine men. They're first-class fellows. Why don't you—as this is a -Christian land—let 'em go home to convalesce with their girls and -pubs and friends and a little bit of swank, for heroes? Why in God's name -don't you? Isn't there suffering enough?"</p> - -<p>"I wish you wouldn't say 'you,'" the dark man said. "It isn't me. The -only A.C.I. I've drafted was to give every Command Depôt a cinema and a -theatre. But the beastly medicals got it stopped . . . for fear -of infection. And, of course, the parsons and Nonconformist -magistrates . . ."</p> - -<p>"Well, you'll have to change it all," Tietjens said, "or you'll just -have to say: thank God we've got a navy. You won't have an army. The -other day three fellows—Warwicks—asked me at question time, -after a lecture, why they were shut up there in Wiltshire whilst Belgian -refugees were getting bastards on their wives in Birmingham. And when I -asked how many men made that complaint over fifty stood up. All from -Birmingham. . . ."</p> - -<p>The dark man said:</p> - -<p>"I'll make a note of that. . . . Go on."</p> - -<p>Tietjens went on; for as long as he stayed there he felt himself a man, -doing work that befitted a man, with the bitter contempt for fools that -a man should have and express. It was a letting up: a real last leave.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="IV_II">IV</a></h4> - - -<p>Mark Tietjens, his umbrella swinging sheepishly, his bowler hat pushed -firmly down on to his ears to give him a sense of stability, walked -beside the weeping girl in the quadrangle.</p> - -<p>"I say," he said, "don't give it to old Christopher too beastly hard -about his militarist opinions. . . . Remember, he's going out to-morrow -and he's one of the best."</p> - -<p>She looked at him quickly, tears remaining upon her cheeks, and then -away.</p> - -<p>"One of the best," Mark said. "A fellow who never told a lie or did a -dishonourable thing in his life. Let him down easy, there's a good girl. -You ought to, you know."</p> - -<p>The girl, her face turned away, said:</p> - -<p>"I'd lay down my life for him!"</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"I know you would. I know a good woman when I see one. And think! He -probably considers that he <i>is</i> . . . offering his life, you know, for -you. And me, too, of course! . . . It's a different way of looking at -things." He gripped her awkwardly but irresistibly by the upper arm. It -was very thin under her blue cloth coat. He said to himself:</p> - -<p>"By Jove! Christopher likes them skinny. It's the athletic sort that -attracts him. This girl is as clean run as . . ." He couldn't think of -anything as clean run as Miss Wannop, but he felt a warm satisfaction at -having achieved an intimacy with her and his brother. He said:</p> - -<p>"You aren't going away? Not without a kinder word to him. You think! He -might be killed. . . . Besides. Probably he's never killed a German. He -was a liaison officer. Since then he's been in charge of a dump where -they sift army dustbins. To see how they can give the men less to eat. -That means that the civilians get more. You don't object to his -giving civilians more meat? . . . It isn't even helping to kill -Germans. . . ."</p> - -<p>He felt her arm press his hand against her warm side.</p> - -<p>"What's he going to do now?" she asked. Her voice wavered.</p> - -<p>"That's what I'm here about," Mark said. "I'm going in to see old -Hogarth. You don't know Hogarth? Old General Hogarth? I think I can get -him to give Christopher a job with the transport. A safe job. Safeish! -No beastly glory business about it. No killing beastly Germans -either. . . . I beg your pardon, if you like Germans."</p> - -<p>She drew her arm from his hand in order to look him in the face.</p> - -<p>"Oh!" she said, "<i>you</i> don't want him to have any beastly military -glory!" The colour came back into her face: she looked at him open -eyed.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"No! Why the devil should he?" He said to himself: "She's got enormous -eyes: a good neck: good shoulders: good breasts: clean hips: small -hands. She isn't knock-kneed: neat ankles. She stands well on her feet. -Feet not too large! Five foot four, say! A real good filly!" He went on -aloud: "Why in the world should he want to be a beastly soldier? He's -the heir to Groby. That ought to be enough for one man."</p> - -<p>Having stood still sufficiently long for what she knew to be his -critical inspection, she put her hand in turn, precipitately, under his -arm and moved him towards the entrance steps.</p> - -<p>"Let's be quick then," she said. "Let's get him into your transport at -once. Before he goes to-morrow. Then we'll know he's safe."</p> - -<p>He was puzzled by her dress. It was very business-like, dark blue and -very short. A white blouse with a black silk, man's tie. A wideawake, -with, on the front of the band, a cipher.</p> - -<p>"You're in uniform yourself," he said. "Does your conscience let you do -war work?"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"No. We're hard up. I'm taking the gym classes in a great big school to -turn an honest penny. . . . <i>Do</i> be quick!"</p> - -<p>Her pressure on his elbow flattered him. He resisted it a little, -hanging back, to make her more insistent. He liked being pleaded with by -a pretty woman: Christopher's girl at that.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, it's not a matter of minutes. They keep 'em weeks at the base -before they send 'em up. . . . We'll fix him up all right, I've no -doubt. We'll wait in the hall till he comes down."</p> - -<p>He told the benevolent commissionaire, one of two in a pulpit in the -crowded grim hall, that he was going up to see General Hogarth in a -minute or two. But not to send a bell-boy. He might be some time yet.</p> - -<p>He sat himself beside Miss Wannop, clumsily on a wooden bench, humanity -serging over their toes as if they had been on a beach. She moved a -little to make room for him and that, too, made him feel good. He said:</p> - -<p>"You said just now: 'we' are hard up. Does 'we' mean you and -Christopher?"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"I and Mr. Tietjens. Oh, no! I and mother! The paper she used to write -for stopped. When your father died, I believe. He found money for it, I -think. And mother isn't suited to free-lancing. She's worked too hard in -her life."</p> - -<p>He looked at her, his round eyes protruding.</p> - -<p>"I don't know what that is, free-lancing," he said. "But you've got to -be comfortable. How much do you and your mother need to keep you -comfortable? And put in a bit more so that Christopher could have a -mutton-chop now and then!"</p> - -<p>She hadn't really been listening. He said with some insistence: "Look -here! I'm here on business. Not like an elderly admirer forcing himself -on you. Though, by God, I do admire you too. . . . But my father wanted -your mother to be comfortable. . . ."</p> - -<p>Her face, turned to him, became rigid.</p> - -<p>"You don't mean . . ." she began. He said:</p> - -<p>"You won't get it any quicker by interrupting. I have to tell my stories -in my own way. My father wanted your mother to be comfortable. He said -so that she could write books, not papers. I don't know what the -difference is: that's what he said. He wants you to be comfortable too. -. . . You've not got any encumbrances? Not . . . oh, say a business: a -hat shop that doesn't pay? Some girls have. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said: "No. I just teach . . . oh, <i>do</i> be quick. . . ."</p> - -<p>For the first time in his life he dislocated the course of his thoughts -to satisfy a longing in some one else.</p> - -<p>"You may take it to go on with," he said, "as if my father had left your -mother a nice little plum." He cast about to find his scattered -thoughts.</p> - -<p>"He has! He <i>has</i>! After all!" the girl said. "Oh, thank God!"</p> - -<p>"There'll be a bit for you, if you like," Mark said, "or perhaps -Christopher won't let you. He's ratty with me. And something for your -brother to buy a doctor's business with." He asked: "You haven't -fainted, have you?" She said:</p> - -<p>"No. I don't faint. I cry."</p> - -<p>"That'll be all right," he answered. He went on: "That's your side of -it. Now for mine. I want Christopher to have a place where he'll be sure -of a mutton-chop and an arm-chair by the fire. And someone to be good -for him. <i>You're</i> good for him. I can see that. I know women!"</p> - -<p>The girl was crying, softly and continuously. It was the first moment of -the lifting of strain that she had known since the day before the -Germans crossed the Belgian frontier, near a place called Gemmenich.</p> - -<p>It had begun with the return of Mrs. Duchemin from Scotland. She had -sent at once for Miss Wannop to the rectory, late at night. By the light -of candles in tall silver stocks, against oak panelling she had seemed -like a mad block of marble, with staring, dark eyes and mad hair. She -had exclaimed in a voice as hard as a machine's:</p> - -<p>"How do you get rid of a baby? You've been a servant. You ought to -know!"</p> - -<p>That had been the great shock, the turning-point, of Valentine Wannop's -life. Her last years before that had been of great tranquillity, tinged -of course with melancholy because she loved Christopher Tietjens. But -she had early learned to do without, and the world as she saw it was a -place of renunciations, of high endeavour and sacrifice. Tietjens had to -be a man who came to see her mother and talked wonderfully. She had been -happy when he had been in the house—she in the housemaid's pantry, -getting the tea-things. She had, besides, been very hard worked for her -mother; the weather had been, on the whole, good, the corner of the -country in which they lived had continued to seem fresh and agreeable. She -had had excellent health, got an occasional ride on the <i>qui-tamer</i> -with which Tietjens had replaced Joel's rig; and her brother had done -admirably at Eton, taking such a number of exhibitions and things that, -once at Magdalen, he had been nearly off his mother's hands. An -admirable, gay boy, not unlikely to run for, as well as being a credit -to, his university, if he didn't get sent down for his political -extravagances. He was a Communist!</p> - -<p>And at the rectory there had been the Duchemins, or rather Mrs. Duchemin -and, during most week-ends, Macmaster somewhere about.</p> - -<p>The passion of Macmaster for Edith Ethel and of Edith Ethel for -Macmaster had seemed to her one of the beautiful things of life. They -seemed to swim in a sea of renunciations, of beautiful quotations, and -of steadfast waiting. Macmaster did not interest her personally much, -but she took him on trust because of Edith Ethel's romantic passion and -because he was Christopher Tietjens' friend. She had never heard him say -anything original; when he used quotations they would be apt rather than -striking. But she took it for granted that he was the right man—much -as you take it for granted that the engine of an express train in which you -are is reliable. The right people have chosen it for you. . . .</p> - -<p>With Mrs. Duchemin, mad before her, she had the first intimation that -her idolised friend, in whom she had believed as she had believed in the -firmness of the great, sunny earth, had been the mistress of her -lover—almost since the first day she had seen him. . . . And that -Mrs. Duchemin had, stored somewhere, a character of an extreme harshness -and great vulgarity of language. She raged up and down in the candlelight, -before the dark oak panelling, screaming coarse phrases of the deepest -hatred for her lover. Didn't the oaf know his business better than -to . . .? The dirty little Port of Leith fish-handler. . . .</p> - -<p>What, then, were tall candles in silver sticks for? And polished -panelling in galleries?</p> - -<p>Valentine Wannop couldn't have been a little ash-cat in worn cotton -dresses, sleeping under the stairs, in an Ealing household with a -drunken cook, an invalid mistress and three over-fed men, without -acquiring a considerable knowledge of the sexual necessities and -excesses of humanity. But, as all the poorer helots of great cities -hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance, and -suave wealth, she had always considered that, far from the world of -Ealing and its county councillors who over-ate and neighed like -stallions, there were bright colonies of beings, chaste, beautiful in -thought, altruist and circumspect.</p> - -<p>And, till that moment, she had imagined herself on the skirts of such a -colony. She presupposed a society of beautiful intellects centring in -London round her friends. Ealing she just put out of her mind. She -considered: she had, indeed once heard Tietjens say that humanity was -made up of exact and constructive intellects on the one hand and on the -other of stuff to fill graveyards. . . . Now, what had become of the -exact and constructive intellects?</p> - -<p>Worst of all, what became of her beautiful inclination towards Tietjens, -for she couldn't regard it as anything more? Couldn't her heart sing any -more whilst she was in the housemaid's pantry and he in her mother's -study? And what became, still more, of what she knew to be Tietjens' -beautiful inclination towards her? She asked herself the eternal -question—and she knew it to be the eternal question—whether no -man and woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. And, looking -at Mrs. Duchemin, rushing backwards and forwards in the light of candles, -blue-white of face and her hair flying, Valentine Wannop said: "No! no! -The tiger lying in the reeds will always raise its head!" But tiger . . . -it was more like a peacock. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens, raising his head from the other side of the tea-table and -looking at her with his long, meditative glance from beside her mother: -ought he then, instead of blue and protruding, to have eyes divided -longitudinally in the blacks of them—that should divide, closing or -dilating, on a yellow ground, with green glowings of furtive light?</p> - -<p>She was aware that Edith Ethel had done her an irreparable wrong, for -you cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same. Or not for -years. Nevertheless she stayed with Mrs. Duchemin until far into the -small hours, when that lady fell, a mere parcel of bones in a peacock -blue wrapper, into a deep chair and refused to move or speak; nor did -she afterwards slacken in her faithful waiting on her friend. . . .</p> - -<p>On the next day came the war. That was a nightmare of pure suffering, -with never a let-up, day or night. It began on the morning of the fourth -with the arrival of her brother from some sort of Oxford Communist -Summer School on the Broads. He was wearing a German corps student's cap -and was very drunk. He had been seeing German friends off from Harwich. -It was the first time she had ever seen a drunken man, so that was a -good present to her.</p> - -<p>Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his -father, he had his mother's hooked nose and was always a little -imbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened -for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very -vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn't hitherto -mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper: her brother, when he -had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption. -But her mother had only chuckled.</p> - -<p>The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood -and to torture: neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as -if—so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived -with her—in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her -knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers -to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture, and flay off -all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner -of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling and vitriolic, one hand -clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British -soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting -from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom -Edward Wannop affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause -disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had -failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being -ducked in a horse-pond, shot or otherwise martyrised. That made it -obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war. -If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled -and terrorised millions would have thrown down their arms!</p> - -<p>Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was -in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother, -who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs. Wannop had said:</p> - -<p>"What does your wife think about it?"</p> - -<p>Tietjens had answered:</p> - -<p>"Oh, Mrs. Tietjens is a pro-German. . . . Or no, that isn't exact! She -has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly -all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war. -She can't bear the thought of physical suffering. I can't blame her."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop was no longer listening: her daughter was.</p> - -<p>For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man -and far less of an inclination—the war and Mrs. Duchemin between -them. He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a -man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on. -She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him.</p> - -<p>One Friday afternoon at Macmaster's she had had a long talk with him: -the first she had had since the drive and the accident.</p> - -<p>Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons—and that -had been some time before the war—Valentine Wannop had accompanied -Mrs. Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the -rectory. Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs. Duchemin drifting about the -large book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists.</p> - -<p>On this occasion—a November day of very chilly, wet—there -had been next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually -full. Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin had taken a Mr. Spong, an architect, into -the dining-room to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi's <i>Views of -Rome</i> that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster. -A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting close together in the far -window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr. Jegg -used the word "inhibition." Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he -had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea -over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat side by side on -the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire -warming their backs. He said:</p> - -<p>"Well, Miss Wannop. What have you been doing?" and they drifted into -talking of the war. You couldn't not. She was astonished not to find him -so loathsome as she had expected, for, just at that time, with the facts -that were always being driven into her mind by the pacifist friends of -her brother and with continual brooding over the morals of Mrs. -Duchemin, she had an automatic feeling that all manly men were -lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over -battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of -sadism. She knew that this view of Tietjens was wrong, but she cherished -it.