"You know, Chris," the General said, "you're the most wonderful hand

with a horse . . . There isn't another man in England . . ."

"I know it," Tietjens said. "Go away. And send up that ambulance. . . .

There's your sister getting out of your car. . . ."

The General began:

"I've an awful lot to get explained . . ." But, at a thin scream of:

"General! General!" he pressed on his sword hilt to keep it from between

his long, black, scarlet-striped legs, and running to the car pushed

back into its door a befeathered, black bolster. He waved his hand to

Tietjens:

"I'll send the ambulance," he called.

The horse, its upper leg swathed with criss-crosses of white through

which a purple stain was slowly penetrating, stood motionless, its head

hanging down, mule-like, under the blinding sun. To ease it Tietjens

began to undo the trace. The girl hopped over the hedge and, scrambling

down, began to help him.

"Well. _My_ reputation's gone," she said cheerfully.

"I know what Lady Claudine is. . . . Why did you try to quarrel with the

General? . . ."

"Oh, you'd better," Tietjens said wretchedly, "have a law-suit with him.

It'll account for . . . for your not going to Mountby . . ."

"You think of everything," she said.

They wheeled the cart backwards off the motionless horse. Tietjens moved

it two yards forward--to get it out of sight of its own blood. Then they

sat down side by side on the slope of the bank.

"Tell me about Groby," the girl said at last.

Tietjens began to tell her about his home. . . . There was, in front of

it, an avenue that turned into the road at right angles. Just like the

one at Mountby.

"My great-great-grandfather made it," Tietjens said. "He liked privacy

and didn't want the house visible by vulgar people on the road . . .

just like the fellow who planned Mountby, no doubt. . . . But it's

beastly dangerous with motors. We shall have to alter it . . . just at

the bottom of a dip. We can't have horses hurt. . . . You'll see . . ."

It came suddenly into his head that he wasn't perhaps the father of the

child who was actually the heir to that beloved place over which

generation after generation had brooded. Ever since Dutch William! A

damn Nonconformist swine!

On the bank his knees were almost level with his chin. He felt himself

slipping down.

"If I ever take you there . . ." he began.

"Oh, but you never will," she said.

The child wasn't his. The heir to Groby! All his brother's were

childless . . . There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant

to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count

twenty-three. And there came up a whispering roar. . . . But not his

child! Perhaps he hadn't even the power to beget children. His married

brothers hadn't. . . . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury

to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility

were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss

Wannop had her arm over his shoulder.

"My dear!" she said, "you won't ever take me to Groby . . . It's

perhaps . . . oh . . . short acquaintance; but I feel you're the

splendidest . . ."

He thought: "It _is_ rather short acquaintance."

He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall,

eel-skin, blonde figure of his wife. . . .

The girl said:

"There's a fly coming!" and removed her arm.

A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General

Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted

a pound to take them to Mrs. Wannop's, waked out of his beauty sleep and

all. The knacker's cart was following.

"You'll take Miss Wannop home at once," Tietjens said, "she's got her

mother's breakfast to see to. . . . I shan't leave the horse till the

knacker's van comes."

The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip.

"Aye," he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket.

"Always the gentleman . . . a merciful man is merciful also to his

beast. . . . But I wouldn't leave my little wooden 'ut, nor miss my

breakfast, for no beast. . . . Some do and some . . . do not."

He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique conveyance.

Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight,

beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at

last, a lot of blood.

Tietjens said:

"I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want

the money. . . ."

He said:

"But it wouldn't be playing the game!"

A long time afterwards he said:

"Damn all principles!" And then:

"But one has to keep on going. . . . Principles are like a skeleton map

of a country--you know whether you're going east or north."

The knacker's cart lumbered round the corner.

PART II

I

Sylvia Tietjens rose from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along

it, carrying her plate. She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her

skirts as long as she possibly could: she didn't, she said, with her

height, intend to be taken for a girl guide. She hadn't, in complexion,

in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute. You

couldn't discover in the skin of her face any deadness: in her eyes the

shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had

purposely increased her air of scornful insolence. That was because she

felt that her hold over men increased to the measure of her coldness.

Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she

entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was

Sylvia's pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all

the women in it realised with mortification--that they needn't! For if

coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: "Nothing doing!" as

barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn't more plainly have

conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured

rubbish.

Once, on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire, where the moors come above

the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a

man had bidden her observe the demeanour of the herring gulls below.

They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with

none of the dignity of gulls. Some of them even let fall the herrings

that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the

blue motion. The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing

for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a

pale flame against the sky was a bird. The man told her that that was

some sort of fish-eagle or hawk. Its normal habit was to chase the gulls

which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon

the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water. At the moment

the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it

had been.

Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle. It

pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet

screamed and dropped their herrings . . . The whole affair reminded her

of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard. . . .

Not that there was the breath of a scandal against herself; that she

very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice

men--the "really nice men" of commerce--was her hobby.

She practiced every kind of "turning down" on these creatures: the

really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal's brown eyes,

the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and

the admirable records--as long as you didn't enquire _too_ closely.

Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man--she _had_

smiled at him in mistake for some one more trustable--had followed in a

taxi, hard on her motor, and flushed with wine, glory and the firm

conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common

property, had burst into her door from the public stairs. . . . She had

overtopped him by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she

seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that

scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: a

_chaud-froid_ effect. He had come in like a stallion, red eyed, and all

his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned

rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other.

Yet she hadn't really told him more than the way one should behave to

the wives of one's brother officers then actually in the line, a point

of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh. But it

must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother--when his mother

had been much younger, of course--speaking from paradise, and his

conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness. This, however,

had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn't, therefore,

interested her. She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains.

She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressement which

a man would develop about herself at the first glance--the amount and

the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of

the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on

introduction couldn't conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a

measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner,

diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket,

diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so,

rather more quickly away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow

stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong--from the milder note to the

more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of "turnings down." The poor

fellows next day would change their bootmakers, their sock merchants,

their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts: they would

sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with

their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that

calamity came from the fact that she hadn't deigned to look into their

eyes. . . . Perhaps hadn't dared was the right word!

Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have

been. She knew that, like her intimates--all the Elizabeths, Alixs, and

Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly journals--she

was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their intimacy as of their

eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed paper. They went about in

bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather boas floating above them,

though to be sure no one _wore_ feather boas; they shortened their hairs

and their skirts and flattened, as far as possible, their chest

developments, which _does_ give, oh, you know . . . a _certain_ . . .

They adopted demeanours as like as possible--and yet how unlike--to

those of waitresses in tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads

in police court reports of raids what _those_ are! Probably they were,

in action, as respectable as any body of women; _more_ respectable,

probably, than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly

spotless by comparison with their own upper servants whose morals,

merely as recorded in the divorce court statistics--_that_ she had from

Tietjens--would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch

villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that she was sure her butler

would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an

angel--and, as such, delicately minded--wouldn't have the face to put

down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan's offences. . . .

And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn't really even

believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn't

believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call

the _maîtresse en tître_ of any particular man. Passion wasn't, at

least, their strong suit: they left that to more--or to less--august

circles. The Duke of A . . . and all the little A's . . . might be the

children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B . . . instead of

the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A . . . Mr. C,

the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the

father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E . . . The Whig

front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes

trading off these--again French--_collages sérieux_ against the

matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and Mr. G. . . . But those

amorous of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august

politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the

parties to them didn't, for one thing, photograph well, being old,

uglyish and terribly, badly dressed. They were matter rather for the

memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for

fifty years. . . .

The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other

as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their

affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the

country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard

of such country houses, but she didn't know of any. She imagined that

they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had

patronymics ending in schen . . . stein . . . and baum. There were

getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She

had in her that much of the papist.

Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden

marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in

the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord

mayors and common councilmen. They were the product usually of

the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne--of

champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual

circumstances--fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty

marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental

lewdness.

In her own case--years ago now--she had certainly been taken advantage

of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she

acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed:

intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When; in a scare

that had been as much her mother's as her own, she had led Tietjens on

and married him in Paris to be out of the way--though it was fortunate

that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the scene

of her mother's marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an

ostensible reason!--there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very

night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see

the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with

grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and

the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been

very near death. She had wanted death.

And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper--her

mother's influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House,

her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were

recorded in gazettes--nay, she had only involuntarily to think of that

night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into

her palms and groan slightly. . . . She had to invent a chronic stitch

in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and

seemed to herself to degrade her. . . .

The miserable memory would come, ghost-like, at any time, anywhere. She

would see Drake's face, dark against the white things; she would feel

the thin night-gown lipping off her shoulder; but most of all she would

seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might

be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the

longing for the brute who had mangled her: the dreadful pain of the

mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had

seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely

without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him. . . . She

had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to

experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake. . . .

Her "turnings down" then of the really nice men, if it were a sport, was

a sport not without a spice of danger. She imagined that, after a

success, she must feel much of the exhilaration that men told her they

felt after bringing off a clean right and left, and no doubt she felt

some of the emotions that the same young men felt when they were out

shooting with beginners. Her personal chastity she now cherished much as

she cherished her personal cleanliness and persevered in her Swedish

exercises after her baths before an open window, her rides afterwards,

and her long nights of dancing which she would pursue in any room that

was decently ventilated. Indeed, the two sides of life were, in her

mind, intimately connected: she kept herself attractive by her skilfully

selected exercises and cleanlinesses: and the same fatigues, healthful

as they were, kept her in the mood for chastity of life. She had done so

ever since her return to her husband; and this not because of any

attachment to her husband or to virtue as such, as because she had made

the pact with herself out of caprice and meant to keep it. She _had_ to

have men at her feet: that was, as it were, the price of her--purely

social--daily bread: as it was the price of the daily bread of her

intimates. She was, and had been for many years, absolutely continent.

And so very likely were, and had been, all her Moiras, and Megs, and

Lady Marjories--but she was perfectly aware that they had to have, above

their assemblies as it were, a light vapour of the airs and habits of

the brothel. The public demanded that . . . a light vapour, like the

slight traces of steam that she had seen, glutinously adhering to the

top of the water in the crocodile-houses of the Zoo.

It was, indeed, the price; and she was aware that she had been lucky.

Not many of the hastily-married young women of her set really kept their

heads above water _in_ her set: for a season you would read that Lady

Marjorie and Captain Hunt, after her presentation at Court on the

occasion of her marriage, were to be seen at Roehampton, at Goodwood and

the like: photographs of the young couple, striding along with the

palings of the Row behind them, would appear for a month or so. Then the

records of their fashionable doings would transfer themselves to the

lists of the attendants and attachés of distant vice-regal courts in

tropics bad for the complexion. "And then no more of he and she," as

Sylvia put it.

In her case it hadn't been so bad, but it had been nearish. She had had

the advantage of being an only daughter of a very rich woman: her

husband wasn't just any Captain Hunt to stick on a vice-regal staff. He

was in a first-class office and when Angélique wrote notes on the young

menage she could--Angélique's ideas of these things being hazy--always

refer to the husband as the future Lord Chancellor or Ambassador to

Vienna. And their little, frightfully expensive establishment--to which

her mother, who had lived with them had very handsomely contributed--had

floated them over the first dangerous two years. They had entertained

like mad, and two much-canvassed scandals had had their beginnings in

Sylvia's small drawing-room. She had been quite established when she had

gone off with Perowne. . . .

