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.