</p> - -<p>She found him—as subconsciously she knew he -was—astonishingly mild. She had too often watched him whilst he -listened to her mother's tirades against the Kaiser, not to know that. -He did not raise his voice, he showed no emotion. He said at last:</p> - -<p>"You and I are like two people . . ." He paused and began again more -quickly: "Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read -differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read -'Monkey's Soap'; if you look back when you've passed it's 'Needs no -Rinsing.' . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we -both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we -stood side by side we should see yet a third. . . . But I hope we -respect each other. We're both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect -you and I hope you respect me."</p> - -<p>She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr. Jegg, across -the room, said: "The failure to co-ordinate . . ." and then dropped his -voice.</p> - -<p>Tietjens looked at her attentively.</p> - -<p>"You don't respect me?" he asked. She kept obstinately silent.</p> - -<p>"I'd have liked you to have said it," he repeated.</p> - -<p>"Oh," she cried out, "how can I respect you when there is all this -suffering? So much pain! Such torture . . . I can't sleep . . . Never . . . -I haven't slept a whole night since . . . Think of the immense -spaces, stretching out under the night . . . I believe pain and fear -must be worse at night. . . ." She knew she was crying out like that -because her dread had come true. When he had said: "I'd have liked you -to have said it," using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, -too, was going.</p> - -<p>And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she -confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would -say farewell to her: like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, -just occasionally, using the word "we"—and perhaps without -intention—he had let her know that he loved her.</p> - -<p>Mr. Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs. Haviland was already at -the door.</p> - -<p>"We'll leave you to have your war talk out," Mr. Jegg said. He added: -"For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of -things that's preservable. I can't help saying that."</p> - -<p>She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:</p> - -<p>"Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He <i>must</i>!" The -deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of -thought hardly known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had -in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair—like the scent of -the skin of an apple, but very faint. "You must! You <i>must</i>!" she -said to herself. There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of -their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, -climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the -impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body -towards him. A sudden lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall. . . . -She saw the white disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them -was the long, warm night. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing -on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they -had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for -its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great -dining-room at the Duchemins. He got down from the fire-seat with a -weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a -little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue:</p> - -<p>"Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the -office. That, too, won't be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor -Vinnie thinks matters." He added: "It's queer, dear . . ." In the tumult -of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said "dear." . . . -"Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have -just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep -at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at -night. . . . And she, too, said that she could not respect me. . . ."</p> - -<p>She sprang up.</p> - -<p>"Oh," she said, "she didn't mean it. <i>I</i> didn't mean it. Almost -every man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don't you see it's a -desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can -we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?" She -added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned: -"Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from -your point of view? You're more useful—you know you're more useful to -your country here than . . ."</p> - -<p>He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great -gentleness and concern.</p> - -<p>"I can't reconcile it with my conscience," he said. "In this affair -there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don't -mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on. We -ought. But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul."</p> - -<p>The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of -the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were -speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as -soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit -heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil -resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his -conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones -again.</p> - -<p>That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing -straightforward: for him or for any man. One could have fought with a -clean heart for a civilisation: if you like for the eighteenth century -against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against -the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at -once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a -catspaw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was -nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was -just bearable. One could keep at one's job—which was faking -statistics against the other fellow—until you were sick and tired of -faking and your brain reeled. And then some!</p> - -<p>It was probably impolitic to fake—to overstate!—a case -against enemy nations. The chickens would come home to roost in one way or -another, probably. Perhaps they wouldn't. That was a matter for one's -superiors. Obviously! And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows. -Stupid, but relatively disinterested. But now! . . . What was one to -do? . . . He went on, almost mumbling. . . .</p> - -<p>She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily -clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own -so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily -unselfish. He didn't betray one thought of self-interest . . . not one!</p> - -<p>He was saying:</p> - -<p>"But now! . . . with this crowd of boodlers! . . . Supposing one's asked -to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to -force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to, -say, Salonika—when they and you and common-sense and everyone and -everything else, know it's disastrous? . . . And from that to monkeying -with our own forces. . . . Starving particular units for political . . ." -He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said:</p> - -<p>"I can't, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your -sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations."</p> - -<p>She said passionately:</p> - -<p>"They're not! They're not! How dare you say such a thing?"</p> - -<p>He answered:</p> - -<p>"It doesn't matter . . . No! I'm sure you're not . . . But, anyhow, -these things are official. One can't, if one's scrupulous, even talk -about them . . . And then . . . You see it means such infinite deaths of -men, such an infinite prolongation . . . all this interference for -side-ends! . . . I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over -their heads. . . . And then . . . I'm to carry out their orders because -they're my superiors. . . . But helping them means unnumbered -deaths. . . ."</p> - -<p>He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile:</p> - -<p>"You see!" he said, "we're perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn't -think you're the only one that sees all the deaths and all the -sufferings. All, you see: I, too, am a conscientious objector. My -conscience won't let me continue any longer with these fellows. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"But isn't there any other . . ."</p> - -<p>He interrupted:</p> - -<p>"No! There's no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these -affairs. I suppose I'm more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I'm -not. But my conscience won't let me use my brain in this service. So -I've a great, hulking body! I'll admit I'm probably not much good. But -I've nothing to live for: what I stand for isn't any more in this world -What I want, as you know, I can't have. So . . ."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed bitterly:</p> - -<p>"Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two -bullets in front of two small anæmic fellows. . . . And how can you say -you'll have nothing to live for? You'll come back. You'll do your good -work again. You know you did good work . . ."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I've come to believe I -did. . . . But no! They'll never let me back. They've got me out, with -all sorts of bad marks against me. They'll pursue me, systematically. . . . -You see in such a world as this, an idealist—or perhaps it's only -a sentimentalist—must be stoned to death. He makes the others so -uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf. . . . No; they'll get me, -one way or the other. And some fellow—Macmaster here—will do my -jobs. He won't do them so well, but he'll do them more dishonestly. Or no. -I oughtn't to say dishonestly. He'll do them with enthusiasm and -righteousness. He'll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense -docility and unction. He'll fake figures against our allies with the -black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when <i>that</i> war comes, he'll do the -requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priests -of Baal. And he'll be right. It's all we're fitted for. We ought never -to have come into this war. We ought to have snaffled other peoples' -colonies as the price of neutrality. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh!" Valentine Wannop said, "how can you so hate your country?"</p> - -<p>He said with great earnestness:</p> - -<p>"Don't say it! Don't believe it! Don't even for a moment think it! I -love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey, -mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a -grosser name . . . and all the rest of the rubbish—you remember the -field between the Duchemins and your mother's—and we have always been -boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so -we've built up the great tradition that we love. . . . But, for the -moment, it's painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than -Walpole's. But one's too near them. One sees of Walpole that he -consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt: one doesn't -see his methods. . . . My son, or his son, will only see the glory of -the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won't -know about the methods. They'll teach him at school that across the -counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Though -that was another discreditable affair. . . ."</p> - -<p>"But you!" Valentine Wannop exclaimed. "<i>You</i>! what will <i>you</i> -do! After the war!"</p> - -<p>"I!" he said rather bewilderedly. "I! . . . Oh, I shall go into the old -furniture business. I've been offered a job. . . ."</p> - -<p>She didn't believe he was serious. He hadn't, she knew, ever thought -about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and -pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would -come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage -sale. She cried out:</p> - -<p>"Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once?" for -in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably -not itself for the minute. . . ." He was obviously thinking of something -else.</p> - -<p>"I've probably been a low cad," he said, "wringing your heart with my -doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always -been—or we've seemed always to me—so alike in our thoughts. I -daresay I wanted you to respect me. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, I respect you! I respect you!" she said. "You're as innocent as a -child."</p> - -<p>He went on:</p> - -<p>"And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late -that one has had a quiet room and a fire and . . . you! To think in -front of. You <i>do</i> make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very -muddled till to-day . . . till five minutes ago! Do you remember our -drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul. . . -But you see . . . Don't you see?"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"No! What am I to see? I remember . . ."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the -gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for -me!"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Did I say that? . . . Yes, I said that!"</p> - -<p>The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out -her arms. . . . She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly -visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for -tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both -hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word -of love or she would have held it; it began with: "Well, I must be . . ." -He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great -waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room. . . .</p> - -<p>The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and -unrelenting. Her mother's paper cut down her money; no orders for -serials came in: her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal -diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be -praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the -Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her -desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The -police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then -her brother went to prison: somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness -of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no -milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. -For three days Mrs. Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew -better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But -there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour -and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in -prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace, -after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being -the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let -his mother use her influence—of which she had still some—to get -him appointed as an A.B. on a mine-sweeper. Great winds became an agony to -Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that -came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better: she took -pride in having a son in a service. She was then the more able to -appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small -mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs. Wannop in effigy in front of -their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs. Wannop ran out and in -the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer -hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs. Wannop's grey hair in the -firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration -card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to -London.</p> - -<p>The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts: the air above it -filled with aeroplanes: the roads covered with military cars. There was -then no getting away from the sounds of the war.</p> - -<p>Just as they had decided to move Tietjens came back. It was for a moment -heaven to have him in this country. But when, a month later, Valentine -Wannop saw him for a minute, he seemed very heavy, aged and dull. It was -then almost as bad as before, for it seemed to Valentine as if he hardly -had his reason.</p> - -<p>On hearing that Tietjens was to be quartered—or, at any rate, -occupied—in the neighbourhood of Ealing, Mrs. Wannop at once took a -small house in Bedford Park, whilst, to make ends meet—for her mother -made terribly little—Valentine Wannop took a post as athletic -mistress in a great school in a not very near suburb. Thus, though Tietjens -came in for a cup of tea almost every afternoon with Mrs. Wannop in the -dilapidated little suburban house, Valentine Wannop hardly ever saw him. -The only free afternoon she had was the Friday, and on that day she -still regularly chaperoned Mrs. Duchemin: meeting her at Charing Cross -towards noon and taking her back to the same station in time to catch -the last train to Rye. On Saturdays and Sundays she was occupied all day -in typing her mother's manuscript.</p> - -<p>Of Tietjens, then, she saw almost nothing. She knew that his poor mind -was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said he was a great help -to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory -conclusions—or quite startling and attractive theories—with -extreme rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her -whenever—though it wasn't now very often—she had an article to -write for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her -failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing. . . .</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin, then, Valentine Wannop still chaperoned, though there was -no bond any more between them. Valentine knew, for instance, perfectly -well that Mrs. Duchemin, after she had been seen off by train from -Charing Cross, got out at Clapham Junction, took a taxicab back to -Gray's Inn after dark and spent the night with Macmaster, and Mrs. -Duchemin knew quite well that Valentine knew. It was a sort of parade of -circumspection and rightness, and they kept it up even after, at a -sinister registry office, the wedding had taken place, Valentine being -the one witness and an obscure-looking substitute for the usual pew -opener another. There seemed to be, by then, no very obvious reason why -Valentine should support Mrs. Macmaster any more on these rather dreary -occasions, but Mrs. Macmaster said she might just as well, until they -saw fit to make the marriage public. There were, Mrs. Macmaster said, -censorious tongues, and even if these were confuted afterwards it is -difficult, if not impossible, to outrun scandal. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster -was of opinion that the Macmaster afternoons with these geniuses must be -a liberal education for Valentine. But, as Valentine sat most of the -time at the tea-table near the door, it was the backs and side faces of -the distinguished rather than their intellects with which she was most -acquainted. Occasionally, however, Mrs. Duchemin would show Valentine, -as an enormous privilege, one of the letters to herself from men of -genius: usually North British, written, as a rule, from the Continent or -more distant and peaceful climates, for most of them believed it their -duty in these hideous times to keep alive in the world the only -glimmering spark of beauty. Couched in terms so eulogistic as to -resemble those used in passionate love-letters by men more profane, -these epistles recounted, or consulted Mrs. Duchemin as to, their love -affairs with foreign princesses, the progress of their ailments or the -progresses of their souls towards those higher regions of morality in -which floated their so beautiful-souled correspondent.</p> - -<p>The letters entertained Valentine and, indeed, she was entertained by -that whole mirage. It was only the Macmaster's treatment of her mother -that finally decided Valentine that this friendship had died; for the -friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing -disillusionments, and Valentine Wannop was a woman of more than usual -loyalty. Indeed, if she couldn't respect Mrs. Duchemin on the old -grounds, she could very really respect her for her tenacity of purpose, -her determination to advance Macmaster and for the sort of ruthlessness -that she put into these pursuits.</p> - -<p>Valentine's affection had, indeed, survived even Edith Ethel's continued -denigrations of Tietjens—for Edith Ethel regarded Tietjens as a clog -round her husband's neck, if only because he was a very unpopular man, -grown personally rather unpresentable and always extremely rude to the -geniuses on Fridays. Edith Ethel, however, never made these complaints -that grew more and more frequent as more and more the distinguished -flocked to the Fridays, before Macmaster. And they ceased very suddenly -and in a way that struck Valentine as odd.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin's grievance against Tietjens was that, Macmaster being a -weak man, Tietjens had acted as his banker until, what with interest and -the rest of it, Macmaster owed Tietjens a great sum: several thousand -pounds. And there had been no real reason: Macmaster had spent most of -the money either on costly furnishings for his rooms or on his costly -journeys to Rye. On the one hand Mrs. Duchemin could have found -Macmaster all the bric-a-brac he could possibly have wanted from amongst -the things at the rectory, where no one would have missed them and, on -the other, she, Mrs. Duchemin, would have paid all Macmaster's -travelling expenses. She had had unlimited money from her husband, who -never asked for accounts. But, whilst Tietjens still had influence with -Macmaster, he had used it uncompromisingly against this course, giving him -the delusion—it enraged Mrs. Duchemin to think!—that it would have -been dishonourable. So that Macmaster had continued to draw upon him.</p> - -<p>And, most enraging of all, at a period when she had had a power of -attorney over all Mr. Duchemin's fortune and could, perfectly easily, -have sold out something that no one would have missed for the couple of -thousand or so that Macmaster owed, Tietjens had very forcibly refused -to allow Macmaster to agree to anything of the sort. He had again put -into Macmaster's weak head that it would be dishonourable. But Mrs. -Duchemin—and she closed her lips determinedly after she had said -it—knew perfectly well Tietjens' motive. So long as Macmaster owed -him money he imagined that they couldn't close their doors upon him. And -their establishment was beginning to be a place where you meet people of -great influence who might well get for a person as lazy as Tietjens a -sinecure that would suit him. Tietjens, in fact, knew which side his -bread was buttered.</p> - -<p>For what, Mrs. Duchemin asked, could there have been dishonourable about -the arrangement she had proposed? Practically the whole of Mr. -Duchemin's money was to come to her: he was by then insane; it was -therefore, morally, her own. But immediately after that, Mr. Duchemin -having been certified, the estate had fallen into the hands of the -Lunacy Commissioners and there had been no further hope of taking the -capital. Now, her husband being dead, it was in the hands of trustees, -Mr. Duchemin having left the whole of his property to Magdalen College -and merely the income to his widow. The income was very large; but -where, with their expenses, with the death duties and taxation, which -were by then merciless, was Mrs. Duchemin to find the money? She was to -be allowed, under her husband's will, enough capital to buy a pleasant -little place in Surrey, with rather a nice lot of land—enough to let -Macmaster know some of the leisures of a country gentleman's lot. They -were going in for shorthorns, and there was enough land to give them a -small golf-course and, in the autumn, a little—oh, mostly -rough!—shooting for Macmaster to bring his friends down to. It would -just run to that. Oh, no ostentation. Merely a nice little place. As an -amusing detail the villagers there already called Macmaster "squire" and -the women curtsied to him. But Valentine Wannop would understand that, -with all these expenses, they couldn't find the money to pay off -Tietjens. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster said she wasn't going to pay off -Tietjens. He had had his chance once: now he could go without, for her. -Macmaster would have to pay it himself and he would never be able to, -his contribution to their housekeeping being what it was. And there were -going to be complications. Macmaster wondered about their little place -in Surrey, saying that he would consult Tietjens about this and that -alteration. But over the doorsill of that place the foot of Tietjens was -never going to go! Never! It would mean a good deal of unpleasantness; -or rather it would mean one sharp: "C-r-r-unch!" And then: Napoo finny! -Mrs. Duchemin sometimes, and with great effect, condescended to use one -of the more picturesque phrases of the day.</p> - -<p>To all these diatribes Valentine Wannop answered hardly anything. It was -no particular concern of her's; even if, for a moment, she felt -proprietarily towards Christopher as she did now and then, she felt no -particular desire that his intimacy with the Macmasters should be -prolonged, because she knew he could have no particular desire for its -prolongation. She imagined him turning them down with an unspoken and -good-humoured gibe. And, indeed, she agreed on the whole with Edith Ethel. -It <i>was</i> demoralising for a weak little man like Vincent to have -a friend with an ever-open purse beside him. Tietjens ought not to have -been princely: it was a defect, a quality that she did not personally -admire in him. As to whether it would or wouldn't have been -dishonourable for Mrs. Duchemin to take her husband's money and give it -to Macmaster, she kept an open mind. To all intents and purposes the -money <i>was</i> Mrs. Duchemin's, and if Mrs. Duchemin had then paid -Christopher off it would have been sensible. She could see that later it -had become very inconvenient. There were, however, male standards to be -considered, and Macmaster, at least, passed for a man. Tietjens, who was -wise enough in the affairs of others, had, in that, probably been wise; -for there might have been great disagreeablenesses with trustees and -heirs-at-law had Mrs. Duchemin's subtraction of a couple of thousand -pounds from the Duchemin estate afterwards come to light. The Wannops -had never been large property owners as a family, but Valentine had -heard enough of collateral wranglings over small family dishonesties to -know how very disagreeable these could be.</p> - -<p>So she had made little or no comment; sometimes she had even faintly -agreed as to the demoralisation of Macmaster and that had sufficed. For -Mrs. Duchemin had been certain of her rightness and cared nothing at all -for the opinion of Valentine Wannop, or else took it for granted.</p> - -<p>And when Tietjens had been gone to France for a little time Mrs. -Duchemin seemed to forget the matter, contenting herself with saying -that he might very likely not come back. He was the sort of clumsy man -who generally got killed. In that case, since no I.O.U.s or paper had -passed, Mrs. Tietjens would have no claim. So that would be all right.</p> - -<p>But two days after the return of Christopher—and that was how -Valentine knew he had come back!—Mrs. Duchemin with a lowering brow -exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"That oaf, Tietjens, is in England, perfectly safe and sound. And now -the whole miserable business of Vincent's indebtedness . . . Oh!"</p> - -<p>She had stopped so suddenly and so markedly that even the stoppage of -Valentine's own heart couldn't conceal the oddness from her. Indeed it -was as if there were an interval before she completely realised what the -news was and as if, during that interval, she said to herself:</p> - -<p>"It's very queer. It's exactly as if Edith Ethel has stopped abusing him -on my account . . . As if she <i>knew</i>!" But how could Edith Ethel know -that she loved the man who had returned? It was impossible! She hardly -knew herself. Then the great wave of relief rolled over her: he was in -England. One day she would see him, there: in the great room. For these -colloquies with Edith Ethel always took place in the great room where -she had last seen Tietjens. It looked suddenly beautiful and she was -resigned to sitting there, waiting for the distinguished.</p> - -<p>It was indeed a beautiful room: it had become so during the years. It -was long and high—matching the Tietjens'. A great cut-glass -chandelier from the rectory hung dimly coruscating in the centre, -reflected and re-reflected in convex gilt mirrors, topped by eagles. A -great number of books had gone to make place on the white panelled walls -for the mirrors, and for the fair orange and brown pictures by Turner, -also from the rectory. From the rectory had come the immense scarlet and -lapis lazuli carpet, the great brass fire-basket and appendages, the -great curtains that, in the three long windows, on their peacock blue -Chinese silk showed parti-coloured cranes ascending in long -flights—and all the polished Chippendale arm-chairs. Amongst all -these, gracious, trailing, stopping with a tender gesture to rearrange -very slightly the crimson roses in the famous silver bowls, still in -dark blue silks, with an amber necklace and her elaborate black hair, -waved exactly like that of Julia Domna of the Musée Lapidaire at Arles, -moved Mrs. Macmaster—also from the rectory. Macmaster had achieved -his desire: even to the shortbread cakes and the peculiarly scented tea -that came every Friday morning from Princes Street. And, if Mrs. -Macmaster hadn't the pawky, relishing humour of the great Scots ladies -of past days, she had in exchange her deep aspect of comprehension and -tenderness. An astonishingly beautiful and impressive woman: dark hair; -dark, straight eyebrows; a straight nose; dark blue eyes in the shadows -of her hair and bowed, pomegranate lips in a chin curved like the bow of -a Greek boat. . . .</p> - -<p>The etiquette of the place on Fridays was regulated as if by a royal -protocol. The most distinguished and, if possible, titled person was led -to a great walnut-wood fluted chair that stood askew by the fireplace, -its back and seat of blue velvet, heaven knows how old. Over him would -hover Mrs. Duchemin: or, if he were <i>very</i> distinguished, both Mr. and -Mrs. Macmaster. The not so distinguished were led up by turns to be -presented to the celebrity and would then arrange themselves in a -half-circle in the beautiful arm-chairs; the less distinguished still, -in outer groups in chairs that had no arms: the almost undistinguished -stood, also in groups or languished, awestruck on the scarlet leather -window seats. When all were there Macmaster would establish himself on -the incredibly unique hearthrug and would address wise sayings to the -celebrity; occasionally, however, saying a kind thing to the youngest man -present—to give him a chance of distinguishing himself. Macmaster's -hair, at that date, was still black, but not quite so stiff or so well -brushed; his beard had in it greyish streaks and his teeth, not being -quite so white, looked less strong. He wore also a single eyeglass, the -retaining of which in his right eye gave him a slightly agonised -expression. It gave him, however, the privilege of putting his face very -close to the face of anyone upon whom he wished to make a deep -impression. He had lately become much interested in the drama, so that -there were usually several large—and, of course, very reputable and -serious actresses in the room. On rare occasions Mrs. Duchemin would say -across the room in her deep voice:</p> - -<p>"Valentine, a cup of tea for his highness," or "Sir Thomas," as the case -might be, and when Valentine had threaded her way through the chairs -with a cup of tea Mrs. Duchemin, with a kind, aloof smile, would say: -"Your highness, this is my little brown bird." But as a rule Valentine -sat alone at the tea-table, the guests fetching from her what they -wanted.</p> - -<p>Tietjens came to the Fridays twice during the five months of his stay at -Ealing. On each occasion he accompanied Mrs. Wannop.</p> - -<p>In earlier days—during the earliest Fridays—Mrs. Wannop, if -she ever came, had always been installed, with her flowing black, in the -throne and, like an enlarged Queen Victoria, had sat there whilst -suppliants were led up to this great writer. But now: on the first occasion -Mrs. Wannop got a chair without arms in the outer ring, whilst a general -officer commanding lately in chief somewhere in the East, whose military -success had not been considerable, but whose despatches were considered -very literary, occupied, rather blazingly, the throne. But Mrs. Wannop -had chatted very contentedly all the afternoon with Tietjens, and it had -been comforting to Valentine to see Tietjens' large, uncouth, but quite -collected figure, and to observe the affection that these two had for -each other.</p> - -<p>But, on the second occasion, the throne was occupied by a very young -woman who talked a great deal and with great assurance. Valentine didn't -know who she was. Mrs. Wannop, very gay and distracted, stood nearly the -whole afternoon by a window. And even at that, Valentine was contented, -quite a number of young men crowding round the old lady and leaving the -younger one's circle rather bare.</p> - -<p>There came in a very tall, clean run and beautiful, fair woman, -dressed in nothing in particular. She stood with extreme—with -noticeable—unconcern near the doorway. She let her eyes rest on -Valentine, but looked away before Valentine could speak. She must have -had an enormous quantity of fair tawny hair, for it was coiled in a -great surface over her ears. She had in her hand several visiting cards -which she looked at with a puzzled expression and then laid on a card -table. She was no one who had ever been there before.</p> - -<p>Edith Ethel—it was for the second time!—had just broken up -the ring that surrounded Mrs. Wannop, bearing the young men tributary to -the young women in the walnut chair and leaving Tietjens and the older -woman high and dry in a window: thus Tietjens saw the stranger, and there -was no doubt left in Valentine's mind. He came, diagonally, right down the -room to his wife and marched her straight up to Edith Ethel. His face -was perfectly without expression.</p> - -<p>Macmaster, perched on the centre of the hearthrug, had an emotion that -was extraordinarily comic to witness, but that Valentine was quite -unable to analyse. He jumped two paces forward to meet Mrs. Tietjens, -held out a little hand, half withdrew it, retreated half a step. The -eyeglass fell from his perturbed eye: this gave him actually an -expression less perturbed, but, in revenge, the hairs on the back of his -scalp grew suddenly untidy. Sylvia, wavering along beside her husband, -held out her long arm and careless hand. Macmaster winced almost at the -contact, as if his fingers had been pinched in a vice. Sylvia wavered -desultorily towards Edith Ethel, who was suddenly small, insignificant -and relatively coarse. As for the young woman celebrity in the -arm-chair, she appeared to be about the size of a white rabbit.</p> - -<p>A complete silence had fallen on the room. Every woman in it was -counting the pleats of Sylvia's skirt and the amount of material in it. -Valentine Wannop knew that because she was doing it herself. If one had -that amount of material and that number of pleats one's skirt might hang -like that. . . . For it was extraordinary: it fitted close round the -hips, and gave an effect of length and swing—yet it did not descend -as low as the ankles. It was, no doubt, the amount of material that did -that, like the Highlander's kilt that takes twelve yards to make. And -from the silence Valentine could tell that every woman and most -of the men—if they didn't know that this was Mrs. Christopher -Tietjens—knew that this was a personage of <i>Illustrated Weekly</i>, -as who should say of county family, rank. Little Mrs. Swan, lately married, -actually got up, crossed the room and sat down beside her bridegroom. It -was a movement with which Valentine could sympathise.</p> - -<p>And Sylvia, having just faintly greeted Mrs. Duchemin, and completely -ignored the celebrity in the arm-chair—in spite of the fact that Mrs. -Duchemin had tried half-heartedly to effect an introduction—stood -still, looking round her. She gave the effect of a lady in a -nurseryman's hot-house considering what flower should interest her, -collectedly ignoring the nurserymen who bowed round her. She had just -dropped her eyelashes, twice, in recognition of two staff officers with -a good deal of scarlet streak about them who were tentatively rising -from their chairs. The staff officers who came to the Macmasters were -not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such.</p> - -<p>Valentine was by that time beside her mother, who had been standing all -alone between two windows. She had dispossessed, in hot indignation, a -stout musical critic of his chair and had sat her mother in it. And, -just as Mrs. Duchemin's deep voice sounded, yet a little waveringly:</p> - -<p>"Valentine . . . a cup of tea for . . ." Valentine was carrying a cup of -tea to her mother.</p> - -<p>Her indignation had conquered her despairing jealousy, if you could call -it jealousy. For what was the good of living or loving when Tietjens had -beside him, for ever, the radiant, kind and gracious perfection. On the -other hand, of her two deep passions, the second was for her mother.