And coming back had not been so difficult. She had expected it would be,

but it hadn't. Tietjens had stipulated for large rooms in Gray's Inn.

That hadn't seemed to her to be reasonable; but she imagined that he

wanted to be near his friend and, though she had no gratitude to

Tietjens for taking her back and nothing but repulsion from the idea of

living in his house, as they were making a bargain, she owed it to

herself to be fair. She had never swindled a railway company, brought

dutiable scent past a custom-house or represented to a second-hand

dealer that her clothes were less worn than they were, though with her

prestige she could actually have done this. It was fair that Tietjens

should live where he wished and live there they did, their very tall

windows looking straight into those of Macmaster across the Georgian

quadrangle.

They had two floors of a great building, and that gave them a great deal

of space, the breakfast-room, in which during the war they also lunched,

was an immense room, completely lined with books that were nearly all

calf-backed, with an immense mirror over an immense, carved, yellow and

white marble mantelpiece, and three windows that, in their great height,

with the spideriness of their divisions and their old, bulging

glass--some of the panes were faintly violet in age--gave to the room an

eighteenth century distinction. It suited, she admitted, Tietjens, who

was an eighteenth century figure of the Dr. Johnson type--the only

eighteenth century type of which she knew, except for that of the beau

something who wore white satin and ruffles, went to Bath and must have

been indescribably tiresome.

Above, she had a great white drawing-room, with fixings that she knew

were eighteenth century and to be respected. For Tietjens--again she

admitted--had a marvellous gift for old furniture: he despised it as

such, but he knew it down to the ground. Once when her friend Lady Moira

had been deploring the expense of having her new, little house furnished

from top to toe under the advice of Sir John Robertson, the specialist

(the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some

American), Tietjens, who had come in to tea and had been listening

without speaking, had said, with the soft good nature, rather

sentimental in tone, that once in a blue moon he would bestow on her

prettiest friends:

"You had better let me do it for you."

Taking a look round Sylvia's great drawing-room, with the white panels,

the Chinese lacquer screens, the red lacquer and ormolu cabinets and the

immense blue and pink carpet (and Sylvia knew that if only for the three

panels by a fellow called Fragonard, bought just before Fragonards had

been boomed by the late King, her drawing-room was something

remarkable). Lady Moira had said to Tietjens, rather flutteringly and

almost with the voice with which she began one of her affairs:

"Oh, if you only _would_."

He had done it, and he had done it for a quarter of the estimate of Sir

John Robertson. He had done it without effort, as if with a roll or two

of his elephantine shoulders, for he seemed to know what was in every

dealer's and auctioneer's catalogue by looking at the green halfpenny

stamp on the wrapper. And, still more astonishingly, he had made love to

Lady Moira--they had stopped twice with the Moiras in Gloucestershire

and the Moiras had three times week-ended with Mrs. Satterthwaite as the

Tietjens' _invités_. . . . Tietjens had made love to Lady Moira quite

prettily and sufficiently to tide Moira over until she was ready to

begin her affair with Sir William Heathly.

For the matter of that, Sir John Robertson, the specialist in old

furniture, challenged by Lady Moira to pick holes in her beautiful

house, had gone there, poked his large spectacles against cabinets,

smelt the varnish of table tops and bitten the backs of chairs in his

ancient and short-sighted way, and had then told Lady Moira that

Tietjens had bought her nothing that wasn't worth a bit more than he had

given for it. This increased their respect for the old fellow: it

explained his several millions. For, if the old fellow proposed to make

out of a friend like Moira a profit of 300 per cent.--limiting it to

that out of sheer affection for a pretty woman--what wouldn't he make

out of a natural--and national--enemy like a United States senator!

And the old man took a great fancy to Tietjens himself--which Tietjens,

to Sylvia's bewilderment, did not resent. The old man would come in to

tea and, if Tietjens were present, would stay for hours talking about

old furniture. Tietjens would listen without talking. Sir John would

expatiate over and over again about this to Mrs. Tietjens. It was

extraordinary. Tietjens went purely by instinct: by taking a glance at a

thing and chancing its price. According to Sir John one of the most

remarkable feats of the furniture trade had been Tietjens' purchase of

the Hemingway bureau for Lady Moira. Tietjens, in his dislikeful way,

had bought this at a cottage sale for £3 10s., and had told Lady Moira

it was the best piece she would ever possess: Lady Moira had gone to the

sale with him. Other dealers present had hardly looked at it: Tietjens

certainly hadn't opened it. But at Lady Moira's, poking his spectacles

into the upper part of the glazed piece, Sir John had put his nose

straight on the little bit of inserted yellow wood by a hinge, bearing

signature, name and date: "Jno. Hemingway, Bath, 1784." Sylvia

remembered them because Sir John told her so often. It was a lost

"piece" that the furnishing world had been after for many years.

For that exploit the old man seemed to love Tietjens. That he loved

Sylvia herself, she was quite aware. He fluttered round her tremulously,

gave fantastic entertainments in her honour and was the only man she had

never turned down. He had a harem, so it was said, in an enormous house

at Brighton or somewhere. But it was another sort of love he bestowed on

Tietjens: the rather pathetic love that the aged bestow on their

possible successors in office.

Once Sir John came into tea and quite formally and with a sort of

portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and

that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should

come into partnership with him with the reversion of the business--not,

of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking

a detail or two of Sir John's proposed arrangement. Then he had said,

with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a

pretty woman, that he didn't think it would do. There would be too much

beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him

than his office . . . but there was too much beastly money about it.

Once more, a little to Sylvia's surprise--but men are queer

creatures!--Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable,

though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with

a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn't have Tietjens he couldn't;

and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going

to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce

on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had

entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that

Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old

furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia

a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens _did_ come to be in want

of money . . .

Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people--as they sometimes

did--told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely

unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of

caprice--like her own and, since she knew that most of her own

manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of

thinking much about him.

But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a

consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This

came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of

Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had

discussed the change at Lobscheid--or rather when Sylvia had

unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!--he had

predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the

affair of her mother's cousin's opera box that had most impressed her.

He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering

with her social level, and he was convinced that he was not going to. He

had thought about it a good deal.

She hadn't much listened to him. She had thought, firstly, that he was a

fool and, secondly, that he _did_ mean to hurt her. And she acknowledged

that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with another

man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his name

and the shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms.

Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such

equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure.

But at Lobscheid he had talked a lot of nonsense, as it had seemed to

her: a mixture of prophecy and politics. The Chancellor of the Exchequer

of that date had been putting pressure on the great landlords: the great

landlords had been replying by cutting down their establishments and

closing their town houses--not to any great extent, but enough to make a

very effective gesture of it, and so as to raise a considerable clamour

from footmen and milliners. The Tietjens--both of them--were of the

great landowning class: they could adopt that gesture of shutting up

their Mayfair house and going to live in a wilderness. All the more if

they made their wilderness a thoroughly comfortable affair!

He had counselled her to present this aspect of the matter to her

mother's cousin, the morosely portentous Rugeley. Rugeley was a great

landowner--almost the greatest of all; and he was a landowner obsessed

with a sense of his duties both to his dependants and his even remote

relatives. Sylvia had only, Tietjens said, to go to the Duke and tell

him that the Chancellor's exactions had forced them to this move, but

that they had done it partly as a protest, and the Duke would accept it

almost as a personal tribute to himself. _He_ couldn't, even as a

protest, be expected to shut up Mexborough or reduce his expenses. But,

if his humbler relatives spiritedly did, he would almost certainly make

it up to them. And Rugeley's favours were on the portentous scale of

everything about him. "I shouldn't wonder," Tietjens had said, "if he

didn't lend you the Rugeley box to entertain in."

And that is exactly what had happened.

The Duke--who must have kept a register of his remotest cousins--had,

shortly before their return to London, heard that this young couple had

parted with every prospect of a large and disagreeable scandal. He had

approached Mrs. Satterthwaite--for whom he had a gloomy affection--and

he had been pleased to hear that the rumour was a gross libel. So that,

when the young couple actually turned up again--from Russia!--Rugeley,

who perceived that they were not only together, but to all appearances

quite united, was determined not only to make it up to them, but to

show, in order to abash their libellers as signal a mark of his favour

as he could without inconvenience to himself. He, therefore,

twice--being a widower--invited Mrs. Satterthwaite to entertain for him,

Sylvia to invite the guests, and then had Mrs. Tietjens' name placed on

the roll of those who could have the Rugeley box at the opera, on

application at the Rugeley estate office, when it wasn't wanted. This

was a very great privilege and Sylvia had known how to make the most if

it.

On the other hand, on the occasion of their conversation at Lobscheid,

Tietjens had prophesied what at the time seemed to her a lot of tosh. It

had been two or three years before, but Tietjens had said that about the

time grouse-shooting began, in 1914, a European conflagration would take

place which would shut up half the houses in Mayfair and beggar their

inhabitants. He had patiently supported his prophecy with financial

statistics as to the approaching bankruptcy of various European powers

and the growingly acquisitive skill and rapacity of the inhabitants of

Great Britain. She had listened to that with some attention: it had

seemed to her rather like the usual nonsense talked in country

houses--where, irritatingly, he never talked. But she liked to be able

to have a picturesque fact or two with which to support herself when she

too, to hold attention, wanted to issue moving statements as to

revolutions, anarchies and strife in the offing. And she had noticed

that when she magpied Tietjens' conversations more serious men in

responsible positions were apt to argue with her and to pay her more

attention than before. . . .

And now, walking along the table with her plate in her hand, she could

not but acknowledge that, triumphantly--and very comfortably for

her!--Tietjens had been right! In the third year of the war it was very

convenient to have a dwelling, cheap, comfortable, almost august and so

easy to work that you could have, at a pinch, run it with one maid,

though the faithful Hullo Central had not let it come to that yet. . . .

Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold

cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad: she wavered a little to

one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents

fly at Tietjens' head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted

slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace.

"I'm bored," she said. "Bored! Bored!"

Tietjens had moved slightly as she had thrown: the cutlets and most of

the salad leaves had gone over his shoulder. But one, couched, very

green leaf was on his shoulder-strap, and the oil and vinegar from the

plate--Sylvia _knew_ that she took too much of all condiments--had

splashed from the revers of his tunic to his green staff-badges. She was

glad that she had hit him as much as that: it meant that her

marksmanship had not been quite rotten. She was glad, too, that she had

missed him. She was also supremely indifferent. It had occurred to her

to do it and she had done it. Of that she was glad!

She looked at herself for some time in the mirror of bluish depths. She

pressed her immense bandeaux with both hands on to her ears. She was all

right: high-featured: alabaster complexion--but that was mostly the

mirror's doing--beautiful, long, cool hands--what man's forehead

wouldn't long for them? . . . And that hair! What man wouldn't think of

it, unloosed on white shoulders! . . . Well, Tietjens wouldn't! Or,

perhaps, he did . . . she hoped he did, curse him, for he never saw that

sight. Obviously sometimes, at night, with a little whisky taken he must

want to!

She rang the bell and bade Hullo Central sweep the plateful from the

carpet; Hullo Central, tall and dark, looking with wide-open eyes,

motionlessly at nothing.

Sylvia went along the bookshelves, pausing over a book back, "_Vitae

Hominum Notiss_ . . ." in gilt, irregular capitals pressed deep into the

old leather. At the first long window she supported herself by the

blind-cord. She looked out and back into the room.

"There's that veiled woman!" she said, "going into eleven. . . . It's

two o'clock, of course. . . ."

She looked at her husband's back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was

getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn't going to miss a motion or

a stiffening.

"I've found out who it is!" she said, "and who she goes to. I got it out

of the porter." She waited. Then she added:

"It's the woman you travelled down from Bishop's Auckland with. On the

day war was declared."

Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that

out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing.

His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since

he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust

heaps. He said:

"So you saw me!" But that, too, was mere politeness.

She said:

"Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine's saw you! It was old

Campion who said she was a Mrs. . . . I've forgotten the name."

Tietjens said:

"I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the corridor!"

She said:

"Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster's, or the mistress of both of

you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common. . . . She's got

a mad husband, hasn't she? A clergyman."

Tietjens said:

"She hasn't!"

Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in

these discussions never manœuvred for position, said:

"She has been Mrs. Macmaster over six months."

Sylvia said:

"She married him then the day after her husband's death."

She drew a long breath and added:

"I don't care. . . . She has been coming here every Friday for three

years. . . . I tell you I shall expose her unless that little beast pays

you to-morrow the money he owes you. . . . God knows you need it!" She

said then hurriedly, for she didn't know how Tietjens might take that

proposition:

"Mrs. Wannop rang up this morning to know who was . . . oh! . . . the

evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. Who, by the by, is Mrs. Wannop's

secretary? She wants to see you this afternoon. About war babies!"

Tietjens said:

"Mrs. Wannop hasn't got a secretary. It's her daughter who does her

ringing-up."

"The girl," Sylvia said, "you were so potty about at that horrible

afternoon Macmaster gave. Has she had a war baby by you? They all say

she's your mistress."

Tietjens said:

"No, Miss Wannop isn't my mistress. Her mother has had a commission to

write an article about war babies. I told her yesterday there weren't

any war babies to speak of, and she's upset because she won't be able to

make a sensational article. She wants to try and make me change my

mind."

Sylvia said:

"It _was_ Miss Wannop at that beastly affair of your friend's?" Sylvia

asked. "And I suppose the woman who received was Mrs. What's-er-name:

your other mistress. An unpleasant show. I don't think much of your

taste. The one where all the horrible geniuses in London were? There was

a man like a rabbit talked to me about how to write poetry."

"That's no good as an identification of the party," Tietjens said.

"Macmaster gives a party every Friday, not Saturday. He has for years.

Mrs. Macmaster goes there every Friday. To act as hostess. She has for

years. Miss Wannop goes there every Friday after she has done work for

her mother. To support Mrs. Macmaster. . . ."

"She has for years!" Sylvia mocked him. "And you go there every Friday!

to croodle over Miss Wannop. Oh, Christopher!"--she adopted a mock

pathetic voice--"I never did have much opinion of your taste . . . but

not _that_! Don't let it be that. Put her back. She's too young for

you. . . ."

"All the geniuses in London," Tietjens continued equably, "go to

Macmaster's every Friday. He has been trusted with the job of giving

away Royal Literary Bounty money: that's why they go. They go: that's

why he was given his C.B."

"I should not have thought they counted," Sylvia said.

"Of course they count," Tietjens said. "They write for the Press. They

can get anybody anything . . . except themselves!"

"Like you!" Sylvia said; "exactly like you! They're a lot of bribed

squits."

"Oh, no," Tietjens said. "It isn't done obviously or discreditably.

Don't believe that Macmaster distributes forty-pounders yearly of bounty

on condition that he gets advancement. He hasn't, himself, the least

idea of how it works, except by his atmosphere."

"I never knew a beastlier atmosphere," Sylvia said. "It _reeked_ of

rabbit's food."

"You're quite mistaken," Tietjens said; "that is the Russian leather of

the backs of the specially bound presentation copies in the _large_

bookcase."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Sylvia said. "What _are_

presentation copies? I should have thought you'd had enough of the

beastly Russian smells Kiev stunk of."

Tietjens considered for a moment.

"No! I don't remember it," he said. "Kiev? . . . Oh, it's where we

were . . ."

"You put half your mother's money," Sylvia said, "into the Government of

Kiev 12½ per cent. City Tramways. . . ."

At that Tietjens certainly winced, a type of wincing that Sylvia hadn't

wanted.

"You're not fit to go out to-morrow," she said. "I shall wire to old

Campion."

"Mrs. Duchemin," Tietjens said woodenly. "Mrs. Macmaster that is, also

used to burn a little incense in the room before the parties. . . .

Those Chinese stinks . . . what do they call them? Well, it doesn't

matter"; he added that resignedly. Then he went on: "Don't you make any

mistake. Mrs. Macmaster is a very superior woman. Enormously efficient!

Tremendously respected. I shouldn't advise even you to come up against

her, now she's in the saddle."

Mrs. Tietjens said:

"_That_ sort of woman!"

Tietjens said:

"I don't say you ever will come up against her. Your spheres differ.

But, if you do, don't. . . . I say it because you seem to have got your

knife into her."

"I don't like that sort of thing going on under my windows," Sylvia

said.

Tietjens said:

"What sort of thing? . . . I was trying to tell you a little about Mrs.

Macmaster . . . she's like the woman who was the mistress of the man who

burned the other fellow's horrid book. . . . I can't remember the

names."

Sylvia said quickly:

"Don't try!" In a slower tone she added: "I don't in the least want to

know. . . ."

"Well, she was an Egeria!" Tietjens said. "An inspiration to the

distinguished. Mrs. Macmaster is all that. The geniuses swarm round her,

and with the really select ones she corresponds. She writes superior

letters, about the Higher Morality usually; very delicate in feeling.

Scotch naturally. When they go abroad she sends them snatches of London

literary happenings; well done, mind you! And then, every now and then,

she slips in something she wants Macmaster to have. But with great

delicacy. . . . Say it's this C.B. . . . she transfuses into the minds

of Genius One, Two and Three the idea of a C.B. for Macmaster. . . .

Genius No One lunches with the Deputy Sub-Patronage Secretary, who looks

after literary honours and lunches with geniuses to get the

gossip. . . ."

"Why," Sylvia said, "did you lend Macmaster all that money?" Sylvia

asked. . . .

"Mind you," Tietjens continued his own speech, "it's perfectly proper.

That's the way patronage _is_ distributed in this country; it's the way

it should be. The only clean way. Mrs. Duchemin backs Macmaster because

he's a first-class fellow for his job. And _she_ is an influence over

the geniuses because she's a first-class person for hers. . . . She

represents the higher, nicer morality for really nice Scots. Before long

she will be getting tickets stopped from being sent to people for the

Academy soirées. She already does it for the Royal Bounty dinners. A

little later, when Macmaster is knighted for bashing the French in the

eye, she'll have a tiny share in auguster assemblies. . . . Those people

have to ask _somebody_ for advice. Well, one day you'll want to present

some débutante. And you won't get a ticket. . . ."

"Then I'm glad," Sylvia exclaimed, "that I wrote to Brownie's uncle

about the woman. I was a little sorry this morning because, from what

Glorvina told me, you're in such a devil of a hole. . . ."

"Who's Brownie's uncle?" Tietjens asked. "Lord . . . Lord . . . The

banker! I know Brownie's in his uncle's bank."

"Port Scatho!" Sylvia said. "I wish you wouldn't act forgetting people's

names. You overdo it."

Tietjens' face went a shade whiter. . . .

"Port Scatho," he said, "is the chairman of the Inn Billeting

Committees, of course. And you wrote to him? . . ."

"I'm sorry," Sylvia said. "I mean I'm sorry I said that about your

forgetting. . . . I wrote to him and said that as a resident of the Inn

I objected to your mistress--he knows the relationship, of

course!--creeping in every Friday under a heavy veil and creeping out

every Saturday at four in the morning."

"Lord Port Scatho knows about my relationship," Tietjens began.

"He saw her in your arms in the train," Sylvia said. "It upset Brownie

so much he offered to shut down your overdraft and return any cheques

you had out marked R.D."

"To please you?" Tietjens asked. "_Do_ bankers do that sort of thing?

It's a new light on British society. . . ."

"I suppose bankers try to please their women friends, like other men,"

Sylvia said. "I told him very emphatically it wouldn't please me. . .

But . . ." She hesitated: "I wouldn't give him a chance to get back on

you. I don't want to interfere in your affairs. But Brownie doesn't like

you. . . ."

"He wants you to divorce me and marry him?" Tietjens asked.

"How did you know?" Sylvia asked indifferently. "I let him give me lunch

now and then because it's convenient to have him manage my affairs, you

being away. . . . But of course he hates you for being in the army. All

the men who aren't hate all the men that are. And, of course, when

there's a woman between them the men who aren't do all they can to do

the others in. When they're bankers they have a pretty good pull. . . ."

"I suppose they have," Tietjens said, vaguely; "of course they would

have. . . ."

Sylvia abandoned the blind-cord on which she had been dragging with one

hand. In order that light might fall on her face and give more

impressiveness to her words, for, in a minute or two, when she felt

brave enough, she meant really to let him have her bad news!--she

drifted to the fireplace. He followed her round, turning on his chair to

give her his face.

She said:

"Look here, it's all the fault of this beastly war, isn't it? Can you

deny it? . . . I mean that decent, gentlemanly fellows like Brownie have

turned into beastly squits!"

"I suppose it is," Tietjens said dully. "Yes, certainly it is. You're

quite right. It's the incidental degeneration of the heroic impulse: if

the heroic impulse has too even a strain put on it the incidental

degeneration gets the upper hand. That accounts for the Brownies . . .

all the Brownies . . . turning squits. . . ."

"Then why do you go on with it?" Sylvia said. "God knows I could wangle

you out if you'd back me in the least little way."

Tietjens said:

"Thanks! I prefer to remain in it. . . . How else am I to get a

living? . . ."

"You know then," Sylvia exclaimed almost shrilly. "You know that they

won't have you back in the office if they can find a way of getting you

out. . . ."

"Oh, they'll find that!" Tietjens said. . . . He continued his other

speech: "When we go to war with France," he said dully. . . . And Sylvia

knew he was only now formulating his settled opinion so as not to have

his active brain to give to the discussion. He must be thinking hard of

the Wannop girl! With her littleness: her tweed-skirtishness. . . . A

provincial miniature of herself, Sylvia Tietjens. . . . If she, then,

had been miniature, provincial. . . . But Tietjens' words cut her as if

she had been lashed with a dog-whip. "We shall behave more creditably,"

he had said, "because there will be less heroic impulse about it. We

shall . . . half of us . . . be ashamed of ourselves. So there will be

much less incidental degeneration."

Sylvia who, by that was listening to him, abandoned the consideration of

Miss Wannop and the pretence that obsessed her, of Tietjens talking to

the girl, against a background of books at Macmaster's party. She

exclaimed:

"Good God! What are you talking about? . . ."