</p> - -<p>Rightly or wrongly, Valentine regarded Mrs. Wannop as a great, an august -figure: a great brain, a high and generous intelligence. She had -written, at least, one great book, and if the rest of her time had been -frittered away in the desperate struggle to live that had taken both -their lives, that could not detract from that one achievement that -should last and for ever take her mother's name down time. That this -greatness should not weigh with the Macmasters had hitherto neither -astonished nor irritated Valentine. The Macmasters had their game to -play and, for the matter of that, they had their predilections. Their -game kept them amongst the officially influential, the semi-official and -the officially accredited. They moved with such C.B.s, knights, -presidents, and the rest as dabbled in writing or the arts: they went -upwards with such reviewers, art critics, musical writers and -archæologists as had posts in, if possible, first-class public offices -or permanent positions on the more august periodicals. If an imaginative -author seemed assured of position and lasting popularity Macmaster would -send out feelers towards him, would make himself humbly useful, and -sooner or later either Mrs. Duchemin would be carrying on with him one -of her high-souled correspondences—or she wouldn't.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wannop they had formerly accepted as permanent leader writer and -chief critic of a great organ, but the great organ having dwindled and -now disappeared the Macmasters no longer wanted her at their parties. -That was the game—and Valentine accepted it. But that it should have -been done with such insolence, so obviously meant to be noted—for in -twice breaking up Mrs. Wannop's little circle Mrs. Duchemin had not even -once so much as said: "How d'ye do?" to the elder lady!—that was -almost more than Valentine could, for the moment, bear, and she would have -taken her mother away at once and would never have re-entered the house, -but for the compensations.</p> - -<p>Her mother had lately written and even found a publisher for a -book—and the book had showed no signs of failing powers. On the -contrary, having been perforce stopped off the perpetual journalism that -had dissipated her energies, Mrs. Wannop had turned out something that -Valentine knew was sound, sane and well done. Abstractions caused by -failing attention to the outside world are not necessarily in a writer -signs of failing, as a writer. It may mean merely that she is giving so -much thought to her work that her other contacts suffer. If that is the -case her work will gain. That this might be the case with her mother was -Valentine's great and secret hope. Her mother was barely sixty: many -great works have been written by writers aged between sixty and -seventy. . . .</p> - -<p>And the crowding of youngish men round the old lady had given Valentine -a little confirmation of that hope. The book naturally, in the maelstrom -flux and reflux of the time, had attracted little attention, and poor -Mrs. Wannop had not succeeded in extracting a penny for it from her -adamantine publisher: she hadn't, indeed, made a penny for several -months, and they existed almost at starvation point in their little den of -a villa—on Valentine's earnings as athletic teacher. . . . But that -little bit of attention in that semi-public place had seemed, at least, -as a confirmation to Valentine: there probably was something sound, sane -and well done in her mother's work. That was almost all she asked of -life.</p> - -<p>And, indeed, whilst she stood by her mother's chair, thinking with a -little bitter pathos that if Edith Ethel had left the three or four -young men to her mother the three or four might have done her poor mother -a little good, with innocent puffs and the like—and heaven knew they -needed that little good badly enough!—a very thin and untidy young -man <i>did</i> drift back to Mrs. Wannop and asked, precisely, if he might -make a note or two for publication as to what Mrs. Wannop was doing. -"Her book," he said, "had attracted so much attention. They hadn't known -that they had still writers among them. . . ."</p> - -<p>A singular, triangular drive had begun through the chairs from the -fireplace. That was how it had seemed to Valentine! Mrs. Tietjens had -looked at them, had asked Christopher a question and, immediately, as if -she were coming through waist-high surf, had borne down Macmaster and -Mrs. Duchemin, flanking her obsequiously, setting aside chairs and their -occupants, Tietjens and the two, rather bashfully following staff -officers, broadening out the wedge.</p> - -<p>Sylvia, her long arm held out from a yard or so away, was giving her -hand to Valentine's mother. With her clear, high, unembarrassed voice -she exclaimed, also from a yard or so away, so as to be heard by every -one in the room:</p> - -<p>"You're Mrs. Wannop. The great writer! I'm Christopher Tietjens' -wife."</p> - -<p>The old lady, with her dim eyes, looked up at the younger woman towering -above her.</p> - -<p>"You're Christopher's wife!" she said. "I must kiss you for all the -kindness he has shown me."</p> - -<p>Valentine felt her eyes filling with tears. She saw her mother stand up, -place both her hands on the other woman's shoulders. She heard her -mother say:</p> - -<p>"You're a most beautiful creature. I'm sure you're good!"</p> - -<p>Sylvia stood, smiling faintly, bending a little to accept the embrace. -Behind the Macmasters, Tietjens and the staff officers, a little crowd -of goggle eyes had ranged itself.</p> - -<p>Valentine was crying. She slipped back behind the tea-urns, though she -could hardly feel the way. Beautiful! The most beautiful woman she had -ever seen! And good! Kind! You could see it in the lovely way she had -given her cheek to that poor old woman's lips. . . . And to live all -day, for ever, beside him . . . she, Valentine, ought to be ready to lay -down her life for Sylvia Tietjens. . . .</p> - -<p>The voice of Tietjens said, just above her head:</p> - -<p>"Your mother seems to be having a regular triumph," and, with his -good-natured cynicism, he added, "it seems to have upset some -apple-carts!" They were confronted with the spectacle of Macmaster -conducting the young celebrity from her deserted arm-chair across the -room to be lost in the horseshoe of crowd that surrounded Mrs. Wannop.</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"You're quite gay to-day. Your voice is different. I suppose you're -better?" She did not look at him. His voice came:</p> - -<p>"Yes! I'm relatively gay!" It went on: "I thought you might like to -know. A little of my mathematical brain seems to have come to life -again. I've worked out two or three silly problems. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Mrs. Tietjens will be pleased."</p> - -<p>"Oh!" the answer came. "Mathematics don't interest her any more than -cock-fighting." With immense swiftness, between word and word, Valentine -read into that a hope! This splendid creature did not sympathise with -her husband's activities. But he crushed it heavily by saying: "Why -should she? She's so many occupations of her own that she's unrivalled -at!"</p> - -<p>He began to tell her, rather minutely, of a calculation he had made only -that day at lunch. He had gone into the Department of Statistics and had -had rather a row with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln. A pretty title the fellow -had taken! They had wanted him to ask to be seconded to his old -department for a certain job. But he had said he'd be damned if he -would. He detested and despised the work they were doing.</p> - -<p>Valentine, for the first time in her life, hardly listened to what he -said. Did the fact that Sylvia Tietjens had so many occupations of her -own mean that Tietjens found her unsympathetic? Of their relationships -she knew nothing. Sylvia had been so much of a mystery as hardly to -exist as a problem hitherto. Macmaster, Valentine knew, hated her. She -knew that through Mrs. Duchemin; she had heard it ages ago, but she -didn't know why. Sylvia had never come to the Macmaster afternoons; but -that was natural. Macmaster passed for a bachelor, and it was excusable -for a young woman of the highest fashion not to come to bachelor teas of -literary and artistic people. On the other hand, Macmaster dined at the -Tietjens quite often enough to make it public that he was a friend of -that family. Sylvia, too, had never come down to see Mrs. Wannop. But -then it would, in the old days, have been a long way to come for a lady -of fashion with no especial literary interests. And no one, in mercy, -could have been expected to call on poor them in their dog kennel in an -outer suburb. They had had to sell almost all their pretty things.</p> - -<p>Tietjens was saying that after his tempestuous interview with Lord -Ingleby of Lincoln—she wished he would not be so rude to powerful -people!—he had dropped in on Macmaster in his private room, and -finding him puzzled over a lot of figures had, in the merest spirit of -bravado, taken Macmaster and his papers out to lunch. And, he said, -chancing to look, without any hope at all, at the figures, he had suddenly -worked out an ingenious mystification. It had just come!</p> - -<p>His voice had been so gay and triumphant that she hadn't been able to -resist looking up at him. His cheeks were fresh coloured, his hair -shining; his blue eyes had a little of their old arrogance—and -tenderness! Her heart seemed to sing with joy! He was, she felt, her -man. She imagined the arms of his mind stretching out to enfold her.</p> - -<p>He went on explaining. He had rather, in his recovered self-confidence, -gibed at Macmaster. Between themselves, wasn't it easy to do what the -Department, under orders, wanted done? They had wanted to rub into our -allies that their losses by devastation had been nothing to write home -about—so as to avoid sending reinforcements to their lines! Well, if -you took just the bricks and mortar of the devastated districts, you -could prove that the loss in bricks, tiles, woodwork and the rest -didn't—and the figures with a little manipulation would prove -it!—amount to more than a normal year's dilapidations spread over the -whole country in peace time. . . . House repairs in a normal year had -cost several million sterling. The enemy had only destroyed just about -so many million sterling in bricks and mortar. And what was a mere -year's dilapidations in house property! You just neglected to do them -and did them next year.</p> - -<p>So, if you ignored the lost harvests of three years, the lost industrial -output of the richest industrial region of the country, the smashed -machinery, the barked fruit trees, the three years' loss of four and a -half-tenths of the coal output for three years—and the loss of -life!—we could go to our allies and say:</p> - -<p>"All your yappings about losses are the merest bulls. You can perfectly -well afford to reinforce the weak places of your own lines. We intend to -send our new troops to the Near East, where lies our true interest!" -And, though they might sooner or later point out the fallacy, you would -by so much have put off the abhorrent expedient of a single command.</p> - -<p>Valentine, though it took her away from her own thoughts, couldn't help -saying:</p> - -<p>"But weren't you arguing against your own convictions?"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Yes, of course I was. In the lightness of my heart! It's always a good -thing to formulate the other fellow's objections."</p> - -<p>She had turned half round in her chair. They were gazing into each -other's eyes, he from above, she from below. She had no doubt of his -love: he, she knew, could have no doubt of hers. She said:</p> - -<p>"But isn't it dangerous? To show these people how to do it?"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, no, no. No! You don't know what a good soul little Vinnie is. I -don't think you've ever been quite just to Vincent Macmaster! He'd as -soon think of picking my pocket as of picking my brains. The soul of -honour!"</p> - -<p>Valentine had felt a queer, queer sensation. She was not sure afterwards -whether she had felt it before she had realised that Sylvia Tietjens was -looking at them. She stood there, very erect, a queer smile on her face. -Valentine could not be sure whether it was kind, cruel, or merely -distantly ironic; but she was perfectly sure it showed, whatever was -behind it, that its wearer knew all that there was to know of her, -Valentine's, feelings for Tietjens and for Tietjens' feelings for -her. . . . It was like being a woman and man in adultery in Trafalgar -Square.</p> - -<p>Behind Sylvia's back, their mouths agape, were the two staff officers. -Their dark hairs were too untidy for them to amount to much, but, such -as they were, they were the two most presentable males of the -assembly—and Sylvia had snaffled them.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, Christopher! I'm going on to the Basil's."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"All right. I'll pop Mrs. Wannop into the tube as soon as she's had -enough of it, and come along and pick you up!"</p> - -<p>Sylvia had just drooped her long eyelashes, in sign of salutation, to -Valentine Wannop, and had drifted through the door, followed by her -rather unmilitary military escort in khaki and scarlet.</p> - -<p>From that moment Valentine Wannop never had any doubt. She knew that -Sylvia Tietjens knew that her husband loved her, Valentine Wannop, and -that she, Valentine Wannop, loved her husband—with a passion absolute -and ineffable. The one thing she, Valentine, didn't know, the one -mystery that remained impenetrable, was whether Sylvia Tietjens was good -to her husband!</p> - -<p>A long time afterwards Edith Ethel had come to her beside the tea-cups -and had apologised for not having known, earlier than Sylvia's -demonstration, that Mrs. Wannop was in the room. She hoped that they -might see Mrs. Wannop much more often. She added after a moment that she -hoped Mrs. Wannop wouldn't, in future, find it necessary to come under -the escort of Mr. Tietjens. They were too old friends for that, surely.</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"Look here, Ethel, if you think that you can keep friends with mother -and turn on Mr. Tietjens after all he's done for you, you're mistaken. -You are really. And mother's a great deal of influence. I don't want to -see you making any mistakes: just at this juncture. It's a mistake to -make nasty rows. And you'd make a very nasty one if you said anything -against Mr. Tietjens to mother. She knows a great deal. Remember. She -lived next door to the rectory for a number of years. And she's got a -dreadfully incisive tongue. . . ."</p> - -<p>Edith Ethel coiled back on her feet as if her whole body were threaded -by a steel spring. Her mouth opened, but she bit her lower lip and then -wiped it with a very white handkerchief. She said:</p> - -<p>"I hate that man! I detest that man! I shudder when he comes near -me."</p> - -<p>"I know you do!" Valentine Wannop answered. "But I wouldn't let other -people know it if I were you. It doesn't do you any real credit. He's a -good man."</p> - -<p>Edith Ethel looked at her with a long, calculating glance. Then she went -to stand before the fireplace.</p> - -<p>That had been five—or at most six—Fridays before Valentine -sat with Mark Tietjens in the War Office waiting hall, and, on the Friday -immediately before that again, all the guests being gone, Edith Ethel -had come to the tea-table and, with her velvet kindness, had placed her -right hand on Valentine's left. Admiring the gesture with a deep -fervour, Valentine knew that that was the end.</p> - -<p>Three days before, on the Monday, Valentine, in her school uniform, in a -great store to which she had gone to buy athletic paraphernalia, had run -into Mrs. Duchemin, who was buying flowers. Mrs. Duchemin had been -horribly distressed to observe the costume. She had said:</p> - -<p>"But do you go <i>about</i> in that? It's really dreadful." Valentine -had answered:</p> - -<p>"Oh, yes. When I'm doing business for the school in school hours I'm -expected to wear it. And I wear it if I'm going anywhere in a hurry -after school hours. It saves my dresses. I haven't got too many."</p> - -<p>"But <i>any</i> one might meet you," Edith Ethel said in a note of -agony. "It's very inconsiderate. Don't you <i>think</i> you've been very -inconsiderate? You might meet any of the people who come to our -Fridays!"</p> - -<p>"I frequently do," Valentine said. "But they don't seem to mind. Perhaps -they think I'm a Waac officer. That would be quite respectable. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin drifted away, her arms full of flowers and real agony upon -her face.</p> - -<p>Now, beside the tea-table she said, very softly:</p> - -<p>"My dear, we've decided not to have our usual Friday afternoon next -week." Valentine wondered whether this was merely a lie to get rid of -her. But Edith Ethel went on: "We've decided to have a little evening -festivity. After a great deal of thought we've come to the conclusion -that we ought, now, to make our union public." She paused to await -comment, but Valentine making none she went on: "It coincides very -happily—I can't help feeling it coincides very happily!—with -another event. Not that we set much store by these things. . . . But it has -been whispered to Vincent that next Friday. . . . Perhaps, my dear -Valentine, you, too, will have heard . . ."</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"No, I haven't. I suppose he's got the O.B.E. I'm very glad."</p> - -<p>"The Sovereign," Mrs. Duchemin said, "is seeing fit to confer the honour -of knighthood on him."</p> - -<p>"Well!" Valentine said. "He's had a quick career. I've no doubt he -deserves it. He's worked very hard. I do sincerely congratulate you. -It'll be a great help to you."</p> - -<p>"It's," Mrs. Duchemin said, "not for mere plodding. That's what makes it -so gratifying. It's for a special piece of brilliance, that has marked -him out. It's, of course, a secret. But . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, I know!" Valentine said. "He's worked out some calculations to -prove that losses in the devastated districts, if you ignore machinery, -coal output, orchard trees, harvests, industrial products and so on, -don't amount to more than a year's household dilapidations for -the . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said with real horror:</p> - -<p>"But how did you know? How on <i>earth</i> did you know? . . ." She -paused. "It's such a <i>dead</i> secret. . . . That fellow must have told -you. . . . But how on earth could <i>he</i> know?"</p> - -<p>"I haven't seen Mr. Tietjens to speak to since the last time he was -here," Valentine said. She saw, from Edith Ethel's bewilderment, the -whole situation. The miserable Macmaster hadn't even confided to his -wife that the practically stolen figures weren't his own. He desired to -have a little prestige in the family circle; for once a little prestige! -Well! Why shouldn't he have it? Tietjens, she knew, would wish him to -have all he could get. She said therefore:</p> - -<p>"Oh, it's probably in the air. . . . It's known the Government want to -break their claims to the higher command. And anyone who could help them -to that would get a knighthood. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin was more calm.</p> - -<p>"It's certainly," she said, "Burke'd, as you call it, those beastly -people." She reflected for a moment. "It's probably that," she went on. -"It's in the air. Anything that can help to influence public opinion -against those horrible people is to be welcomed. That's known pretty -widely. . . . No! It could hardly be Christopher Tietjens who thought of -it and told you. It wouldn't enter his head. He's their friend! He would -be . . ."</p> - -<p>"He's certainly," Valentine said, "not a friend of his country's -enemies. I'm not myself."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed sharply, her eyes dilated.</p> - -<p>"What do you mean? What on earth do you dare to mean? I thought you were -a pro-German!"</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"I'm not! I'm not! . . . I hate men's deaths. . . . I hate any men's -deaths. . . . Any men . . ." She calmed herself by main force. "Mr. -Tietjens says that the more we hinder our allies the more we drag the -war on and the more lives are lost. . . . More lives, do you understand? -. . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin assumed her most aloof, tender and high air: "My poor -child," she said, "what possible concern can the opinions of that broken -fellow cause anyone? You can warn him from me that he does himself no -good by going on uttering these discredited opinions. He's a marked man. -Finished! It's no good Guggums, my husband, trying to stand up for -him."</p> - -<p>"He <i>does</i> stand up for him?" Valentine asked. "Though I don't see -why it's needed. Mr. Tietjens is surely able to take care of himself."</p> - -<p>"My good child," Edith Ethel said, "you may as well know the worst. -There's not a more discredited man in London than Christopher Tietjens, -and my husband does himself infinite harm in standing up for him. It's -our one quarrel."</p> - -<p>She went on again:</p> - -<p>"It was all very well whilst that fellow had brains. He was said to have -some intellect, though I could never see it. But now that, with his -drunkenness and debaucheries, he has got himself into the state he is -in; for there's no other way of accounting for his condition! They're -striking him, I don't mind telling you, off the roll of his -office. . . ."</p> - -<p>It was there that, for the first time, the thought went through -Valentine Wannop's mind, like a mad inspiration: this woman must at one -time have been in love with Tietjens. It was possible, men being what -they were that she had even once been Tietjens' mistress. For it was -impossible otherwise to account for this spite, which to Valentine -seemed almost meaningless. She had, on the other hand, no impulse to -defend Tietjens against accusations that could not have any possible -grounds.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin was going on with her kind loftiness:</p> - -<p>"Of course a fellow like that—in that condition!—could not -understand matters of high policy. It is imperative that these fellows -should not have the higher command. It would pander to their insane spirit -of militarism. They <i>must</i> be hindered. I'm talking, of course, -between ourselves, but my husband says that that is the conviction in the -very highest circles. To let them have their way, even if it led to earlier -success, would be to establish a precedent—so my husband -says!—compared with which the loss of a few lives. . . ."</p> - -<p>Valentine sprang up, her face distorted.</p> - -<p>"For the sake of Christ," she cried out, "as you believe that Christ -died for you, try to understand that millions of men's lives are at -stake. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin smiled.</p> - -<p>"My poor child," she said, "if you moved in the higher circles you would -look at these things with more aloofness. . . ."</p> - -<p>Valentine leant on the back of a high chair for support.</p> - -<p>"You don't move in the higher circles," she said. "For Heaven's -sake—for your own—remember that you are a woman, not for ever -and for always a snob. You were a good woman once. You stuck to your -husband for quite a long time. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin, in her chair, had thrown herself back.</p> - -<p>"My good girl," she said, "have you gone mad?"</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"Yes, very nearly. I've got a brother at sea; I've had a man I loved out -there for an infinite time. You can understand that, I suppose, even if -you can't understand how one can go mad merely at the thoughts of -suffering at all. . . . And I know, Edith Ethel, that you are afraid of -my opinion of you, or you wouldn't have put up all the subterfuges and -concealments of all these years. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said quickly:</p> - -<p>"Oh, my good girl. . . . If you've got personal interests at stake you -can't be expected to take abstract views of the higher matters. We had -better change the subject."</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"Yes, do. Get on with your excuses for not asking me and mother to your -knighthood party."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin, too, rose at that. She felt at her amber beads with long -fingers that turned very slightly at the tips. She had behind her all -her mirrors, the drops of her lustres, shining points of gilt and of the -polish of dark woods. Valentine thought that she had never seen anyone -so absolutely impersonate kindness, tenderness and dignity. She said:</p> - -<p>"My dear, I was going to suggest that it was the sort of party to which -you might not care to come. . . . The people will be stiff and formal -and you probably haven't got a frock."</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, I've got a frock all right. But there's a Jacob's ladder in my -party stockings and that's the sort of ladder you can't kick down." She -couldn't help saying that.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin stood motionless and very slowly redness mounted into her -face. It was most curious to see against that scarlet background the -vivid white of the eyes and the dark, straight eyebrows that nearly met. -And, slowly again her face went perfectly white; then her dark blue eyes -became marked. She seemed to wipe her long, white hands one in the -other, inserting her right hand into her left and drawing it out again.</p> - -<p>"I'm sorry," she said in a dead voice. "We had hoped that, if that -man went to France—or if other things happened—we might have -continued on the old friendly footing. But you yourself must see that, with -our official position, we can't be expected to connive . . ."</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"I don't understand!"</p> - -<p>"Perhaps you'd rather I didn't go on!" Mrs. Duchemin retorted. "I'd much -rather not go on."</p> - -<p>"You'd probably better," Valentine answered.</p> - -<p>"We had meant," the elder woman said, "to have a quiet little -dinner—we two and you, before the party—for auld lang syne. But -that fellow has forced himself in, and you see for yourself that we can't -have you as well."</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"I don't see why not. I always like to see Mr. Tietjens!"</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin looked hard at her.</p> - -<p>"I don't see the use," she said, "of your keeping on that mask. It is -surely bad enough that your mother should go about with that man and -that terrible scenes like that of the other Friday should occur. Mrs. -Tietjens was heroic; nothing less than heroic. But you have no right to -subject us, your friends, to such ordeals."</p> - -<p>Valentine said:</p> - -<p>"You mean . . . Mrs. Christopher Tietjens . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin went on:</p> - -<p>"My husband insists that I should ask you. But I will not. I simply will -not. I invented for you the excuse of the frock. Of course we could have -given you a frock if that man is so mean or so penniless as not to keep -you decent. But I repeat, with our official position we cannot—we -cannot; it would be madness!—connive at this intrigue. And all the -more as the wife appears likely to be friendly with us. She has been once: -she may well come again." She paused and went on solemnly: "And I warn -you, if the split comes—as it must, for what woman could stand -it!—it is Mrs. Tietjens we shall support. She will always find a -home here."</p> - -<p>An extraordinary picture of Sylvia Tietjens standing beside Edith Ethel -and dwarfing her as a giraffe dwarfs an emu, came into Valentine's head. -She said:</p> - -<p>"Ethel! Have I gone mad? Or is it you? Upon my word I can't -understand. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"For God's sake hold your tongue, you shameless thing! You've had a -child by the man, haven't you?"</p> - -<p>Valentine saw suddenly the tall silver candlesticks, the dark polished -panels of the rectory and Edith Ethel's mad face and mad hair whirling -before them.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"No! I certainly haven't. Can you get that into your head? I certainly -haven't." She made a further effort over immense fatigue. "I assure -you—I beg you to believe if it will give you any ease—that Mr. -Tietjens has never addressed a word of love to me in his life. Nor have -I to him. We have hardly talked to each other in all the time we have -known each other."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin said in a harsh voice:</p> - -<p>"Seven people in the last five weeks have told me you have had a child -by that brute beast: he's ruined because he has to keep you and your -mother and the child. You won't deny that he has a child somewhere -hidden away? . . ."</p> - -<p>Valentine exclaimed suddenly:</p> - -<p>"Oh, Ethel, you mustn't . . . you <i>mustn't</i> be jealous of me! If -you only knew you wouldn't be jealous of me. . . . I suppose the child you -were going to have was by Christopher? Men are like that. . . . But not -of me! You need never, never. I've been the best friend you can ever -have had. . . ."</p> - -<p>Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed harshly, as if she were being strangled:</p> - -<p>"A sort of blackmail! I knew it would come to that! It always does with -your sort. Then do your damnedest, you harlot. You never set foot in -this house again! Go you and rot. . . ." Her face suddenly expressed -extreme fear and with great swiftness she ran up the room. Immediately -afterwards she was tenderly bending over a great bowl of roses beneath -the lustre. The voice of Vincent Macmaster from the door had said:</p> - -<p>"Come in, old man. Of course I've got ten minutes. The book's in here -somewhere. . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster was beside her, rubbing his hands, bending with his curious, -rather abject manner, and surveying her agonisedly with his eyeglass, -which enormously magnified his lashes, his red lower lid and the veins -on his cornea.</p> - -<p>"Valentine!" he said, "my dear Valentine. . . . You've heard? We've -decided to make it public. . . . Guggums will have invited you to our -little feast. And there will be a surprise, I believe. . . ."</p> - -<p>Edith Ethel looked, as she bent, lamentably and sharply, over her -shoulder at Valentine.</p> - -<p>"Yes," she said bravely, aiming her voice at Edith Ethel, "Ethel has -invited me. I'll try to come. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Oh, but you must," Macmaster said, "just you and Christopher, who've -been so kind to us. For old time's sake. You could not . . ."</p> - -<p>Christopher Tietjens was ballooning slowly from the door, his hand -tentatively held out to her. As they practically never shook hands at -home it was easy to avoid his hand. She said to herself: "Oh! How is it -possible! How could he have. . ." And the terrible situation poured -itself over her mind: the miserable little husband, the desperately -nonchalant lover—and Edith Ethel mad with jealousy! A doomed -household. She hoped Edith Ethel had seen her refuse her hand to -Christopher.</p> - -<p>But Edith Ethel, bent over her rose bowl, was burying her beautiful face -in flower after flower. She was accustomed to do this for many minutes -on end: she thought that, so, she resembled a picture by the subject of -her husband's first little monograph. And so, Valentine thought, she -did. She was trying to tell Macmaster that Friday evenings were -difficult times for her to get away. But her throat ached too much. -That, she knew, was her last sight of Edith Ethel, whom she had loved -very much. That also, she hoped, would be her last sight of Christopher -Tietjens—whom also she had loved very much. . . . He was browsing -along a bookshelf, very big and very clumsy.</p> - -<p>Macmaster pursued her into the stony hall with clamorous repetitions of -his invitation. She couldn't speak. At the great iron-lined door he held -her hand for an eternity, gazing lamentably, his face close up against -hers. He exclaimed in accents of great fear:</p> - -<p>"Has Guggums? . . . She <i>hasn't</i> . . ." His face, which when you -saw it so closely was a little blotched, distorted itself with anxiety: he -glanced aside with panic at the drawing-room door.</p> - -<p>Valentine burst a voice through her agonised throat.</p> - -<p>"Ethel," she said, "has told me she's to be Lady Macmaster. I'm so glad. -I'm so truly glad for you. You've got what you wanted, haven't you?"</p> - -<p>His relief let him get out distractedly, yet as if he were too tired to -be any more agitated:</p> - -<p>"Yes! yes! . . . It's, of course, a secret. . . . I don't want -<i>him</i> told till Friday next . . . so as to be a sort of <i>bonne -bouche</i> . . . He's practically certain to go out again on -Saturday. . . . They're sending out a great batch of them . . . for the -big push. . . ." At that she tried to draw her hand from his: she missed -what he was saying. It was something to the effect that he would give it -all for a happy little party. She caught the rather astonishing words: -"<i>Wie der alten schoenen Zeit.</i>" She couldn't tell whether it was his -or her eyes that were full of tears. She said:</p> - -<p>"I believe . . . I believe you're a kind man!"</p> - -<p>In the great stone hall, hung with long Japanese paintings on silk, the -electric light suddenly jumped; it was at best a sad, brown place.</p> - -<p>He exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"I, too, beg you to believe that I will never abandon . . ." He glanced -again at the inner door and added: "You both . . . I will never abandon -. . . you both!" he repeated.</p> - -<p>He let go her hand: she was on the stone stairs in the damp air. The -great door closed irresistibly behind her, sending a whisper of air -downwards.</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="V_II">V</a></h4> - - -<p>Mark Tietjens' announcement that his father had after all carried out -his long-standing promise to provide for Mrs. Wannop in such a way as to -allow her to write for the rest of her life only the more lasting kind -of work, delivered Valentine Wannop of all her problems except one. That -one loomed, naturally and immediately, immensely large.</p> - -<p>She had passed a queer, unnatural week, the feeling dominating its -numbness having been, oddly, that she would have nothing to do on -Friday! This feeling recurred to her whilst she was casting her eyes -over a hundred girls all in their cloth jumpers and men's black ties, -aligned upon asphalte; whilst she was jumping on trams; whilst she was -purchasing the tinned or dried fish that formed the staple diet of -herself and her mother; whilst she was washing-up the dinner-things; -upbraiding the house agent for the state of the bath, or bending closely -over the large but merciless handwriting of the novel of her mother's -that she was typing. It came, half as a joy, half mournfully across her -familiar businesses; she felt as a man might feel who, luxuriating in -the anticipation of leisure, knew that it was obtained by being -compulsorily retired from some laborious but engrossing job. There would -be nothing to do on Fridays!</p> - -<p>It was, too, as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she -would never know the end. Of the fairy-tale she knew the end: the -fortunate and adventurous tailor had married his beautiful and -be-princessed goose girl, and was well on the way to burial in -Westminster Abbey—or at any rate to a memorial service, the squire -being actually buried amongst his faithful villagers. But she would -never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch -tiles they wanted to line their bathroom. . . . She would never know. -Yet witnessing similar ambitions had made up a great deal of her life.</p> - -<p>And, she said to herself, there was another tale ended. On the surface -the story of her love for Tietjens had been static enough. It had begun in -nothing and in nothing it had ended. But, deep down in her being—ah! -it had progressed enough. Through the agency of two women! Before the -scene with Mrs. Duchemin there could, she thought, have been few young -women less preoccupied than she with the sexual substrata, either of -passion or of life. Her months as a domestic servant had accounted for -that, sex, as she had seen it from a back kitchen, having been a -repulsive affair, whilst the knowledge of its manifestations that she -had thus attained had robbed it of the mystery which caused most of the -young women whom she knew to brood upon these subjects.</p> - -<p>Her conviction: as to the moral incidence of sex were, she knew, quite -opportunist. Brought up amongst rather "advanced" young people, had she -been publicly challenged to pronounce her views she would probably, out -of loyalty to her comrades, have declared that neither morality nor any -ethical aspects were concerned in the matter. Like most of her young -friends, influenced by the advanced teachers and tendential novelists of -the day, she would have stated herself to advocate an—of course, -enlightened!—promiscuity. That, before the revelations of Mrs. -Duchemin! Actually she had thought very little about the matter.</p> - -<p>Nevertheless, even before that date, had her deeper feelings been -questioned she would have reacted with the idea that sexual incontinence -was extremely ugly and chastity to be prized in the egg and spoon race that -life was. She had been brought up by her father—who, perhaps, was -wiser than appeared on the surface—to admire athleticism, and she was -aware that proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety, -cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the -heading of abnegation. She couldn't have lived amongst the Ealing -servant-class—the eldest son of the house in which she had been -employed bad been the defendant in a peculiarly scabrous breach of -promise case, and the comments of the drunken cook on this and similar -affairs had run the whole gamut from the sentimentally reticent to the -extreme of coarseness according to the state of her alcoholic -barometer—she couldn't then have lived among the Ealing servant-class -and come to any other subliminal conclusion. So that, dividing the world -into bright beings on the one hand and, on the other, into the mere -stuff to fill graveyards whose actions during life couldn't matter, she -had considered that the bright beings must be people whose public -advocating of enlightened promiscuity went along with an absolute -continence. She was aware that enlightened beings occasionally fell away -from these standards in order to become portentous Egerias; but the Mary -Wollstonecrafts, the Mrs. Taylors, and the George Eliots of the last -century she had regarded humorously as rather priggish nuisances. -Indeed, being very healthy and very hard worked, she had been in the -habit of regarding the whole matter, if not humorously, then at least -good-humouredly, as a nuisance.