Tietjens went on:

"About our next war with France. . . . We're the natural enemies of the

French. We have to make our bread either by robbing them or making

catspaws of them. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"We can't! We couldn't . . ."

"We've got to!" Tietjens said. "It's the condition of our existence.

We're a practically bankrupt, over-populated, northern country: they're

rich southerners, with a falling population. Towards 1930 we shall have

to do what Prussia did in 1914. Our conditions will be exactly those of

Prussia then. It's the . . . what is it called? . . ."

"But . . ." Sylvia cried out. "You're a Franco-maniac. . . . You're

thought to be a French agent. . . . That's what's bitching your career!"

"I am?" Tietjens asked uninterestedly. He added: "Yes, that probably

_would_ bitch my career. . . ." He went on, with a little more animation

and a little more of his mind:

"Ah! _that_ will be a war worth seeing. . . . None of their drunken

rat-fighting for imbecile boodlers . . ."

"It would drive mother mad!" Sylvia said.

"Oh, no it wouldn't," Tietjens said. "It will stimulate her if she is

still alive. . . . Our heroes won't be drunk with wine and lechery: our

squits won't stay at home and stab the heroes in the back. Our Minister

for Water-closets won't keep two and a half million men in any base in

order to get the votes of their women at a General Election--that's been

the first evil effects of giving women the vote! With the French holding

Ireland and stretching in a solid line from Bristol to Whitehall, we

should hang the Minister before he had time to sign the papers. And we

should be decently loyal to our Prussian allies and brothers. . . . Our

Cabinet won't hate them as they hate the French for being frugal and

strong in logic and well-educated and remorselessly practical. Prussians

are the sort of fellows you can be hoggish with when you want to. . . ."

Sylvia interjected violently:

"For God's sake stop it. You almost make me believe what you say is

true. I tell you mother would go mad. Her greatest friend is the

Duchesse Tonnerre Châteaulherault. . . ."

"Well!" Tietjens said. "Your greatest friends are the Med . . .

Med . . . the Austrian officers you take chocolates and flowers to. That

there was all the row about . . . we're at war with _them_ and you haven't

gone mad!"

"I don't know," Sylvia said. "Sometimes I think I am going mad!" She

drooped. Tietjens, his face very strained, was looking at the

tablecloth. He muttered: "Med . . . Met . . . Kos . . ." Sylvia said:

"Do you know a poem called _Somewhere_? It begins: 'Somewhere or other

there must surely be . . .'"

Tietjens said:

"I'm sorry. No! I haven't been able to get up my poetry again."

Sylvia said:

"_Don't!_" She added: "you've got to be at the War Office at 4.15,

haven't you? What's the time now?" She extremely wanted to give him her

bad news before he went; she extremely wanted to put off giving it as

long as she could. She wanted to reflect on the matter first; she wanted

also to keep up a desultory conversation, or he might leave the room.

She didn't want to have to say to him: "Wait a minute, I've something to

say to you!" for she might not, at that moment, be in the mood. He said

it was not yet two. He could give her an hour and a half more.

To keep the conversation going, she said:

"I suppose the Wannop girl is making bandages or being a Waac. Something

forceful."

Tietjens said:

"No; she's a pacifist. As pacifist as you. Not so impulsive; but, on the

other hand, she has more arguments. I should say she'll be in prison

before the war's over. . . ."

"A nice time you must have between the two of us," Sylvia said. The

memory of her interview with the great lady nicknamed Glorvina--though

it was not at all a good nickname--was coming over her forcibly.

She said:

"I suppose you're always talking it over with her? You see her every

day."

She imagined that that might keep him occupied for a minute or two. He

said--she caught the sense of it only--and quite indifferently that he

had tea with Mrs. Wannop every day. She had moved to a place called

Bedford Park, which was near his office: not three minutes' walk. The

War Office had put up a lot of huts on some public green in that

neighbourhood. He only saw the daughter once a week, at most. They never

talked about the war; it was too disagreeable a subject for the young

woman. Or rather, too painful. . . . His talk gradually drifted into

unfinished sentences. . . .

They played that comedy occasionally, for it is impossible for two

people to live in the same house and not have some common meeting

ground. So they would each talk: sometimes talking at great length and

with politeness, each thinking his or her thoughts till they drifted

into silence.

And, since she had acquired the habit of going into retreat--with an

Anglican sisterhood in order to annoy Tietjens, who hated converts and

considered that the communions should not mix--Sylvia had acquired also

the habit of losing herself almost completely in reveries. Thus she was

now vaguely conscious that a greyish lump, Tietjens, sat at the head of

a whitish expanse: the lunch-table. There were also books . . . actually

she was seeing a quite different figure and other books--the books of

Glorvina's husband, for the great lady had received Sylvia in that

statesman's library.

Glorvina, who was the mother of two of Sylvia's absolutely most intimate

friends, had sent for Sylvia. She wished, kindly and even wittily, to

remonstrate with Sylvia because of her complete abstention from any

patriotic activity. She offered Sylvia the address of a place in the

city where she could buy wholesale and ready-made diapers for babies

which Sylvia could present to some charity or other as being

her own work. Sylvia said she would do nothing of the sort, and

Glorvina said she would present the idea to poor Mrs. Pilsenhauser.

She--Glorvina--said she spent some time every day thinking out acts of

patriotism for the distressed rich with foreign names, accents or

antecedents. . . .

Glorvina was a fiftyish lady with a pointed, grey face and a hard

aspect; but when she was inclined to be witty or to plead earnestly she

had a kind manner. The room in which they were was over a Belgravia back

garden. It was lit by a skylight and the shadows from above deepened the

lines of her face, accentuating the rather dusty grey of the hair as

well as both the hardness and the kind manner. This very much impressed

Sylvia, who was used to seeing the lady by artificial light. . . .

She said, however:

"You don't suggest, Glorvina, that I'm the distressed rich with a

foreign name!"

The great lady had said:

"My dear Sylvia; it isn't so much you as your husband. Your last exploit

with the Esterhazys and Metternichs has pretty well done for _him_. You

forget that the present powers that be are not logical. . . ."

Sylvia remembered that she had sprung up from her leather saddle-back

chair, exclaiming:

"You mean to say that those unspeakable swine think that _I'm_ . . ."

Glorvina said patiently:

"My dear Sylvia, I've already said it's not you. It's your husband that

suffers. He appears to be too good a fellow to suffer. Mr. Waterhouse

says so. I don't know him myself, well."

Sylvia remembered that she had said:

"And who in the world is Mr. Waterhouse?" and, hearing that Mr.

Waterhouse was a late Liberal Minister, had lost interest. She couldn't,

indeed, remember any of the further words of her hostess, as words. The

sense of them had too much overwhelmed her. . . .

She stood now, looking at Tietjens and only occasionally seeing him, her

mind completely occupied with the effort to recapture Glorvina's own

words in the desire for exactness. Usually she remembered conversations

pretty well; but on this occasion her mad fury, her feeling of nausea,

the pain of her own nails in her palms, an unrecoverable sequence of

emotions had overwhelmed her.

She looked at Tietjens now with a sort of gloating curiosity. How was it

possible that the most honourable man she knew should be so overwhelmed

by foul and baseless rumours? It made you suspect that honour had, in

itself, a quality of the evil eye. . . .

Tietjens, his face pallid, was fingering a piece of toast. He muttered:

"Met . . . Met . . . It's Met . . ." He wiped his brow with a

table-napkin, looked at it with a start, threw it on the floor and

pulled out a handkerchief. . . . He muttered: "Mett . . . Metter . . ."

His face illuminated itself like the face of a child listening at a

shell.

Sylvia screamed with a passion of hatred:

"For God's sake say _Metternich_ . . . you're driving me mad!"

When she looked at him again his face had cleared and he was walking

quickly to the telephone in the corner of the room. He asked her to

excuse him and gave a number at Ealing. He said after a moment:

"Mrs. Wannop? Oh! My wife has just reminded me that Metternich was the

evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. . . ." He said: "Yes! Yes!", and

listened. After a time he said: "Oh, you could put it stronger than

that. You could put it that the Tory determination to ruin Napoleon at

all costs was one of those pieces of party imbecility that, etc. . . .

Yes; Castlereagh. And of course Wellington. . . . I'm very sorry I must

ring off. . . . Yes; to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo. . . . No; I

_shan't_ be seeing her again. . . . No; she's made a mistake. . . . Yes;

give her my love . . . good-bye." He was reversing the earpiece to hang

it up, but a high-pitched series of yelps from the instrument forced it

back to his ear: "Oh! _War babies_!" he exclaimed. "I've already sent

the statistics off to you! No! there _isn't_ a marked increase of the

illegitimacy rate, except in patches. The rate's appallingly high in the

lowlands of Scotland; but it always _is_ appallingly high there . . ."

He laughed and said good-naturedly: "Oh, you're an old journalist: you

won't let fifty quid go for that . . ." He was breaking off. But:

"_Or_," he suddenly exclaimed, "here's another idea for you. The rate's

about the same, probably because of this: half the fellows who go out to

France are reckless because it's the last chance, as they see it. But

the other half are made twice as conscientious. A decent Tommie thinks

twice about leaving his girl in trouble just before he's killed. . . .

The divorce statistics are up, of course, because people will chance

making new starts within the law. . . . Thanks . . . thanks . . ." He

hung up the earpiece. . . .

Listening to that conversation had extraordinarily cleared Sylvia's

mind. She said, almost sorrowfully:

"I suppose that that's why you don't seduce that girl." And she

knew--she had known at once from the suddenly changed inflection of

Tietjens' voice when he had said "a decent Tommie thinks twice before

leaving his girl in trouble"!--that Tietjens himself had thought twice.

She looked at him now almost incredulously, but with great coolness. Why

_shouldn't_ he, she asked herself, give himself a little pleasure with

his girl before going to almost certain death. . . . She felt a real,

sharp pain at her heart. . . . A poor wretch in such a devil of a

hole. . . .

She had moved to a chair close beside the fireplace and now sat looking

at him, leaning interestedly forward, as if at a garden party she had

been finding--_par impossible_!--a pastoral play not so badly produced.

Tietjens was a fabulous monster. . . .

He was a fabulous monster not because he was honourable and virtuous.

She had known several very honourable and very virtuous men. If she had

never known an honourable or virtuous woman except among her French or

Austrian friends, that was, no doubt, because virtuous and honourable

women did not amuse her or because, except just for the French and

Austrians, they were not Roman Catholics. . . . But the honourable and

virtuous men she had known had usually prospered and been respected.

They weren't the great fortunes, but they were well-offish: well spoken

of: of the country gentleman type . . . Tietjens. . . .

She arranged her thoughts. To get one point settled in her mind, she

asked:

"What really happened to you in France? What is really the matter with

your memory? Or your brain, is it?"

He said carefully:

"It's half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale.

Without a proper blood supply. . . . So a great portion of it, in the

shape of memory, has gone."

She said:

"But _you_! . . . without a brain! . . ." As this was not a question he

did not answer.

His going at once to the telephone, as soon as he was in the possession

of the name "Metternich," had at last convinced her that he had not

been, for the last four months, acting hypochondriacal or merely lying

to obtain sympathy or extended sick leave. Amongst Sylvia's friends a

wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved

of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her

women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over

there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended

by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival

of lying, lechery, drink and howling that this affair was, to pretend to

a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous. At any

rate if a man passed his time at garden parties--or, as for the last

months Tietjens had done, passed his time in a tin hut amongst dust

heaps, going to tea every afternoon in order to help Mrs. Wannop with

her newspaper articles--when men were so engaged they were, at least,

not trying to kill each other.

She said now:

"Do you mind telling me what actually happened to you?"

He said:

"I don't know that I can very well. . . . Something burst--or 'exploded'

is probably the right word--near me, in the dark. I expect you'd rather

not hear about it? . . ."

"I want to!" Sylvia said.

He said:

"The point about it is that I _don't_ know what happened and I don't

remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life dead. . . . What I

remember is being in a C.C.S. and not being able to remember my own

name."

"You _mean_ that?" Sylvia asked. "It's not just a way of talking?"

"No, it's not just a way of talking," Tietjens answered. "I lay in bed

in the C.C.S. . . . Your friends were dropping bombs on it."

"You might not call them my friends," Sylvia said.

Tietjens said:

"I beg your pardon. One gets into a loose way of speaking. The poor

bloody Huns then were dropping bombs from aeroplanes on the hospital

huts. . . . I'm not suggesting they knew it was a C.C.S.; it was, no

doubt, just carelessness. . . ."

"You needn't spare the Germans for me!" Sylvia said. "You needn't spare

any man who has killed another man."

"I was, then, dreadfully worried," Tietjens went on. "I was composing a

preface for a book on Arminianism. . . ."

"You haven't written a book!" Sylvia exclaimed eagerly, because she

thought that if Tietjens took to writing a book there might be a way of

his earning a living. Many people had told her that he ought to write a

book.

"No, I hadn't written a book," Tietjens said, "and I didn't know what

Arminianism was. . . ."

"You know perfectly well what the Arminian heresy is," Sylvia said

sharply; "you explained it all to me years ago."

"Yes," Tietjens exclaimed. "Years ago I could have, but I couldn't then.

I could now, but I was a little worried about it then. It's a little

awkward to write a preface about a subject of which you know nothing.

But it didn't seem to me to be discreditable in an army sense. . . .

Still it worried me dreadfully not to know my own name. I lay and

worried and worried and thought how discreditable it would appear if a

nurse came along and asked me and I didn't know. Of course my name was

on a luggage label tied to my collar; but I'd forgotten they did that to

casualties. . . . Then a lot of people carried pieces of a nurse down

the hut: the Germans' bombs had done that of course. They were still

dropping about the place."

"But good heavens," Sylvia cried out, "do you mean they carried a dead

nurse past you? . . ."

"The poor dear wasn't dead," Tietjens said. "I wish she had been. Her

name was Beatrice Carmichael . . . the first name I learned after my

collapse. She's dead now of course. . . . That seemed to wake up a

fellow on the other side of the room with a lot of blood coming through

the bandages on his head. . . . He rolled out of his bed and, without a

word, walked across the hut and began to strangle me. . . ."

"But this isn't believable," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry, but I can't

believe it. . . . You were an officer: they _couldn't_ have carried a

wounded nurse under your nose. They must have known your sister Caroline

was a nurse and was killed. . . ."

"Carrie!" Tietjens said, "was drowned on a hospital ship. I thank God I

didn't have to connect the other girl with her. . . . But you don't

suppose that in addition to one's name, rank, unit, and date of

admission they'd put that I'd lost a sister and two brothers in action

and a father--of a broken heart I daresay. . . ."

"But you only lost one brother," Sylvia said. "I went into mourning for

him and your sister. . . ."

"No, two," Tietjens said; "but the fellow who was strangling me was what

I wanted to tell you about. He let out a number of ear-piercing shrieks

and lots of orderlies came and pulled him off me and sat all over him.

Then he began to shout '_Faith_'! He shouted: 'Faith! . . . Faith! . . .

Faith! . . .' at intervals of two seconds, as far as I could tell by my

pulse, until four in the morning, when he died. . . . I don't know

whether it was a religious exhortation or a woman's name, but I disliked

him a good deal because he started my tortures, such as they were. . . .

There had been a girl I knew called Faith. Oh, not a love affair: the

daughter of my father's head gardener, a Scotsman. The point is that

every time he said Faith I asked myself 'Faith . . . Faith what?' I

couldn't remember the name of my father's head gardener."

Sylvia, who was thinking of other things, asked:

"What _was_ the name?"

Tietjens answered:

"I don't know, I don't know to this day. . . . The point is that when I

knew that I didn't know _that_ name, I was as ignorant, as

_uninstructed_, as a new-born babe and much more worried about it. . . .

The Koran says--I've got as far as K in my reading of the Encyclopædia

Britannica every afternoon at Mrs. Wannop's--'The strong man when

smitten is smitten in his pride!' . . . Of course I got King's Regs, and

the M.M.L. and Infantry Field Training and all the A.C.I.s to date by

heart very quickly. And that's all a British officer is really

encouraged to know. . . ."

"Oh, Christopher!" Sylvia said. "_You_ read that Encyclopædia; it's

pitiful. You used to despise it so."

"That's what's meant by 'smitten in his pride,'" Tietjens said. "Of

course what I read or hear now I remember. . . . But I haven't got to M,

much less V. That was why I was worried about Metternich and the

Congress of Vienna. I _try_ to remember things on my own, but I haven't

yet done so. You see it's as if a certain area of my brain had been

wiped white. Occasionally one name suggests another. You noticed, when I

got Metternich it suggested Castlereagh and Wellington--and even other

names. . . . But that's what the Department of Statistics will get me

on. When they fire me out. The real reason will be that I've served. But

they'll pretend it's because I've no more general knowledge than is to

be found in the Encyclopædia: or two-thirds or more or less--according

to the duration of the war. . . . Or, of course, the real reason will be

that I won't fake statistics to dish the French with. They asked me to,

the other day, as a holiday task. And when I refused you should have

seen their faces."

"Have you _really_," Sylvia asked, "lost two brothers in action?"

"Yes," Tietjens answered. "Curly and Longshanks. You never saw them

because they were always in India. And they weren't noticeable. . . ."

"_Two_!" Sylvia said. "I only wrote to your father about one called

Edward. And your sister Caroline. In the same letter. . . ."

"Carrie wasn't noticeable either," Tietjens said. "She did Charity

Organisation Society work. . . . But I remember: you didn't like her.

She was the born old maid. . . ."

"Christopher!" Sylvia asked, "do you still think your mother died of a

broken heart because I left you?"

Tietjens said:

"Good God; no. I never thought so and I don't think so. I _know_ she

didn't."

"_Then_!" Sylvia exclaimed, "she died of a broken heart because I came

back. . . . It's no good protesting that you don't think so. I remember

your face when you opened the telegram at Lobscheid. Miss Wannop

forwarded it from Rye. I remember the postmark. She was born to do me

ill. The moment you got it I could see you thinking that you must

conceal from me that you thought it was because of me she died. I could

see you wondering if it wouldn't be practicable to conceal from me that

she was dead. You couldn't, of course, do that because, you remember, we

were to have gone to Wiesbaden and show ourselves; and we couldn't do

that because we should have to be in mourning. So you took me to Russia

to get out of taking me to the funeral."

"I took you to Russia," Tietjens said. "I remember it all now--because I

had an order from Sir Robert Ingleby to assist the British

Consul-General in preparing a Blue Book statistical table of the

Government of Kiev. . . . It appeared to be the most industrially

promising region in the world in those days. It isn't now, naturally. I

shall never see back a penny of the money I put into it. I thought I was

clever in those days. . . . And of course, yes, the money was my

mother's settlement. It comes back . . . yes, of course. . . ."

"Did you," Sylvia asked, "get out of taking me to your mother's funeral

because you thought I should defile your mother's corpse by my presence?

Or because you were afraid that in the presence of your mother's body

you wouldn't be able to conceal from me that you thought I killed

her? . . . Don't deny it. And don't get out of it by saying that you can't

remember those days. You're remembering now: that I killed your mother:

that Miss Wannop sent the telegram--why don't you score it against her

that she sent the news? . . . Or, good God, why don't you score it

against yourself, as the wrath of the Almighty, that your mother was

dying while you and that girl were croodling over each other? . . . At

Rye! Whilst I was at Lobscheid. . . ."

Tietjens wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

"Well, let's drop that," Sylvia said. "God knows I've no right to put a

spoke in that girl's wheel or in yours. If you love each other you've a

right to happiness and I daresay she'll make you happy. I can't divorce

you, being a Catholic; but I won't make it difficult for you other ways,

and self-contained people like you and her will manage somehow. You'll

have learned the way from Macmaster and his mistress. . . . But, oh,

Christopher Tietjens, have you ever considered how foully you've used

_me_!"

Tietjens looked at her attentively, as if with magpie anguish.

"If," Sylvia went on with her denunciation, "you had once in our lives

said to me: 'You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in

hell for it . . . .' If you'd only once said something like it . . .

about the child! About Perowne! . . . you might have done something to

bring us together. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"That's, of course, true!"

"I know," Sylvia said, "you can't help it. . . . But when, in your

famous county family pride--though a youngest son!--you say to yourself:

And I daresay if . . . Oh, Christ! . . . you're shot in the trenches

you'll say it . . . oh, between the saddle and the ground! that you

never did a dishonourable action. . . . And, mind you, I believe that no

other man save one has ever had more right to say it than you. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"You believe that!"

"As I hope to stand before my Redeemer," Sylvia said, "I believe

it. . . . But, in the name of the Almighty, how could any woman live beside

you . . . and be for ever forgiven? Or no: not forgiven: ignored! . . .

Well, be proud when you die because of your honour. But, God, you be

humble about . . . your errors in judgment. _You_ know what it is to

ride a horse for miles with too tight a curb-chain and its tongue cut

almost in half. . . . You remember the groom your father had who had the

trick of turning the hunters out like that. . . . And you horse-whipped

him, and you've told me you've almost cried ever so often afterwards for

thinking of that mare's mouth. . . . Well! Think of _this_ mare's mouth

sometimes! You've ridden me like that for seven years. . . ."

She stopped and then went on again:

"Don't you know, Christopher Tietjens, that there is only one man from

whom a woman could take '_Neither I condemn thee_' and not hate him more

than she hates the fiend! . . ."

Tietjens so looked at her that he contrived to hold her attention.

"I'd like you to let me ask you," he said, "how I could throw stones at

you? I have never disapproved of your actions."

Her hands dropped dispiritedly to her sides.

"Oh, Christopher," she said, "don't carry on that old play acting. I

shall never see you again, very likely, to speak to; You'll sleep with

the Wannop girl to-night: you're going out to be killed to-morrow.

_Let's_ be straight for the next ten minutes or so. And give me your

attention. The Wannop girl can spare that much if she's to have all the

rest. . . ."

She could see that he was giving her his whole mind.

"As you said just now," he exclaimed slowly, "as I hope to meet my

Redeemer I believe you to be a good woman. One that never did a

dishonourable thing."