</p> - -<p>But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a -first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs. Duchemin -had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely -æsthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and -infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook. The -language that she had used about her lover—calling him always "that -oaf" or "that beast"!—had seemed literally to pain the girl -internally, as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports -at each two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through -the darkness from the rectory.</p> - -<p>And she had never heard what had become of Mrs. Duchemin's baby. Next -day Mrs. Duchemin had been as suave, as circumspect, and as collected as -ever. Never a word more had passed between them on the subject. This left -in Valentine Wannop's mind a dark patch—as it were of murder—at -which she must never look. And across the darkened world of her sexual -tumult there flitted continually the quick suspicion that Tietjens might -have been the lover of her friend. It was a matter of the simplest -analogy. Mrs. Duchemin had appeared a bright being: so had Tietjens. But -Mrs. Duchemin was a foul whore. . . . How much more then must Tietjens, -who was a man, with the larger sexual necessities of the male . . . Her -mind always refused to complete the thought.</p> - -<p>Its suggestion wasn't to be combated by the idea of Vincent Macmaster -himself: he was, she felt, the sort of man that it was almost a -necessity for either mistress or comrade to betray. He seemed to ask for -it. Besides, she once put it to herself, how could any woman, given the -choice and the opportunity—and God knows there was opportunity -enough—choose that shadowy, dried leaf, if there were the splendid -masculinity of Tietjens in whose arms to lie. She so regarded these two -men. And that shadowy conviction was at once fortified and appeased -when, a little later, Mrs. Duchemin herself began to apply to Tietjens -the epithets of "oaf" and "beast"—the very ones that she had used to -designate the father of her putative child!</p> - -<p>But then Tietjens must have abandoned Mrs. Duchemin; and, if he had -abandoned Mrs. Duchemin, he must be available for her, Valentine Wannop! -The feeling, she considered, made her ignoble; but it came from depths -of her being that she could not control and, existing, it soothed her. -Then, with the coming of the war, the whole problem died out, and -between the opening of hostilities and what she had known to be the -inevitable departure of her lover, she had surrendered herself to what -she thought to be the pure physical desire for him. Amongst the -terrible, crashing anguishes of that time, there had been nothing for it -but surrender! With the unceasing—the never ceasing—thought of -suffering; with the never ceasing idea that her lover, too, must soon be -so suffering, there was in the world no other refuge. No other!</p> - -<p>She surrendered. She waited for him to speak the word, or look the look -that should unite them. She was finished. Chastity: napoo finny! Like -everything else!</p> - -<p>Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In -the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in -which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the -village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, -little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to -take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, -thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or -not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it -was thus love worked upon the body—and that it would stop for ever at -that!</p> - -<p>But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. -It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her -whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you -are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if -physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid -itself. The moon so draws the tides.</p> - -<p>Once before, for a fraction of a second, after the long, warm night of -their drive, she had felt that impulsion. Now, years after, she was to -know it all the time, waking or half waking; and it would drive her from -her bed. She would stand all night at the open window till the stars -paled above a world turned grey. It could convulse her with joy; it -could shake her with sobs and cut through her breast like a knife.</p> - -<p>The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed -beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her -mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago: he had been -going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what -a love scene was. It passed without any mention of the word "love"; it -passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word -they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, -when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of -your lover beating upon your heart.</p> - -<p>Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster -furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had -confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world—"To -no other soul in the world," he had said!—his doubts, his misgivings -and his fears: it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, -during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered -the word "Come" she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the -earth; if he had said, "There is no hope," she would have known the -finality of despair. Having said neither he said, she knew: "This is our -condition; so we must continue!" And she knew, too, that he was telling -her that he, like her, was . . . oh, say on the side of the angels. She -was then, she knew, so nicely balanced that, had he said, "Will you -to-night be my mistress?" she would have said "Yes"; for it was as if -they had been, really, at the end of the world.</p> - -<p>But his abstention not only strengthened her in her predilection for -chastity; it restored to her her image of the world as a place of -virtues and endeavours. For a time at least she again hummed beneath her -breath upon occasion, for it seemed as if her heart sang within her. And -there was restored to her her image of her lover as a beautiful spirit. -She had been able to look at him across the tea-table of their dog -kennel in Bedford Park, during the last months, almost as she had looked -across the more shining table of the cottage near the rectory. The -deterioration that she knew Mrs. Duchemin to have worked in her mind was -assuaged. It could even occur to her that Mrs. Duchemin's madness had -been no more than a scare to be followed by no necessary crime. -Valentine Wannop had re-become her confident self in a world of at least -straight problems.</p> - -<p>But Mrs. Duchemin's outbreak of a week ago had driven the old phantoms -across her mind. For Mrs. Duchemin she had still had a great respect. -She could not regard her Edith Ethel as merely a hypocrite; or, indeed, -as a hypocrite at all. There was her great achievement of making -something like a man of that miserable little creature—as there had -been her other great achievement of keeping her unfortunate husband for -so long out of a lunatic asylum. That had been no mean feat; neither -feat had been mean. And Valentine knew that Edith Ethel really loved -beauty, circumspection, urbanity. It was no hypocrisy that made her -advocate the Atalanta race of chastity. But, also, as Valentine Wannop -saw it, humanity has these doublings of strong natures; just as the -urbane and grave Spanish nation must find its outlet in the shrieking -lusts of the bull-ring or the circumspect, laborious and admirable city -typist must find her derivative in the cruder lusts of certain novelists, -so Edith Ethel must break down into physical sexualities—and -into shrieked coarseness of fishwives. How else, indeed, do we have -saints? Surely, alone, by the ultimate victory of the one tendency over -the other!</p> - -<p>But now after her farewell scene with Edith Ethel a simple -re-arrangement of the pattern had brought many of the old doubts at -least temporarily back. Valentine said to herself that, just because of -the very strength of her character, Edith Ethel couldn't have been -brought down to uttering her fantastic denunciation of Tietjens, the -merely mad charges of debauchery and excesses and finally the sexually -lunatic charge against herself, except under the sting of some such -passion as jealousy. She, Valentine, couldn't arrive at any other -conclusion. And, viewing the matter as she believed she now did, more -composedly, she considered with seriousness that, men being what they -are, her lover respecting, or despairing of, herself had relieved the -grosser necessities of his being—at the expense of Mrs. Duchemin, who -had, no doubt, been only too ready.</p> - -<p>And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this -suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards the -Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going from -her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life -stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the long, -hard thing that life is. And on the Thursday two minor, or major, -worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced himself as -coming home for several days' leave, and she had the trouble of thinking -that she would have forced upon her a companionship and a point of view -that would be coarsely and uproariously opposed to anything that -Tietjens stood for—or for which he was ready to sacrifice himself. -Moreover she would have to accompany her brother to a number of riotous -festivities whilst all the time she would have to think of Tietjens as -getting hour by hour nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in -contact with enemy forces. In addition her mother had received an -enviably paid for commission from one of the more excitable Sunday -papers to write a series of articles on extravagant matters connected -with the hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully—more -particularly as Edward was coming home—that Valentine Wannop had -conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her mother. . . . -It would have meant very little waste of time, and the £60 that it -would have brought in would have made all the difference to them for -months and months.</p> - -<p>But Tietjens, whom Mrs. Wannop had come to rely on as her right hand man -in these matters, had, it appeared, shown an unexpected recalcitrancy. -He had, Mrs. Wannop said, hardly seemed himself and had gibed at the two -first subjects proposed—that of "war babies" and the fact that the -Germans were reduced to eating their own corpses—as being below the -treatment of any decent pen. The illegitimacy rate, he had said, had -shown very little increase; the French-derived German word "<i>Cadaver</i>" -meant bodies of horses or cattle; <i>Leichnam</i> being the German for the -word "corpse." He had practically refused to have anything to do with -the affair.</p> - -<p>As to the <i>Cadaver</i> business Valentine agreed with him, as to the -"war babies" she kept a more open mind. If there weren't any war babies it -couldn't, as far as she could see, matter whether one wrote about them; -it couldn't certainly matter as much as to write about them, supposing -the poor little things to exist. She was aware that this was immoral, -but her mother needed the money desperately and her mother came first.</p> - -<p>There was nothing for it, therefore, but to plead with Tietjens, for -Valentine knew that without so much of moral support from him as would -be implied by a good-natured, or an enforced sanction of the article, -Mrs. Wannop would drop the matter and so would lose her connection with -the excitable paper which paid well. It happened that on the Friday -morning Mrs. Wannop received a request that she would write for a Swiss -review a propaganda article about some historical matter connected with -the peace after Waterloo. The pay would be practically nothing, but the -employment was at least relatively dignified, and Mrs. Wannop—which -was quite in the ordinary course of things!—told Valentine to ring -Tietjens up and ask him for some details about the Congress of Vienna at -which, before and after Waterloo, the peace terms had been wrangled out.</p> - -<p>Valentine rang up—as she had done hundreds of times; it was to her -a great satisfaction that she was going to hear Tietjens speak once more -at least. The telephone was answered from the other end, and Valentine -gave her two messages, the one as to the Congress of Vienna, the other -as to war babies. The appalling speech came back:</p> - -<p>"Young woman! You'd better keep off the grass. Mrs. Duchemin is already -my husband's mistress. You keep off." There was about the voice no human -quality; it was as if from an immense darkness the immense machine had -spoken words that dealt blows. She answered; and it was as if a -substratum of her mind of which she knew nothing must have been prepared -for that very speech; so that it was not her own "she" that answered -levelly and coolly:</p> - -<p>"You have probably mistaken the person you are speaking to. Perhaps you -will ask Mr. Tietjens to ring up Mrs. Wannop when he is at liberty."</p> - -<p>The voice said:</p> - -<p>"My husband will be at the War Office at 4.15. He will speak to you -there—about your war babies. But I'd keep off the grass if I were -you!" The receiver at the other end was hung up.</p> - -<p>She went about her daily duties. She had heard of a kind of pine kernel -that was very cheap and very nourishing, or at least very filling. They -had come to it that it was a matter of pennies balanced against the -feeling of satiety, and she visited several shops in search of this -food. When she had found it she returned to the dog kennel; her brother -Edward had arrived. He was rather subdued. He brought with him a piece -of meat which was part of his leave ration. He occupied himself with -polishing up his sailor's uniform for a rag-time party to which they -were to go that evening. They were to meet plenty of conchies, he -said. Valentine put the meat—it was a Godsend, though very -stringy!—on to stew with a number of chopped vegetables. She went up -to her room to do some typing for her mother.</p> - -<p>The nature of Tietjens' wife occupied her mind. Before, she had barely -thought about her: she had seemed unreal; so mysterious as to be a myth! -Radiant and high-stepping: like a great stag! But she must be cruel! She -must be vindictively cruel to Tietjens himself, or she could not have -revealed his private affairs! Just broadcast; for she could not, bluff -it how she might, have been certain of to whom she was speaking! A thing -that wasn't done! But she had delivered her cheek to Mrs. Wannop; a -thing, too, that wasn't done! Yet so kindly! The telephone bell rang -several times during the morning. She let her mother answer it.</p> - -<p>She had to get the dinner, which took three-quarters of an hour. It was -a pleasure to see her mother eat so well; a good stew, rich and heavy -with haricot beans. She herself couldn't eat, but no one noticed, which -was a good thing. Her mother said that Tietjens had not yet telephoned, -which was very inconsiderate. Edward said: "What! The Huns haven't -killed old Feather Bolster yet? But of course he's been found a safe -job." The telephone on the sideboard became a terror to Valentine; at -any moment his voice might . . . Edward went on telling anecdotes of how -they bamboozled petty officers on mine-sweepers. Mrs. Wannop listened to -him with the courteous, distant interest of the great listening to -commercial travellers. Edward desired draught ale and produced a two -shilling piece. He seemed very much coarsened; it was, no doubt, only on -the surface. In these days everyone was very much coarsened on the -surface.</p> - -<p>She went with a quart jug to the jug and bottle department of the -nearest public-house—a thing she had never done before. Even at -Ealing the mistress hadn't allowed her to be sent to a public-house; the -cook had had to fetch her dinner beer herself or have it sent in. Perhaps -the Ealing mistress had exercised more surveillance than Valentine had -believed; a kind woman, but an invalid. Nearly all day in bed. Blind -passion overcame Valentine at the thought of Edith Ethel in Tietjens' -arms. Hadn't she got her own eunuch? Mrs. Tietjens had said: "Mrs. -Duchemin is his mistress!" <i>Is!</i> Then he might be there now!</p> - -<p>In the contemplation of that image she missed the thrills of buying beer -in a bottle and jug department. Apparently it was like buying anything -else, except for the smell of beer on the sawdust. You said: "A quart of -the best bitter!" and a fat, quite polite man, with an oily head and a -white apron, took your money and filled your jug. . . . But Edith Ethel -had abused Tietjens so foully! The more foully the more certain it made -it! . . . Draught beer in a jug had little marblings of burst foam on -its brown surface. It mustn't be spilt at the kerbs of crossings!—the -more certain it made it! Some women did so abuse their lovers after -sleeping with them, and the more violent the transports the more frantic -the abuse. It was the "<i>post-dash-tristis</i>" of the Rev. Duchemin! Poor -devil! Tristis! Tristis!</p> - -<p><i>Terra tribus scopulis vastum</i> . . . <i>Not</i> longum!</p> - -<p>Brother Edward began communing with himself, long and unintelligibly as -to where he should meet his sister at 19.30 and give her a blow-out! The -names of restaurants fell from his lips into her panic. He decided -hilariously and not quite steadily—a quart is a lot to a fellow from -a mine-sweeper carrying no booze at all!—on meeting her at 7.20 at -High Street and going to a pub he knew; they would go on to the dance -afterwards. In a studio. "Oh, God!" her heart said, "if Tietjens should -want her then!" To be his; on his last night. He might! Everybody was -coarsened then; on the surface. Her brother rolled out of the house, -slamming the door so that every tile on the jerry-built dog kennel rose -and sat down again.</p> - -<p>She went upstairs and began to look over her frocks. She couldn't tell -what frocks she looked over; they lay like aligned rags on the bed, the -telephone bell ringing madly. She heard her mother's voice, suddenly -assuaged: "Oh! oh! . . . It's you!" She shut her door and began to pull -open and to close drawer after drawer. As soon as she ceased that -exercise her mother's voice became half audible; quite audible when she -raised it to ask a question. She heard her say: "Not get her into -trouble . . . Of <i>course</i>!" then it died away into mere high -sounds.