She recoiled a little in her chair.

"Then!" she said, "you're the wicked man I've always made believe to

think you, though I didn't."

Tietjens said:

"No! . . . Let me try to put it to you as I see it."

She exclaimed:

"No! . . . I've been a wicked woman. I have ruined you. I am not going

to listen to you."

He said:

"I daresay you have ruined me. That's nothing to me. I am completely

indifferent."

She cried out:

"Oh! Oh! . . . Oh!" on a note of agony.

Tietjens said doggedly:

"I don't care. I can't help it. Those are--those _should_ be--the

conditions of life amongst decent people. When our next war comes I hope

it will be fought out under those conditions. Let us, for God's sake,

talk of the gallant enemy. Always. We have _got_ to plunder the French

or millions of our people must starve: they have _got_ to resist us

successfully or be wiped out. . . . It's the same with you and

me. . . ."

She exclaimed:

"You mean to say that you don't think I was wicked when I . . . when I

trepanned is what mother calls it? . . ."

He said loudly:

"_No_! . . . You had been let in for it by some brute. I have always

held that a woman who has been let down by one man has the right--has

the duty for the sake of her child--to let down a man. It becomes woman

against man: against one man. I happened to be that one man: it was the

will of God. But you were within your rights. I will never go back on

that. Nothing will make me, ever!"

She said:

"And the others! And Perowne. . . . I know you'll say that anyone is

justified in doing anything as long as they are open enough about

it. . . . But it killed your mother. Do you disapprove of my having killed

your mother? Or you consider that I have corrupted the child. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I don't. . . . I want to speak to you about that."

She exclaimed:

"You _don't_. . . ."

He said calmly:

"You know I don't . . . while I was certain that I was going to be here

to keep him straight and an Anglican I fought your influence over him.

I'm obliged to you for having brought up of yourself the considerations

that I may be killed and that I am ruined. I am. I could not raise a

hundred pounds between now and to-morrow. I am, therefore, obviously not

the man to have sole charge of the heir of Groby."

Sylvia was saying:

"Every penny I have is at your disposal. . . ." when the maid, Hullo

Central, marched up to her master and placed a card in his hand. He

said:

"Tell him to wait five minutes in the drawing-room."

Sylvia said:

"Who is it?"

Tietjens answered:

"A man . . . Let's get this settled. I've never thought you corrupted

the boy. You tried to teach him to tell white lies. On perfectly

straight Papist lines. I have no objection to Papists and no objection

to white lies for Papists. You told him once to put a frog in Marchant's

bath. I've no objection to a boy's putting a frog in his nurse's bath,

as such. But Marchant is an old woman, and the heir to Groby should

respect old women always and old family servants in particular. . . . It

hasn't, perhaps, struck you that the boy is heir to Groby. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"If . . . if your second brother is killed. . . . But your eldest

brother . . ."

"He," Tietjens said, "has got a French woman near Euston station. He's

lived with her for over fifteen years, of afternoons, when there were no

race meetings. She'll never let him marry and she's past the

child-bearing stage. So there's no one else. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"You mean that I may bring the child up as a Catholic."

Tietjens said:

"A _Roman_ Catholic. . . . You'll teach him, please, to use that term

before myself if I ever see him again. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"Oh, I thank God that he has softened your heart. This will take the

curse off this house."

Tietjens shook his head:

"I think not," he said, "off you, perhaps. Off Groby very likely. It

was, perhaps, time that there should be a Papist owner of Groby again.

You've read Spelden on sacrilege about Groby? . . ."

She said:

"Yes! The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine,

was pretty bad to the Papist owners. . . ."

"He was a tough Dutchman," Tietjens said, "but let us get on! There's

enough time, but not too much. . . . I've got this man to see."

"Who is he?" Sylvia asked.

Tietjens was collecting his thoughts.

"My dear!" he said. "You'll permit me to call you 'my dear'? We're old

enemies enough and we're talking about the future of our child."

Sylvia said:

"You said 'our' child, not 'the' child. . . ."

Tietjens said with a great deal of concern:

"You will forgive me for bringing it up. You might prefer to think he

was Drake's child. He can't be. It would be outside the course of

nature. . . . I'm as poor as I am because . . . forgive me . . . I've

spent a great deal of money on tracing the movements of you and Drake

before our marriage. And if it's a relief to you to know . . ."

"It _is_," Sylvia said. "I . . . I've always been too beastly shy to put

the matter before a specialist, or even before mother. . . . And we

women are so ignorant. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I know . . . I know you were too shy even to think about it yourself,

hard." He went into months and days; then he continued: "But it would

have made no difference: a child born in wedlock is by law the father's,

and if a man who's a gentleman suffers the begetting of his child he

must, in decency, take the consequences: the woman and the child must

come before the man, be he who he may. And worse-begotten children than

ours have inherited statelier names. And I loved the little beggar with

all my heart and with all my soul from the first minute I saw him. That

may be the secret clue, or it may be sheer sentimentality. . . . So I

fought your influence because it was Papist, while I was a whole man.

But I'm not a whole man any more, and the evil eye that is on me might

transfer itself to him."

He stopped and said:

"For I must to the greenwood go. Alone a banished man. . . . But have

him well protected against the evil eye. . . ."

"Oh, Christopher," she said, "it's true I've not been a bad woman to the

child. And I never will be. And I will keep Marchant with him till she

dies. You'll tell her not to interfere with his religious instruction,

and she won't. . . ."

Tietjens said with a friendly weariness:

"That's right . . . and you'll have Father . . . Father . . . the priest

that was with us for a fortnight before he was born to give him his

teachings. He was the best man I ever met and one of the most

intelligent. It's been a great comfort to me to think of the boy as in

his hands. . . ."

Sylvia stood up, her eyes blazing out of a pallid face of stone:

"Father Consett," she said, "was hung on the day they shot Casement.

They dare not put it into the papers because he was a priest and all the

witnesses Ulster witnesses. . . . And yet I may not say this is an

accursed war."

Tietjens shook his head with the slow heaviness of an aged man.

"You may for me . . ." he said. "You might ring the bell, will you?

Don't go away. . . ."

He sat with the blue gloom of that enclosed space all over him, lumped

heavily in his chair.

"Spelden on sacrilege," he said, "may be right after all. You'd say so

from the Tietjenses. There's not been a Tietjens since the first Lord

Justice cheated the Papist Loundeses out of Groby, but died of a broken

neck or of a broken heart: for all the fifteen thousand acres of good

farming-land and iron land, and for all the heather on the top of

it. . . . What's the quotation: 'Be ye something as something and

something and ye shall not escape. . . .' What is it?"

"Calumny!" Sylvia said. She spoke with intense bitterness. . . . "Chaste

as ice and cold as . . . as you are. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Yes! Yes. . . . And mind you none of the Tietjens were ever soft. Not

one! They had reason for their broken hearts. . . . Take my poor

father. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"_Don't_!"

"Both my brothers were killed in Indian regiments on the same day and

not a mile apart. And my sister in the same week: out at sea, not so far

from them. . . . Unnoticeable people. But one can be fond of

unnoticeable people. . . ."

Hullo Central was at the door. Tietjens told her to ask Lord Port Scatho

to step down. . . .

"You must, of course, know these details," Tietjens said, "as the mother

to my father's heir. . . . My father got the three notifications on the

same day. It was enough to break his heart. He only lived a month. I saw

him . . ."

Sylvia screamed piercingly:

"Stop! stop! stop!" She clutched at the mantelpiece to hold herself up.

"Your father died of a broken heart," she said, "because your brother's

best friend, Ruggles, told him you were a squit who lived on women's

money and had got the daughter of his oldest friend with child. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Oh! Ah! Yes! . . . I suspected that. I knew it, really. I suppose the

poor dear knows better now. Or perhaps he doesn't. . . . It doesn't

matter."

II

It has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of

self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a

great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. In the smaller

matters of the general run of life he will be impeccable and not to be

moved; but in sudden confrontations of anything but physical dangers he

is apt--he is, indeed, almost certain--to go to pieces very badly. This,

at least, was the view of Christopher Tietjens, and he very much dreaded

his interview with Lord Port Scatho--because he feared that he must be

near breaking point.

In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his

temperament as he could control--for, though no man can choose the land

of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and

determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his

automatic habits--Tietjens had quite advisedly and of set purpose

adopted a habit of behaviour that he considered to be the best in the

world for the normal life. If every day and all day long you chatter at

high pitch and with the logic and lucidity of the Frenchman; if you

shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a

stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your

interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as

the Italian, or as drily and epigramatically imbecile over unessentials

as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome and thoughtless

society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the

atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep

arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at

all--or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of

death--except at sea, by fire, railway accident or accidental drowning

in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or--and

particularly--prolonged mental strain, you will have all the

disadvantage of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly

indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare

occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage

would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the

later months of the year 1914. Death for man came but once: the danger

of death so seldom as to be practically negligible: love of a

distracting kind was a disease merely of the weak: public dishonour for

persons of position, so great was the hushing up power of the ruling

class, and the power of absorption of the remoter Colonies, was

practically unknown.

Tietjens found himself now faced by all these things, coming upon him

cumulatively and rather suddenly, and he had before him an interview

that might cover them all and with a man whom he much respected and very

much desired not to hurt. He had to face these, moreover, with a brain

two-thirds of which felt numb. It was exactly like that.

It was not so much that he couldn't use what brain he had as trenchantly

as ever: it was that there were whole regions of fact upon which he

could no longer call in support of his argument. His knowledge of

history was still practically negligible: he knew nothing whatever of

the humaner letters and, what was far worse, nothing at all of the

higher and more sensuous phases of mathematics. And the comings back of

these things was much slower than he had confessed to Sylvia. It was

with these disadvantages that he had to face Lord Port Scatho.

Lord Port Scatho was the first man of whom Sylvia Tietjens had thought

when she had been considering of men who were absolutely honourable,

entirely benevolent . . . and rather lacking in constructive

intelligence. He had inherited the management of one of the most

respected of the great London banks, so that his commercial and social

influences were very extended: he was extremely interested in promoting

Low Church interests, the reform of the divorce laws and sports for the

people, and he had a great affection for Sylvia Tietjens. He was

forty-five, beginning to put on weight, but by no means obese; he had a

large, quite round head, very high-coloured cheeks that shone as if with

frequent ablutions, an uncropped, dark moustache, dark, very cropped,

smooth hair, brown eyes, a very new grey tweed suit, a very new grey

Trilby hat, a black tie in a gold ring and very new patent leather boots

that had white calf tops. He had a wife almost the spit of himself in

face, figure, probity, kindliness and interests, except that for his

interest in sports for the people she substituted that for maternity

hospitals. His heir was his nephew, Mr. Brownlie, known as Brownie, who

would also be physically the exact spit of his uncle, except that, not

having put on flesh, he appeared to be taller and that his moustache and

hair were both a little longer and more fair. This gentleman entertained

for Sylvia Tietjens a gloomy and deep passion that he considered to be

perfectly honourable because he desired to marry her after she had

divorced her husband. Tietjens he desired to ruin because he wished to

marry Mrs. Tietjens and partly because he considered Tietjens to be an

undesirable person of no great means. Of this passion Lord Port Scatho

was ignorant.