</p> - -<p>She heard her mother calling:</p> - -<p>"Valentine! Valentine! Come down. . . . Don't you want to speak to -Christopher? . . . Valentine! Valentine! . . ." And then another burst: -"Valentine . . . Valentine . . . <i>Valentine</i> . . ." As if she had been -a puppy dog! Mrs. Wannop, thank God, was on the lowest step of the creaky -stairs. She had left the telephone. She called up:</p> - -<p>"Come down. I want to tell you! The dear boy has saved me! He always -saves me! What shall I do now he's gone?"</p> - -<p>"He saved others: himself he could not save!" Valentine quoted bitterly. -She caught up her wideawake. She wasn't going to prink herself for him. -He must take her as she was. . . . Himself he could not save! But he did -himself proud! With women! . . . Coarsened! But perhaps only on the -surface! She herself! . . . She was running downstairs!</p> - -<p>Her mother had retreated into the little parlour: nine feet by nine; in -consequence, at ten feet it was too tall for its size. But there was in -it a sofa with cushions. . . . With her head upon those cushions, -perhaps. . . . If he came home with her! Late! . . .</p> - -<p>Her mother was saying: He's a splendid fellow. . . . A root idea for a -war baby article. . . . If a Tommy was a decent fellow he abstained -because he didn't want to leave his girl in trouble. . . . If he wasn't -he chanced it because it might be his last chance. . . .</p> - -<p>"A message to me!" Valentine said to herself. "But <i>which</i> -sentence. . . ." She moved, absently, all the cushions to one end of the -sofa. Her mother exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"He sent his love! His mother was lucky to have such a son!" and turned -into her tiny hole of a study.</p> - -<p>Valentine ran down over the broken tiles of the garden path, pulling -her wideawake firmly on. She had looked at her wrist watch; it -was two and twelve: 14.45. If she was to walk to the War Office -by 4.15—16.15—a sensible innovation!—she must step out. -Five miles to Whitehall. God knows what, then! Five miles back! Two and -a half, diagonally, to High Street Station by half-past 19! Twelve and a -half miles in five hours or less. And three hours dancing on the top of -it. And to dress! . . . She needed to be fit . . . And, with violent -bitterness, she said:</p> - - -<p>"Well! I'm fit. . . ." She had an image of the aligned hundred of girls -in blue jumpers and men's ties keeping whom fit had kept her super-fit. -She wondered how many of them would be men's mistresses before the year -was out. It was August then. But perhaps none! Because she had kept them -fit. . . .</p> - -<p>"Ah!" she said, "if I had been a loose woman, with flaccid breasts and a -soft body. All perfumed!" . . . But neither Sylvia Tietjens nor Ethel -Duchemin were soft. They might be scented on occasion! But they could -not contemplate with equanimity doing a twelve mile walk to save a few -pence and dancing all night on top of it! She could! And perhaps the -price she paid was just that; she was in such hard condition she hadn't -moved him to . . . She perhaps exhaled such an aura of sobriety, -chastity and abstinence as to suggest to him that . . . that a decent -fellow didn't get his girl into trouble before going to be killed. . . . -Yet if he were such a town bull! . . . She wondered how she knew such -phrases. . . .</p> - -<p>The sordid and aligned houses seemed to rush past her in the mean August -sunshine. That was because if you thought hard time went quicker; or -because after you noticed the paper shop at this corner you would be up -to the boxes of onions outside the shop of the next corner before you -noticed anything else.</p> - -<p>She was in Kensington Gardens, on the north side; she had left the poor -shops behind. . . . In sham country, with sham lawns, sham avenues, sham -streams. Sham people pursuing their ways across the sham grass. Or no! -Not sham! In a vacuum! No! "Pasteurised" was the word! Like dead milk. -Robbed of their vitamines. . . .</p> - -<p>If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a larger pile to put -into the leering—or compassionate—taxicabman's hand after he -had helped her support her brother into the dog kennel door. Edward would -be dead drunk. She had fifteen shillings for the taxi . . . If she gave a -few coppers more it seemed generous. . . . What a day to look forward to -still! Some days were lifetimes!</p> - -<p>She would rather die than let Tietjens pay for the cab!</p> - -<p>Why? Once a taximan had refused payment for driving her and Edward all -the way to Chiswick, and she hadn't felt insulted. She had paid him; but -she hadn't felt insulted! A sentimental fellow; touched at the heart by -the pretty sister—or perhaps he didn't really believe it was a -sister—and her incapable bluejacket brother! Tietjens was a -sentimental fellow too. . . . What was the difference? . . . And then! The -mother a dead, heavy sleeper; the brother dead drunk. One in the morning! -He couldn't refuse her! Blackness: cushions! She had arranged the cushions, -she remembered. Arranged them subconsciously! Blackness! Heavy sleep; -dead drunkenness! . . . Horrible! . . . A disgusting affair! An affair -of Ealing. . . . It shall make her one with all the stuff to fill -graveyards. . . . Well, what else was she, Valentine Wannop: daughter of -her father? And of her mother? Yes! But she herself . . . Just a little -nobody!</p> - -<p>They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty. . . . But her brother -was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking treason. -At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas couldn't -for the moment concern him. . . . That 'bus touched her skirt as she ran -for the island. . . . It might have been better. . . . But one hadn't -the courage!</p> - -<p>She was looking at patterned deaths under a little green roof, such as -they put over bird shelters. Her heart stopped! Before, she had been -breathless! She was going mad. She was dying. . . . All these deaths! -And not merely the deaths. . . . The waiting for the approach of death; -the contemplation of the parting from life! This minute you were; that, -and you weren't! What was it like? Oh heaven, she knew. . . . She stood -there contemplating parting from . . . One minute you were; the -next . . . Her breath fluttered in her chest. . . . Perhaps he wouldn't -come . . .</p> - -<p>He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him and -said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and his like -responsible! . . . He had apparently a brother, a responsible one too! -Browner complexioned! . . . But he! He! He! He! completely calm; with -direct eyes. . . . It wasn't possible. "<i>Holde Lippen: klaare Augen: -heller Sinn</i>. . . ." Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And -the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn't look at you so, unless . . .</p> - -<p>She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he -belonged—more than to any browner, mere civilian, -brother!—to her! She was going to ask him! If he answered: "Yes! I -am such a man!" she was going to say: "Then you must take me too! If -them, why not me? I must have a child. I too!" She desired a child. She -would overwhelm these hateful lodestones with a flood of argument; she -imagined—she felt—the words going between her lips. . . . -She imagined her fainting mind; her consenting limbs. . . .</p> - -<p>His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings. -Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word from him. -Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence -than words can enhance a love that exists. He might as well have recited -the names of railway stations. His eyes, his unconcerned face, his -tranquil shoulders; they were what acquitted him. The greatest love -speech he had ever and could ever make her was when, harshly and -angrily, he said something like:</p> - -<p>"Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better"—brushing her aside -as if she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to -her!</p> - -<p>She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said -"Pink! pink!" The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against -her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed. . . . It was just a -problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him. . . . Good <i>for</i> him -was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like -water that goes off the boil. . . . "Waters stilled at even." Nonsense. -It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save <i>his</i> -brother. . . . Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm -feeling settled down upon her; this was <i>her</i> brother; the next to the -best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with -another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! -She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, -never so grateful as to the other—who had done nothing!</p> - -<p>Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the -blessed word Transport! "They," so Mark said: he and she—the family -feeling again—were going to get Christopher into the Transport. . . . -By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of -the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who -could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. -"Hooray!" he had written to his mother, "I've been off my feed; -recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they're putting me senior N.C.O. of -First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally -front line caboodle!" Valentine had had to read this letter in the -scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she -had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But -charity begins surely with the char! She had had to. Now she could thank -God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his -mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber -wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. "Why," one -sentence ran, "our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. -Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and -b——y hell to the man who walks across it!" There the O.C. -practised casting with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. "That'll -show you what a soft job it is!" the sergeant had finished -triumphantly. . . .</p> - -<p>So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench -against a wall; downright, healthy middle-class—or perhaps upper -middle-class—for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient -family! Over her sensible, mocassined shoes the tide of humanity flowed -before her hard bench. There were two commissionaires, the one always -benevolent, the other perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of -her; on the other, a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging -eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to -thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a -knob. She could not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to -conciliate her; but she knew she would know in a minute.</p> - -<p>For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost -mathematically symmetrical. <i>Now</i> she was an English middle-class -girl—whose mother had a sufficient income—in blue cloth, a -wideawake hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she -shouldn't have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not -ten, not five minutes ago, she had been . . . She could not even -remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a -town . . . No, she could not think the words. . . . A raging stallion -then! If now he should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand -along the table, she would retreat.</p> - -<p>It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old -man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick. . . . When the old -man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman -came out . . . It was exactly like that! She hadn't time to work out the -analogy. But it was like that. . . . In rainy weather the whole world -altered. Darkened! . . . The cat-gut that turned them slackened . . . -slackened. . . . But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the -stick!</p> - -<p>Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance:</p> - -<p>"We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother. . . ."</p> - -<p>It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how -little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr. -Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years ago. Her -mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting, Mr. Tietjens -alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it up to her. He -was making it up. In no princely fashion, but adequately, as a -gentleman.</p> - -<p>Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bell-boy came up -to him and said: "Mr. Riccardo!" Mark Tietjens said: "No! He's gone!" He -continued:</p> - -<p>"Your brother. . . . Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a -practice, a good practice! When he's a full-fledged sawbones." He -stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his umbrella -handle; he was extremely nervous.</p> - -<p>"Now you!" he said. "Two or three hundred. A year of course! The capital -absolutely your own. . . ." He paused: "But I warn you! Christopher -won't like it. He's got his knife into me. I wouldn't grudge you . . . -oh, any sum!" . . . He waved his hand to indicate an amount boundless in -its figures. "I know you keep Christopher straight," he said. "The only -person that could!" He added: "Poor devil!"</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"He's got his knife into you? Why?"</p> - -<p>He answered vaguely:</p> - -<p>"Oh, there's been all this talk. . . . Untrue, of course."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps because -there's been delay in settling the estate."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!"</p> - -<p>"Then they have been saying," she exclaimed, "things against . . . -against me. And him!"</p> - -<p>He exclaimed in anguish:</p> - -<p>"Oh, but I ask you to believe . . . I beg you to believe that I believe -. . . <i>you</i>! Miss Wannop!" He added grotesquely: "As pure as dew that -lies within Aurora's sun-tipped . . ." His eyes stuck out like those of -a suffocating fish. He said: "I beg you not on that account to hand the -giddy mitten to . . ." He writhed in his tight double collar. "His -wife!" he said . . . "She's no good to . . . <i>for</i> him! . . . She's -soppily in love with him. But no <i>good</i> . . ." He very nearly sobbed. -"You're the only . . ." he said, "I <i>know</i> . . ."</p> - -<p>It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle -des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Fivepence! But -what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year. . . . Two -hundred and forty times five. . . .</p> - -<p>Mark said brightly:</p> - -<p>"If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred. . . . You say -that's ample to give Christopher his chop. . . . And settled on her -three . . . four . . . I like to be exact . . . hundred a year. . . . -The capital of it: with remainder to you . . ." His interrogative face -beamed.</p> - -<p>She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood -Mrs. Duchemin's:</p> - -<p>"You couldn't expect us, with our official position . . . to -connive . . ." Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She <i>couldn't</i> be -expected. . . . She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! -You can't ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! . . . -It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said—to Mark:</p> - -<p>"It's as if the whole world had conspired . . . like a carpenter's -vice—to force us . . ." she was going to say "together. . . ." But he -burst in, astonishingly:</p> - -<p>"He must have his buttered toast . . . and his mutton chop . . . and -Rhum St. James!" He said: "Damn it all. . . . You were made for him. . . . -You can't blame people for coupling you. . . . They're forced to it. . . . -If you hadn't existed they'd have had to invent you . . . Like Dante -for . . . who was it? . . . Beatrice? There <i>are</i> couples like -that."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Like a carpenter's vice. . . . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven't -we resisted?"</p> - -<p>His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the -pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:</p> - -<p>"You won't . . . because of my ox's hoof . . . desert . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:—she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.</p> - -<p>"I ask you to believe that I will never . . . abandon . . ."</p> - -<p>It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. -Micawber!</p> - -<p>Christopher Tietjens—in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt -his best uniform—spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had -approached her from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she -had been turned towards Mark on his bench:</p> - -<p>"Come along! Let's get out of this!" He was, she asked herself, getting -out of this! Towards what?</p> - -<p>Like mutes from a funeral—or as if she had been, between the -brothers, a prisoner under escort—they walked down steps; half -righted towards the exit arch; one and a half righted to face Whitehall. -The brothers grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over her head. They -crossed, by the islands, Whitehall, where the 'bus had brushed her skirt. -Under an archway—</p> - -<p>In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other. Mark -said:</p> - -<p>"I suppose you won't shake hands!"</p> - -<p>Christopher said:</p> - -<p>"No! Why should I?" She herself had cried out to Christopher:</p> - -<p>"Oh, <i>do</i>!" (The wireless squares overhead no longer concerned her. -Her brother was, no doubt, getting drunk in a bar in Piccadilly. . . . A -surface coarseness!)</p> - -<p>Mark said:</p> - -<p>"Hadn't you better? You might get killed! A fellow just getting killed -would not like to think he had refused to shake his brother by the -hand!"</p> - -<p>Christopher had said: "Oh . . . well!"</p> - -<p>During her happiness over this hyperborean sentimentality he had gripped -her thin upper arm. He had led her past swans—or possibly huts; she -never remembered which—to a seat that had over it, or near it, a -weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish:</p> - -<p>"Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from -Waterloo."</p> - -<p>She had answered:</p> - -<p>"Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve. . . . I have to -see my brother home. . . . He will be drunk. . . ." She meant to say: -"Oh, my darling, I have wanted you so much. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said instead:</p> - -<p>"I have arranged the cushions. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said to herself:</p> - -<p>"Now whatever made me say that? It's as if I had said: 'You'll find the -ham in the larder under a plate. . . .' No tenderness about it. . . ."</p> - -<p>She went away, up a cockle-shelled path, between ankle-high railings, -crying bitterly. An old tramp, with red weeping eyes and a thin white -beard, regarded her curiously from where he lay on the grass. He -imagined himself the monarch of that landscape.</p> - -<p>"That's women!" he said with the apparently imbecile enigmaticality of -the old and the hardened. "Some do!" He spat into the grass; said: "Ah!" -then added: "Some do not!"</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4><a id="VI_II">VI</a></h4> - - -<p>He let himself in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind him, in -the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious -whisperings up the great stone stairs. These sounds irritated him. If -you shut a heavy door on an enclosed space it will push air in front of -it and there will be whisperings; the atmosphere of mystery was absurd. -He was just a man, returning after a night out. . . . Two-thirds, say, -of a night out! It must be half-past three. But what the night had -lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects. . . .</p> - -<p>He laid his cane down on the invisible oak chest and, through the -tangible and velvety darkness that had always in it the chill of the -stone of walls and stairs, he felt for the handle of the breakfast-room -door.</p> - -<p>Three long parallelograms existed: pale glimmerings above, cut -two-thirds of the way down by the serrations of chimney pot and -roof-shadows! Nine full paces across the heavy piled carpet; then he -ought to reach his round-backed chair, by the left-hand window. He -reached his round-backed chair by the left-hand window. He sank into it; -it fitted exactly his back. He imagined that no man had ever been so -tired and that no man had ever been so alone! A small, alive sound -existed at the other end of the room; in front of him existed one and a -half pale parallelograms. They were the reflection of the windows of the -mirror; the sound was no doubt Calton, the cat. Something alive, at any -rate! Possibly Sylvia at the other end of the room, waiting for him, to -see what he looked like. Most likely! It didn't matter!</p> - -<p>His mind stopped! Sheer weariness!</p> - -<p>When it went on again it was saying:</p> - -<p>"Naked shingles and surges drear . . ." and, "On these debatable borders -of the world!" He said sharply: "Nonsense!" The one was either <i>Calais -beach</i> or <i>Dover sands</i> of the whiskered man: Arnold. . . . He -would be seeing them both within the twenty-four hours. . . . But no! He -was going from Waterloo. Southampton, Havre, therefore! . . . The other was -by that detestable fellow: "the subject of our little monograph!" . . . -What a long time ago! . . . He saw a pile of shining despatch cases: the -inscription "<i>This rack is reserved for</i> . . .": a coloured—pink -and blue!—photograph of Boulogne sands and the held up squares, the -proofs of "our little . . ." What a long time ago! He heard his own voice -saying in the new railway carriage, proudly, clearly and with male -hardness:</p> - -<p>"<i>I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of -course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again -no talking about it</i>. . . ." His voice—his own voice—came to -him as if from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn -long-distance one! Ten years . . .</p> - -<p>If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman. . . . Damn it, he -doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent fellow. -. . . His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running -one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:</p> - -<p>"Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury," and:</p> - -<p>"Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!"</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands -didn't meet. . . . I don't believe I've shaken hands. . . . I don't -believe I've touched the girl . . . in my life. . . . Never once! . . . -Not the hand-shaking sort. . . . A nod! . . . A meeting and parting! . . . -English, you know . . . But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders. . . . -On the bank! . . . <i>On such short acquaintance!</i> I said to myself -then . . . Well, we've made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up! . . . -Atoned. . . . As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was -dying. . . ."</p> - -<p>He, his conscious self, said:</p> - -<p>"But it was probably the drunken brother. . . . You don't beguile -virgins with the broken seals of perjury in Kensington High Street at -two at night supporting, one on each side, a drunken bluejacket with -intermittent legs. . . ."</p> - -<p>"Intermittent!" was the word. "Intermittently functioning!"</p> - -<p>At one point the boy had broken from them and run with astonishing -velocity along the dull wood paving of an immense empty street. When -they had caught him up he had been haranguing under black hanging trees, -with an Oxford voice, an immobile policeman:</p> - -<p>"You're the fellows!" he'd been exclaiming, "who make old England what -she is! You keep the peace in our homes! You save us from the vile -excesses. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens himself he had always addressed with the voice and accent of a -common seaman; with his coarsened surface voice!</p> - -<p>He had the two personalities. Two or three times he had said:</p> - -<p>"Why don't you kiss the girl? She's a <i>nice</i> girl, isn't -she? You're a poor b——y Tommie, ain't cher? Well, the poor -b——y Tommies ought to have all the nice girls they want! That's -straight, isn't it? . . ."</p> - -<p>And, even at that time they hadn't known what was going to happen. . . . -There are certain cruelties. . . . They had got a four-wheel cab at -last. The drunken boy had sat beside the driver; he had insisted. . . . -Her little, pale, shrunken face had gazed straight before her. . . . It -hadn't been possible to speak; the cab, rattling all over the road had -pulled up with frightful jerks when the boy had grabbed at the -reins. . . . The old driver hadn't seemed to mind; but they had had to -subscribe all the money in their pockets to pay him after they had carried -the boy into the black house. . . .</p> - -<p>Tietjens' mind said to him:</p> - -<p>"Now when they came to her father's house so nimbly she slipped in, and -said: 'There is a fool without and is a maid within. . . .'"</p> - -<p>He answered dully:</p> - -<p>"Perhaps that's what it really amounts to. . . ." He had stood at the -hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the -sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds, -like the laughter of unknown races from darkness. He had turned and -walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"It's perhaps too . . . untidy . . ."</p> - -<p>She had said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! Yes . . . Ugly . . . Too . . . oh . . . <i>private</i>!"</p> - -<p>He said, he remembered:</p> - -<p>"But . . . for ever . . ."</p> - -<p>She said, in a great hurry:</p> - -<p>"But when you come back. . . . Permanently. And . . . oh, as if it were -in public." . . . "I don't know," she had added. "<i>Ought</i> we? . . . -I'd be ready. . . ." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask."</p> - -<p>He had said at some time: "But obviously. . . . Not under <i>this</i> -roof. . . ." And he had added: "We're the sort that . . . <i>do -not</i>!"</p> - -<p>She had answered, quickly too:</p> - -<p>"Yes—that's it. We're that sort!" And then she had asked: "And -Ethel's party? Was it a great success?" It hadn't, she knew, been an -inconsequence. He had answered:</p> - -<p>"Ah . . . <i>That's</i> permanent. . . . <i>That's</i> public. . . . -There was Rugeley. The Duke . . . Sylvia brought him. She'll be a great -friend! . . . And the President of the . . . Local Government Board, I -think . . . And a Belgian . . . equivalent to Lord Chief Justice . . . and, -of course, Claudine Sandbach. . . . Two hundred and seventy; all of the -best, the modestly-elated Guggumses said as I left! And Mr. -Ruggles . . . Yes! . . . They're established. . . . No place for me!"</p> - -<p>"Nor for <i>me</i>!" she had answered. She added: "But I'm glad!"</p> - -<p>Patches of silence ran between them: they hadn't yet got -out of the habit of thinking they had to hold up the drunken -brother. That had seemed to last for a thousand painful months. . . . -Long enough to acquire a habit. The brother seemed to roar: -"Haw—Haw—Kuryasch. . . ." And after two minutes: -"Haw—Haw—Kuryasch. . . ." Hungarian, no doubt!</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"It was splendid to see Vincent standing beside the Duke. Showing him a -first edition! Not of course <i>quite</i> the thing for a, after all, -wedding party! But how was Rugeley to know that? . . . And Vincent not in -the least servile! He even corrected cousin Rugeley over the meaning of the -word <i>colophon</i>! The first time he ever corrected a superior! . . . -Established, you see! . . . And <i>practically</i> cousin Rugeley. . . . -Dear Sylvia Tietjens' cousin, so the next to nearest thing! Wife of Lady -Macmaster's <i>oldest</i> friend. . . . Sylvia going to them in -their—quite modest!—little place in Surrey. . . . As for us," -he had concluded "they also serve who only stand and wait. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"I suppose the rooms looked lovely."</p> - -<p>He had answered:</p> - -<p>"Lovely. . . . They'd got all the pictures by that beastly fellow up -from the rectory study in the dining-room on dark oak panelling. . . . A -fair blaze of bosoms and nipples and lips and pomegranates. . . The -tallest silver candlesticks of course. . . . You remember, silver -candlesticks and dark oak. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, my dear . . . Don't . . . <i>Don't</i>!"</p> - -<p>He had just touched the rim of his helmet with his folded gloves.</p> - -<p>"So we just wash out!" he had said.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Would you take this bit of parchment. . . . I got a little Jew girl to -write on it in Hebrew:" It's "God bless you and keep you: God watch over -you at your goings out and at . . ."</p> - -<p>He tucked it into his breast pocket.</p> - -<p>"The talismanic passage," he said. "Of course I'll wear it. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"If we <i>could</i> wash out this afternoon. . . . It would make it -easier to bear. . . . Your poor mother, you know, she was dying when we -last . . ."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"You remember <i>that</i> . . . Even then you . . . And if I hadn't gone -to Lobscheid. . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"From the first moment I set eyes on you. . . ."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"And I . . . from the first moment . . . I'll tell you . . . If I looked -out of a door . . . It was all like sand. . . . But to the half left a -little bubbling up of water. That could be trusted. To keep on for ever. -. . . You, perhaps, won't understand."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"Yes! I know!"</p> - -<p>"They were seeing landscapes. . . . Sand dunes; close-cropped. . . . -Some negligible shipping; a stump-masted brig from Archangel. . . ."</p> - -<p>"From the first moment," he repeated.</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"If we <i>could</i> wash out . . ."</p> - -<p>He said, and for the first moment felt grand, tender, protective:</p> - -<p>"Yes, you <i>can</i>," he said. "You cut out from this afternoon, just -before 4.58 it was when I said that to you and you consented . . . I heard -the Horse Guards clock. . . . To now. . . . Cut it out; and join time -up. . . . It <i>can</i> be done. . . . You know they do it surgically; for -some illness; cut out a great length of the bowel and join the tube -up. . . . For colitis, I think. . . ."</p> - -<p>She said:</p> - -<p>"But I <i>wouldn't</i> cut it out. . . . It was the first spoken -sign."</p> - -<p>He said:</p> - -<p>"No it wasn't. . . . From the very beginning . . . with every -word. . . ."</p> - -<p>She exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"You felt that. . . . Too! . . . We've been pushed, as in a carpenter's -vice. . . . We couldn't have got away. . . ."</p> - -<p>He said: "By God! That's it. . . ."</p> - -<p>He suddenly saw a weeping willow in St. James's Park; 4.59! He had just -said: "Will you be my mistress to-night?" She had gone away, half left -her hands to her face. . . . A small fountain; half left. That could be -trusted to keep on for ever. . . .</p> - -<p>Along the lake side, sauntering, swinging his crooked stick, his -incredibly shiny top-hat perched sideways, his claw-hammer coat tails, -very long, flapping out behind, in dusty sunlight, his magpie pince-nez -gleaming, had come, naturally, Mr. Ruggles. He had looked at the girl; -then down at Tietjens, sprawled on his bench. He had just touched the -brim of his shiny hat. He said:</p> - -<p>"Dining at the club to-night? . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said: "No; I've resigned."</p> - -<p>With the aspect of a long-billed bird chewing a bit of putridity, -Ruggles said:</p> - -<p>"Oh, but we've had an emergency meeting of the committee . . . the -committee was sitting . . . and sent you a letter asking you to -reconsider. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens said:</p> - -<p>"I know. . . . I shall withdraw my resignation to-night. . . . And -resign again to-morrow morning."</p> - -<p>Ruggles' muscles had relaxed for a quick second, then they -stiffened.</p> - -<p>"Oh, I say!" he had said. "Not that. . . . You couldn't do that. . . . -Not to the <i>club</i>! . . . It's never been done. . . . It's an -insult. . . ."</p> - -<p>"It's meant to be," Tietjens said. "Gentlemen shouldn't be expected to -belong to a club that has certain members on its committee."</p> - -<p>Ruggles' deepish voice suddenly grew very high.</p> - -<p>"Eh, I say, you know!" he squeaked.</p> - -<p>Tietjens had said:</p> - -<p>"I'm not vindictive. . . . But I <i>am</i> deadly tired: of all old -women and their chatter."</p> - -<p>Ruggles had said:</p> - -<p>"I don't . . ." His face had become suddenly dark brown, scarlet and -then brownish purple. He stood droopingly looking at Tietjens' boots.</p> - -<p>"Oh! Ah! Well!" he said at last. "See you at Macmaster's to-night. . . . -A great thing his knighthood. First-class man. . . ."</p> - -<p>That had been the first Tietjens had heard of Macmaster's knighthood; he -had missed looking at the honours' list of that morning. Afterwards, -dining alone with Sir Vincent and Lady Macmaster, he had seen, pinned -up, a back view of the Sovereign doing something to Vincent; a photo for -next morning's papers. From Macmaster's embarrassed hushings of Edith -Ethel's explanation that the honour was for special services of a -specific kind Tietjens guessed both the nature of Macmaster's service -and the fact that the little man hadn't told Edith Ethel who, originally, -had done the work. And—just like his girl—Tietjens had let -it go at that. He didn't see why poor Vincent shouldn't have -that little bit of prestige at home—under all the monuments! But he -hadn't—though through all the evening Macmaster, with the solicitude -and affection of a cringing Italian greyhound, had hastened from celebrity -to celebrity to hang over Tietjens, and although Tietjens knew that his -friend was grieved and appalled, like any woman, at his, Tietjens', going -out again to France—Tietjens hadn't been able to look Macmaster again -in the face. . . . He had felt ashamed. He had felt, for the first time in -his life, ashamed!</p> - -<p>Even when he, Tietjens, had slipped away from the party—to go to -his good fortune!—Macmaster had come panting down the stairs, running -after him, through guests coming up. He had said:</p> - -<p>"Wait . . . You're not going. . . . I want to . . ." With a miserable -and appalled glance he had looked up the stairs; Lady Macmaster might -have come out too. His black, short beard quivering and his wretched -eyes turned down, he had said:</p> - -<p>"I wanted to explain. . . . This miserable knighthood. . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens patted him on the shoulder, Macmaster being on the stairs above -him.</p> - -<p>"It's all right, old man," he had said—and with real affection: -"We've powlered up and down enough for a little thing like that not -to . . . I'm very glad. . . ." Macmaster had whispered:</p> - -<p>"And Valentine. . . . She's not here to-night. . . ."</p> - -<p>He had exclaimed:</p> - -<p>"By God! . . . If I thought . . ." Tietjens had said: "It's all right. -It's all right. She's at another party. . . . I'm going on . . ."</p> - -<p>Macmaster had looked at him doubtingly and with misery, leaning over and -clutching the clammy banisters.</p> - -<p>"Tell her . . ." he said . . . "Good God! You may be killed. . . . I beg -you . . . I beg you to believe . . . I will . . . Like the apple of my -eye. . . ." In the swift glance that Tietjens took of his face he could -see that Macmaster's eyes were full of tears.</p> - -<p>They both stood looking down at the stone stairs for a long time.</p> - -<p>Then Macmaster had said: "Well . . ."</p> - -<p>Tietjens had said: "Well . . ." But he hadn't been able to look at -Macmaster's eyes, though he had felt his friend's eyes pitiably -exploring his own face. . . . "A backstairs way out of it," he had -thought; a queer thing that you couldn't look in the face a man you were -never going to see again!</p> - -<p>"But by God," he said to himself fiercely, when his mind came back again -to the girl in front of him, "this isn't going to be another backstairs -exit. . . . I must tell her. . . . I'm damned if I don't make an -effort. . . ."</p> - -<p>She had her handkerchief to her face.</p> - -<p>"I'm always crying," she said. . . . "A little bubbling spring that can -be trusted to keep on. . . ."</p> - -<p>He looked to the right and to the left. Ruggles or General Someone with -false teeth that didn't fit <i>must</i> be coming along. The street with -its sooty boskage was clean empty and silent. She was looking at him. He -didn't know how long he had been silent, he didn't know where he had -been; intolerable waves urged him towards her.</p> - -<p>After a long time he said:</p> - -<p>"Well . . ."</p> - -<p>She moved back. She said:</p> - -<p>"I won't watch you out of sight. . . . It is unlucky to watch anyone out -of sight. . . . But I will never . . . I will never cut what you said -then out of my memory . . ." She was gone; the door shut. He had -wondered what she would never cut out of her memory. That he had asked -her that afternoon to be his mistress?</p> - -<p>He had caught, outside the gates of his old office, a transport lorry -that had given him a lift to Holborn. . . .</p> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<h4>THE END</h4> - -<p><br /><br /><br /></p> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME DO NOT... ***</div> -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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