He now came into the Tietjens' dining-room, behind the servant, holding

an open letter: he walked rather stiffly because he was very much

worried. He observed that Sylvia had been crying and was still wiping

her eyes. He looked round the room to see if he could see in it anything

to account for Sylvia's crying. Tietjens was still sitting at the head

of the lunch-table: Sylvia was rising from a chair beside the fireplace.

Lord Port Scatho said:

"I want to see you, Tietjens, for a minute on business."

Tietjens said:

"I can give you ten minutes. . . ."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"Mrs. Tietjens perhaps . . ."

He waved the open letter towards Mrs. Tietjens. Tietjens said:

"No! Mrs. Tietjens will remain." He desired to say something more

friendly. He said: "Sit down."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"I shan't be stopping a minute. But really . . ." and he moved the

letter, but not with so wide a gesture, towards Sylvia.

"I have no secrets from Mrs. Tietjens," Tietjens said.

"Absolutely none . . ."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"No . . . No, of course not . . . But . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Similarly, Mrs. Tietjens has no secrets from me. Again absolutely

none."

Sylvia said:

"I don't, of course, tell Tietjens about my maid's love affairs or what

the fish costs every day."

Tietjens said:

"You'd better sit down." He added on an impulse of kindness: "As a

matter of fact I was just clearing up things for Sylvia to take over . . .

this command." It was part of the disagreeableness of his mental

disadvantages that upon occasion he could not think of other than

military phrases. He felt intense annoyance. Lord Port Scatho affected

him with some of the slight nausea that in those days you felt at

contact with the civilian who knew none of your thoughts, phrases or

preoccupations. He added, nevertheless equably:

"One has to clear up. I'm going out."

Lord Port Scatho said hastily:

"Yes; yes. I won't keep you. One has so many engagements in spite of the

war. . . ." His eyes wandered in bewilderment. Tietjens could see them

at last fixing themselves on the oil stains that Sylvia's salad dressing

had left on his collar and green tabs. He said to himself that he must

remember to change his tunic before he went to the War Office. He must

not forget. Lord Port Scatho's bewilderment at these oil stains was such

that he had lost himself in the desire to account for them. . . . You

could see the slow thoughts moving inside his square, polished brown

forehead. Tietjens wanted very much to help him. He wanted to say: "It's

about Sylvia's letter that you've got in your hand, isn't it?" But Lord

Port Scatho had entered the room with the stiffness, with the odd,

high-collared sort of gait that on formal and unpleasant occasions

Englishmen use when they approach each other; braced up, a little like

strange dogs meeting in the street. In view of that, Tietjens couldn't

say "Sylvia." . . . But it would add to the formality and unpleasantness

if he said again "Mrs. Tietjens!" _That_ wouldn't help Port

Scatho. . . .

Sylvia said suddenly:

"You don't understand, apparently. My husband is going out to the front

line. To-morrow morning. It's for the second time."

Lord Port Scatho sat down suddenly on a chair beside the table. With his

fresh face and brown eyes suddenly anguished he exclaimed:

"But, my dear fellow! You! Good God!" and then to Sylvia: "I beg your

pardon!" To clear his mind he said again to Tietjens: "_You_! Going out

to-morrow!" And, when the idea was really there, his face suddenly

cleared. He looked with a swift, averted glance at Sylvia's face and

then for a fixed moment at Tietjens' oil-stained tunic. Tietjens could

see him explaining to himself with immense enlightenment that _that_

explained both Sylvia's tears and the oil on the tunic. For Port Scatho

might well imagine that officers went to the conflict in their oldest

clothes. . . .

But, if his puzzled brain cleared, his distressed mind became suddenly

distressed doubly. He had to add to the distress he had felt on entering

the room and finding himself in the midst of what he took to be a highly

emotional family parting. And Tietjens knew that during the whole war

Port Scatho had never witnessed a family parting at all. Those that were

not inevitable he would avoid like the plague, and his own nephew and

all his wife's nephews were in the bank. That was quite proper for, if

the ennobled family of Brownlie were not of the Ruling Class--who had to

go!--they were of the Administrative Class, who were privileged to stay.

So he had seen no partings.

Of his embarrassed hatred of them he gave immediate evidence. For he

first began several sentences of praise of Tietjens' heroism which he

was unable to finish and then getting quickly out of his chair

exclaimed:

"In the circumstances then . . . the little matter I came about . . .

I couldn't of course think . . ."

Tietjens said:

"No; don't go. The matter you came about--I know all about it of

course--had better be settled."

Port Scatho sat down again: his jaw fell slowly: under his bronzed

complexion his skin became a shade paler. He said at last:

"You know what I came about? But then . . ."

His ingenuous and kindly mind could be seen to be working with

reluctance: his athletic figure drooped. He pushed the letter that he

still held along the tablecloth towards Tietjens. He said, in the voice

of one awaiting a reprieve:

"But you _can't_ be . . . aware . . . Not of this letter. . . ."

Tietjens left the letter on the cloth, from there he could read the

large handwriting on the blue-grey paper:

"Mrs. Christopher Tietjens presents her compliments to Lord Port Scatho

and the Honourable Court of Benchers of the Inn. . . ." He wondered

where Sylvia had got hold of that phraseology: he imagined it to be

fantastically wrong. He said:

"I have already told you that I know about this letter, as I have

already told you that I know--and I will add that I approve!--of all

Mrs. Tietjens' actions. . . ." With his hard blue eyes he looked

brow-beatingly into Port Scatho's soft brown orbs, knowing that he was

sending the message: "Think what you please and be damned to you!"

The gentle brown things remained on his face; then they filled with an

expression of deep pain. Port Scatho cried:

"But good God! Then . . ."

He looked at Tietjens again. His mind, which took refuge from life in

the affairs of the Low Church, of Divorce Law Reform and of Sports for

the People, became a sea of pain at the contemplation of strong

situations. His eye said:

"For heaven's sake do not tell me that Mrs. Duchemin, the mistress of

your dearest friend, is the mistress of yourself, and that you take this

means of wreaking a vulgar spite on them."

Tietjens, leaning heavily forward, made his eyes as enigmatic as he

could; he said very slowly and very clearly:

"Mrs. Tietjens is, of course, not aware of _all_ the circumstances."

Port Scatho threw himself back in his chair.

"I don't understand!" he said. "I do not understand. How am I to act?

You do not wish me to act on this letter? You can't!"

Tietjens, who found himself, said:

"You had better talk to Mrs. Tietjens about that. I will say something

myself later. In the meantime let me say that Mrs. Tietjens would seem

to me to be quite within her rights. A lady, heavily veiled, comes here

every Friday and remains until four of the Saturday morning. . . . If

you are prepared to palliate the proceeding you had better do so to Mrs.

Tietjens. . . ."

Port Scatho turned agitatedly on Sylvia.

"I can't, of course, palliate," he said. "God forbid. . . . But, my dear

Sylvia . . . my dear Mrs. Tietjens. . . . In the case of two people so

much esteemed! . . . We have, of course, argued the matter of principle.

It is a part of a subject I have very much at heart: the granting of

divorce . . . civil divorce, at least . . . in cases in which one of the

parties to the marriage is in a lunatic asylum. I have sent you the

pamphlets of E. S. P. Haynes that we publish. I know that as a Roman

Catholic you hold strong views. . . . I do not, I assure you, stand for

latitude. . . ." He became then simply eloquent: he really had the

matter at heart, one of his sisters having been for many years married

to a lunatic. He expatiated on the agonies of this situation all the

more eloquently in that it was the only form of human distress which he

had personally witnessed.

Sylvia took a long look at Tietjens: he imagined for counsel. He looked

at her steadily for a moment, then at Port Scatho, who was earnestly

turned to her, then back at her. He was trying to say:

"Listen to Port Scatho for a minute. I need time to think of my course

of action!"

He needed, for the first time in his life, time to think of his course

of action.

He had been thinking with his under mind ever since Sylvia had told him

that she had written her letter to the benchers denouncing Macmaster and

his woman; ever since Sylvia had reminded him that Mrs. Duchemin in the

Edinburgh to London express of the day before the war had been in his

arms he had seen, with extraordinary clearness a great many north

country scenes though he could not affix names to all the places. The

forgetfulness of the names was abnormal: he ought to know the names of

places from Berwick down to the vale of York--but that he should have

forgotten the incidents was normal enough. They had been of little

importance: he preferred not to remember the phases of his friend's love

affair; moreover, the events that happened immediately afterwards had

been of a nature to make one forget quite normally what had just

preceded them. That Mrs. Duchemin should be sobbing on his shoulder in a

locked corridor carriage hadn't struck him as in the least important:

she was the mistress of his dearest friend: she had had a very trying

time for a week or so, ending in a violent, nervous quarrel with her

agitated lover. She was, of course, crying off the effects of the

quarrel which had been all the more shaking in that Mrs. Duchemin, like

himself, had always been almost too self-contained. As a matter of fact

he did not himself like Mrs. Duchemin, and he was pretty certain that

she herself more than a little disliked him; so that nothing but their

common feeling for Macmaster had brought them together. General Campion,

however, was not to know that. . . . He had looked into the carriage in

the way one does in a corridor just after the train had left. . . . He

couldn't remember the name. . . . Doncaster . . . No! . . . Darlington;

it wasn't that. At Darlington there was a model of the Rocket . . . or

perhaps it isn't the Rocket. An immense clumsy leviathan of a locomotive

by . . . by . . . The great gloomy stations of the north-going trains . . .

Durham . . . No! Alnwick. . . . No! . . . Wooler . . . By God!

Wooler! The junction for Bamborough. . . .

It had been in one of the castles at Bamborough that he and Sylvia had

been staying with the Sandbachs. Then . . . a name had come into his

mind spontaneously! . . . Two names! . . . It was, perhaps, the turn of

the tide! For the first time . . . To be marked with a red stone . . .

after this: some names, sometimes, on the tip of the tongue, might come

over! He had, however, to get on. . . .

The Sandbachs, then, and he and Sylvia . . . others too . . . had been

in Bamborough since mid-July: Eton and Harrow at Lord's, waiting for the

real house parties that would come with the 12th. . . . He repeated

these names and dates to himself for the personal satisfaction of

knowing that, amongst the repairs effected in his mind, these two

remained: Eton and Harrow, the end of the London season: 12th of August,

grouse shooting begins. . . . It was pitiful. . . .

When General Campion had come up to rejoin his sister he, Tietjens, had

stopped only two days. The coolness between the two of them remained; it

was the first time they had met, except in Court, after the accident. . . .

For Mrs. Wannop, with grim determination, had sued the General for

the loss of her horse. It had lived all right--but it was only fit to

draw a lawn-mower for cricket pitches. . . . Mrs. Wannop, then, had gone

bald-headed for the General, partly because she wanted the money, partly

because she wanted a public reason for breaking with the Sandbachs. The

general had been equally obstinate and had undoubtedly perjured himself

in Court: not the best, not the most honourable, the most benevolent man

in the world would not turn oppressor of the widow and orphan when his

efficiency as a chauffeur was impugned or the fact brought to light that

at a very dangerous turning he hadn't sounded his horn. Tietjens had

sworn that he hadn't: the General that he had. There _could_ not be any

question of doubt, for the horn was a beastly thing that made a

prolonged noise like that of a terrified peacock. . . . So Tietjens had

not, till the end of that July, met the General again. It had been quite

a proper thing for gentlemen to quarrel over and was quite convenient,

though it had cost the General fifty pounds for the horse and, of

course, a good bit over for costs. Lady Claudine had refused to

interfere in the matter: she was privately of opinion that the General

_hadn't_ sounded his horn, but the General was both a passionately

devoted and explosive brother. She had remained closely intimate with

Sylvia, mildly cordial with Tietjens and had continued to ask the

Wannops to such of her garden parties as the General did not attend. She

was also very friendly with Mrs. Duchemin.

Tietjens and the General had met with the restrained cordiality of

English gentlemen who had some years before accused each other of

perjury in a motor accident. On the second morning a violent quarrel had

broken out between them on the subject of whether the General had or

hadn't sounded his horn. The General had ended up by shouting . . .

really shouting:

"By God! If I ever get you under my command. . . ."

Tietjens remembered that he had quoted and given the number of a

succinct paragraph in King's Regs, dealing with the fate of general or

higher field officers who gave their subordinates bad confidential

reports because of private quarrels. The General had exploded into

noises that ended in laughter.

"What a rag-bag of a mind you have, Chrissie!" he said. "What's King's

Regs, to you? And how do you know it's paragraph 66 or whatever you say

it is? I don't." He added more seriously: "_What_ a fellow you are for

getting into obscure rows! What in the world do you do it for?"

That afternoon Tietjens had gone to stop, a long way up in the moors,

with his son, the nurse, his sister Effie and her children. They were

the last days of happiness he was to know and he hadn't known so many.

He was then content. He played with his boy, who, thank God, was

beginning to grow healthy at last. He walked about the moors with his

sister Effie, a large, plain, parson's wife, who had no conversation at

all, though at times they talked of their mother. The moors were like

enough to those above Groby to make them happy. They lived in a bare,

grim farmhouse, drank great quantities of butter-milk and ate great

quantities of Wensleydale. It was the hard, frugal life of his desire

and his mind was at rest.

His mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first

moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of the

Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance.

Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known

a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of its hills, the

shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the

skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only

mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible

pall, over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread

from . . . oh, Middlesbrough! We were fitted neither for defeat nor for

victory: we could be true to neither friend nor foe. Not even to

ourselves!

But of war for us he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till

the opportune moment and then grabbing a French channel port or a few

German colonies as the price of neutrality. And he was thankful to be

out of it; for his back-doorway out--his second!--was the French Foreign

Legion. First Sylvia: then that! Two tremendous disciplines: for the

soul and for the body.

The French he admired: for their tremendous efficiency, for their

frugality of life, for the logic of their minds, for their admirable

achievements in the arts, for their neglect of the industrial system,

for their devotion, above all, to the eighteenth century. It would be

restful to serve, if only as a slave, people who saw clearly, coldly,

straight: not obliquely and with hypocrisy only such things as should

deviously conduce to the standard of comfort of hogs and to lecheries

winked at. . . . He would rather sit for hours on a bench in a

barrack-room polishing a badge in preparation for the cruellest of route

marches of immense lengths under the Algerian sun.

For, as to the Foreign Legion, he had had no illusion. You were treated

not as a hero, but as a whipped dog: he was aware of all the

_asticoteries_, the cruelties, the weight of the rifle, the cells. You

would have six months of training in the desert and then be hurtled into

the line to be massacred without remorse . . . as foreign dirt. But the

prospect seemed to him one of deep peace: he had never asked for soft

living and now was done with it. . . . The boy was healthy; Sylvia, with

the economies they had made, very rich . . . and even at that date he

was sure that, if the friction of himself, Tietjens, were removed, she

would make a good mother. . . .

Obviously he might survive; but after that tremendous physical drilling

what survived would not be himself, but a man with cleaned, sand-dried

bones: a clear mind. His private ambition had always been for

saintliness: he must be able to touch pitch and not be defiled. That he

knew marked him off as belonging to the sentimental branch of humanity.

He couldn't help it: Stoic or Epicurean: Caliph in the harem or Dervish

desiccating in the sand: one or the other you must be. And his desire

was to be a saint of the Anglican variety . . . as his mother had been,

without convent, ritual, vows, or miracles to be performed by your

relics! That sainthood, truly, the Foreign Legion might give you. . . .

The desire of every English gentleman from Colonel Hutchinson

upwards. . . . A mysticism. . . .

Remembering the clear sunlight of those naïvetés--though in his blue

gloom he had abated no jot of the ambition--Tietjens sighed deeply as he

came back for a moment to regard his dining-room. Really, it was to see

how much time he had left in which to think out what to say to Port

Scatho. . . . Port Scatho had moved his chair over to beside Sylvia and,

almost touching her, was leaning over and recounting the griefs of his

sister who was married to a lunatic. Tietjens gave himself again for a

moment to the luxury of self-pity. He considered that he was

dull-minded, heavy, ruined, and so calumniated that at times he believed

in his own infamy, for it is impossible to stand up for ever against the

obloquy of your land and remain unhurt in the mind. If you hunch your

shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. . . .

His mind stopped for a moment and his eyes gazed dully at Sylvia's

letter which lay open on the tablecloth. His thoughts came together,

converging on the loosely-written words:

"For the last nine months a woman . . ."

He wondered swiftly what he had already said to Port Scatho: only that

he had known of his wife's letter; not when! And that he approved! Well,

on principle! He sat up. To think that one could be brought down to

thinking so slowly!

He ran swiftly over what had happened in the train from Scotland and

before. . . .

Macmaster had turned up one morning beside their breakfast table in the

farm house, much agitated, looking altogether too small in a cloth cap

and a new grey tweed suit. He had wanted £50 to pay his bill with: at

some place up the line above . . . above . . . Berwick suddenly flashed

into Tietjens' mind. . . .

That was the geographic position. Sylvia was at Bamborough on the coast

(junction Wooler); he, himself, to the north-west, on the moors.

Macmaster to the north-east of him, just over the border: in some

circumspect beauty spot where you did not meet people. Both Macmaster

and Mrs. Duchemin would know that country and gurgle over its beastly

literary associations. . . . The Shirra! Maida! Pet Marjorie . . .

Faugh! Macmaster would, no doubt, turn an honest penny by writing

articles about it and Mrs. Duchemin would hold his hand. . . .

She had become Macmaster's mistress, as far as Tietjens knew, after a

dreadful scene in the rectory, Duchemin having mauled his wife like a

savage dog, and Macmaster in the house. . . . It was natural: a Sadic

reaction as it were. But Tietjens rather wished they hadn't. Now it

appeared they had been spending a week together . . . or more. Duchemin

by that time was in an asylum. . . .

From what Tietjens had made out they had got out of bed early one

morning to take a boat and see the sunrise on some lake and had passed

an agreeable day together quoting, "Since when we stand side by side

only hands may meet" and other poems of Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti,

no doubt to justify their sin. On coming home they had run their boat's

nose into the tea-table of the Port Scathos with Mr. Brownlie, the

nephew, just getting out of a motor to join them. The Port Scatho group

were spending the night at the Macmasters' hotel which backed on to the

lake. It was the ordinary damn sort of thing that must happen in these

islands that are only a few yards across.

The Macmasters appear to have lost their heads frightfully, although

Lady Port Scatho had been as motherly as possible to Mrs. Duchemin; so

motherly, indeed, that if they had not been unable to observe anything,

they might have recognised the Port Scathos as backers rather than spies

upon themselves. It was, no doubt, however, Brownlie who had upset them:

he wasn't very civil to Macmaster, whom he knew as a friend of Tietjens.

He had dashed up from London in his motor to consult his uncle, who was

dashing down from the west of Scotland, about the policy of the bank in

that moment of crisis. . . .

Macmaster, anyhow, did not spend the night in the hotel, but went to

Jedburgh or Melrose or some such place, turning up again almost before

it was light to have a frightful interview about five in the morning

with Mrs. Duchemin, who, towards three, had come to a disastrous

conclusion as to her condition. They had lost their nerves for the first

time in their association, and they had lost them very badly indeed, the

things that Mrs. Duchemin said to Macmaster seeming almost to have

passed belief. . . .

Thus, when Macmaster turned up at Tietjens' breakfast, he was almost out

of his mind. He wanted Tietjens to go over in the motor he had brought,

pay the bill at the hotel, and travel down to town with Mrs. Duchemin,

who was certainly in no condition to travel alone. Tietjens was also to

make up the quarrel with Mrs. Duchemin and to lend Macmaster £50 in

cash, as it was then impossible to change cheques anywhere. Tietjens got

the money from his old nurse, who, because she distrusted banks, carried

great sums in £5 notes in a pocket under her under-petticoat.

Macmaster, pocketing the money, had said:

"That makes exactly two thousand guineas that I owe you. I'm making

arrangements to repay you next week. . . ."

Tietjens remembered that he had rather stiffened and had said: "For

God's sake don't. I beg you not to. Have Duchemin properly put under

trustees in lunacy, and leave his capital alone. I really beg you. You

don't know what you'll be letting yourselves in for. You don't owe me

anything and you can always draw on me."

Tietjens never knew what Mrs. Duchemin had done about her husband's

estate over which she had at that date had a power of attorney; but he

had imagined that, from that time on, Macmaster had felt a certain

coldness for himself and that Mrs. Duchemin had hated him. During

several years Macmaster had been borrowing hundreds at a time from

Tietjens. The affair with Mrs. Duchemin had cost her lover a good deal:

he had week-ended almost continuously in Rye at the expensive hostel.

Moreover, the famous Friday parties for geniuses had been going on for

several years now, and these had meant new furnishings, bindings,

carpets, and loans to geniuses--at any rate before Macmaster had had the

ear of the Royal Bounty. So the sum had grown to £2,000, and now to

guineas. And, from that date, the Macmasters had not offered any

repayment.

Macmaster had said that he dare not travel with Mrs. Duchemin because

all London would be going south by that train. All London had. It pushed

in at every conceivable and inconceivable station all down the line--it

was the great rout of the 3-8-14. Tietjens had got on board at Berwick,

where they were adding extra coaches, and by giving a £5 note to the

guard, who hadn't been able to promise isolation for any distance, had

got a locked carriage. It hadn't remained locked for long enough to let

Mrs. Duchemin have her cry out--but it had apparently served to make

some mischief. The Sandbach party had got on, no doubt at Wooler; the

Port Scatho party somewhere else. Their petrol had run out somewhere and

sales were stopped, even to bankers. Macmaster, who after all had

travelled by the same train, hidden beneath two bluejackets, had picked

up Mrs. Duchemin at King's Cross and that had seemed the end of it.

Tietjens, back in his dining-room, felt relief and also anger. He said:

"Port Scatho. Time's getting short. I'd like to deal with this letter if

you don't mind."

Port Scatho came as if up out of a dream. He had found the process of

attempting to convert Mrs. Tietjens to divorce law reform very

pleasant--as he always did. He said:

"Yes! . . . Oh, yes!"

Tietjens said slowly: