exactly nine months. . . . Have you got that? Mrs. Tietjens did not know
this till this afternoon. The period Mrs. Tietjens complains of in her
letter is nine months. She did perfectly right to write the letter. As
such I approve of it. If she had known that the Macmasters were married
she would not have written it. I didn't know she was going to write it.
If I had known she was going to write it I should have requested her not
to. If I had requested her not to she would, no doubt, not have done so.
I did know of the letter at the moment of your coming in. I had heard of
it at lunch only ten minutes before. I should, no doubt, have heard of
it before, but this is the first time I have lunched at home in four
months. I have to-day had a day's leave as being warned for foreign
service. I have been doing duty at Ealing. To-day is the first
opportunity I have had for serious business conversation with Mrs.
Tietjens. . . . Have you got all that? . . ."
Port Scatho was running towards Tietjens, his hand extended, and over
his whole shining personage the air of an enraptured bridegroom.
Tietjens moved his right hand a little to the right, thus eluding the
pink, well-fleshed hand of Port Scatho. He went on frigidly:
"You had better, in addition, know as follows: The late Mr. Duchemin was
a scathological--afterwards a homicidal--lunatic. He had recurrent fits,
usually on a Saturday morning. That was because he fasted--not abstained
merely--on Fridays. On Fridays he also drank. He had acquired the
craving for drink when fasting, from finishing the sacramental wine
after communion services. That is a not unknown occurrence. He behaved
latterly with great physical violence to Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin,
on the other hand, treated him with the utmost consideration and
concern: she might have had him certified much earlier, but, considering
the pain that confinement must cause him during his lucid intervals, she
refrained. I have been an eye-witness of the most excruciating heroisms
on her part. As for the behaviour of Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin, I am
ready to certify--and I believe society accepts--that it has been
most . . . oh, circumspect and right! . . . There has been no secret of
their attachment to each other. I believe that their determination to
behave with decency during their period of waiting has not been
questioned. . . ."
Lord Port Scatho said:
"No! no! Never . . . Most . . . as you say . . . circumspect and,
yes . . . right!"
"Mrs. Duchemin," Tietjens continued, "has presided at Macmaster's
literary Fridays for a long time; of course since long before they were
married. But, as you know, Macmaster's Fridays have been perfectly open:
you might almost call them celebrated. . . ."
Lord Port Scatho said:
"Yes! yes! indeed . . . I sh'd be only too glad to have a ticket for
Lady Port Scatho. . . ."
"She's only got to walk in," Tietjens said. "I'll warn them: they'll be
pleased. . . . If, perhaps, you would look in to-night! They have a
special party. . . . But Mrs. Macmaster was always attended by a young
lady who saw her off by the last train to Rye. Or I very frequently saw
her off myself, Macmaster being occupied by the weekly article that he
wrote for one of the papers on Friday nights. . . . They were married on
the day after Mr. Duchemin's funeral. . . ."
"You can't blame 'em!" Lord Port Scatho proclaimed.
"I don't propose to," Tietjens said. "The really frightful tortures Mrs.
Duchemin had suffered justified--and indeed necessitated--her finding
protection and sympathy at the earliest possible moment. They have
deferred this announcement of their union partly out of respect for the
usual period of mourning, partly because Mrs. Duchemin feels very
strongly that, with all the suffering that is now abroad, wedding feasts
and signs of rejoicing on the part of non-participants are eminently to
be deprecated. Still, the little party of to-night is by way of being an
announcement that they are married. . . ." He paused to reflect for a
moment.
"I perfectly understand!" Lord Port Scatho exclaimed. "I perfectly
approve. Believe me, I and Lady Port Scatho will do everything. . . .
Everything! . . . Most admirable people. . . . Tietjens, my dear fellow,
your behaviour . . . most handsome. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Wait a minute. . . . There was an occasion in August, '14. In a place
on the border. I can't remember the name. . . ."
Lord Port Scatho burst out:
"My dear fellow . . . I beg you won't. . . . I beseech you not to . . ."
Tietjens went on:
"Just before then Mr. Duchemin had made an attack of an unparalleled
violence on his wife. It was that that caused his final incarceration.
She was not only temporarily disfigured, but she suffered serious
internal injuries and, of course, great mental disturbance. It was
absolutely necessary that she should have change of scene. . . . But I
think you will bear me out that, in that case too, their behaviour
was . . . again, circumspect and right. . . ."
Port Scatho said:
"I know; I know . . . Lady Port Scatho and I agreed--even without
knowing what you have just told me--that the poor things almost
exaggerated it. . . . He slept, of course, at Jedburgh? . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Yes! They almost exaggerated it. . . . I had to be called in
to take Mrs. Duchemin home. . . . It caused, apparently,
misunderstandings. . . ."
Port Scatho--full of enthusiasm at the thought that at least two unhappy
victims of the hateful divorce laws had, with decency and
circumspectness, found the haven of their desires--burst out:
"By God, Tietjens, if I ever hear a man say a word against you. . . .
Your splendid championship of your friend. . . . Your . . . your
unswerving devotion . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Wait a minute, Port Scatho, will you?" He was unbottoning the flap of
his breast pocket.
"A man who can act so splendidly in one instance," Port Scatho
said. . . . "And your going to France. . . . If any one . . . if
_any_ one . . . dares . . ."
At the sight of a vellum-cornered, green-edged book in Tietjens' hand
Sylvia suddenly stood up; as Tietjens took from an inner flap a cheque
that had lost its freshness she made three great strides over the carpet
to him.
"Oh, Chrissie! . . ." she cried out. "He hasn't . . . That beast
hasn't . . ."
Tietjens answered:
"He has . . ." He handed the soiled cheque to the banker. Port Scatho
looked at it with slow bewilderment.
"'Account overdrawn,'" he read. "Brownie's . . . my nephew's
handwriting. . . . To the club . . . It's . . ."
"You aren't going to take it lying down?" Sylvia said. "Oh, thank
goodness, you aren't going to take it lying down."
"No! I'm not going to take it lying down," Tietjens said. "Why should
I?" A look of hard suspicion came over the banker's face.
"You appear," he said, "to have been overdrawing your account. People
should not overdraw their accounts. For what sum are you overdrawn?"
Tietjens handed his pass-book to Port Scatho.
"I don't understand on what principle you work," Sylvia said to
Tietjens. "There are things you take lying down; this you don't."
Tietjens said:
"It doesn't matter, really. Except for the child."
Sylvia said:
"I guaranteed an overdraft for you up to a thousand pounds last
Thursday. You can't be overdrawn over a thousand pounds."
"I'm not overdrawn at all," Tietjens said. "I was for about fifteen
pounds yesterday. I didn't know it."
Port Scatho was turning over the pages of the pass-book, his face
completely blank.
"I simply don't understand," he said. "You appear to be in credit. . . .
You appear always to have been in credit except for a small sum now and
then. For a day or two."
"I was overdrawn," Tietjens said, "for fifteen pounds yesterday. I
should say for three or four hours: the course of a post, from my army
agent to your head office. During these two or three hours your bank
selected two out of six of my cheques to dishonour--both being under two
pounds. The other one was sent back to my mess at Ealing, who won't, of
course, give it back to me. That also is marked "account overdrawn," and
in the same handwriting."
"But good God," the banker said. "That means your ruin."
"It certainly means my ruin," Tietjens said. "It was meant to."
"But," the banker said--a look of relief came into his face which had
begun to assume the aspect of a broken man's--"you must have other
accounts with the bank . . . a speculative one, perhaps, on which you
are heavily down. . . . I don't myself attend to client's accounts,
except the very huge ones, which affect the bank's policy."
"You ought to," Tietjens said. "It's the very little ones you ought to
attend to, as a gentleman making his fortune out of them. I have no
other account with you. I have never speculated in anything in my life.
I have lost a great deal in Russian securities--a great deal for me. But
so, no doubt, have you."
"Then . . . betting!" Port Scatho said.
"I never put a penny on a horse in my life," Tietjens said. "I know too
much about them."
Port Scatho looked at the faces first of Sylvia, then of Tietjens.
Sylvia, at least, was his very old friend. She said:
"Christopher never bets and never speculates. His personal expenses are
smaller than those of any man in town. You could say he had no personal
expenses."
Again the swift look of suspicion came into Port Scatho's open face.
"Oh," Sylvia said, "you couldn't suspect Christopher and me of being in
a plot to blackmail you."
"No; I couldn't suspect that," the banker said. "But the other
explanation is just as extraordinary. . . . To suspect the bank . . .
the _bank_. . . . How do _you_ account? . . ." He was addressing
Tietjens; his round head seemed to become square, below; emotion worked
on his jaws.
"I'll tell you simply this," Tietjens said. "You can then repair the
matter as you think fit. Ten days ago I got my marching orders. As soon
as I had handed over to the officer who relieved me I drew cheques for
everything I owed--to my military tailor, the mess--for one pound twelve
shillings. I had also to buy a compass and a revolver, the Red Cross
orderlies having annexed mine when I was in hospital. . . ."
Port Scatho said: "Good God!"
"Don't you know they annex things?" Tietjens asked. He went on: "The
total, in fact, amounted to an overdraft of fifteen pounds, but I did
not think of it as such because my army agents ought to have paid my
month's army pay over to you on the first. As you perceive, they have
only paid it over this morning, the 13th. But, as you will see from my
pass-book, they have always paid about the 13th, not the 1st. Two days
ago I lunched at the club and drew that cheque for one pound fourteen
shillings and sixpence: one ten for personal expenses and the four and
six for lunch. . . ."
"You were, however, actually overdrawn," the banker said sharply.
Tietjens said:
"Yesterday, for two hours."
"But then," Port Scatho said, "what do you want done? We'll do what we
can."
Tietjens said:
"I don't know. Do what you like. You'd better make what explanation you
can to the military authority. If they court-martialled me it would hurt
you more than me. I assure you of that. There _is_ an explanation."
Port Scatho began suddenly to tremble.
"What . . . what . . . what explanation?" he said. "You . . . damn
it . . . you draw this out. . . . Do you dare to say my bank. . . ." He
stopped, drew his hand down his face and said: "But yet . . . you're a
sensible, sound man. . . . I've heard things against you. But I don't
believe them. . . . Your father always spoke very highly of you. . . . I
remember he said if you wanted money you could always draw on him
through us for three or four hundred. . . . That's what makes it so
incomprehensible. . . . It's . . . it's . . ." His agitation grew on
him. "It seems to strike at the very heart. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Look here, Port Scatho. . . . I've always had a respect for you. Settle
it how you like. Fix the mess up for both our sakes with any formula
that's not humiliating for your bank. I've already resigned from the
club. . . ."
Sylvia said: "Oh, _no_, Christopher . . . not from the _club_!"
Port Scatho started back from beside the table.
"But if you're in the right!" he said. "You _couldn't_ . . . Not resign
from the club. . . . I'm on the committee. . . . I'll explain to them,
in the fullest, in the most generous . . ."
"You couldn't explain," Tietjens said. "You can't get ahead of
rumour. . . . It's half over London at this moment. You know what
the toothless old fellows of your committee are. . . . Anderson!
ffolliott. . . And my brother's friend, Ruggles. . . ."
Port Scatho said:
"Your brother's friend Ruggles. . . . But look here. . . . He's
something about the Court, isn't he? But look here. . . ." His mind
stopped. He said: "People shouldn't overdraw. . . . But if your father
said you could draw on him I'm really much concerned. . . . You're a
first-rate fellow. . . . I can tell that from your pass-book alone. . . .
Nothing but cheques drawn to first-class tradesmen for reasonable
amounts. The sort of pass-book I liked to see when I was a junior clerk
in the bank. . . ." At that early reminiscence feelings of pathos
overcame him and his mind once more stopped.
Sylvia came back into the room; they had not perceived her going. She in
turn held in her hand a letter.
Tietjens said:
"Look here, Port Scatho, don't get into this state. Give me your word to
do what you can when you've assured yourself the facts are as I say. I
wouldn't bother you at all, it's not my line, except for Mrs. Tietjens.
A man alone can live that sort of thing down, or die. But there's no
reason why Mrs. Tietjens should live, tied to a bad hat, while he's
living it down or dying."
"But that's not _right_" Port Scatho said, "it's not the right way to
look at it. You can't pocket . . . I'm simply bewildered. . . ."
"You've no right to be bewildered," Sylvia said. "You're worrying your
mind for expedients to save the reputation of your bank. We know your
bank is more to you than a baby. You should look after it better, then."
Port Scatho, who had already fallen two paces away from the table, now
fell two paces back, almost on top of it. Sylvia's nostrils were
dilated.
She said:
"Tietjens shall not resign from your beastly club. He shall not! Your
committee will request him formally to withdraw his resignation. You
understand? He will withdraw it. Then he will resign for good. He is too
good to mix with people like you. . . ." She paused, her chest working
fast. "Do you understand what you've got to do?" she asked.
An appalling shadow of a thought went through Tietjens' mind: he would
not let it come into words.
"I don't know . . ." the banker said. "I don't know that I can get the
committee . . ."
"You've got to," Sylvia answered. "I'll tell you why . . . Christopher
was never overdrawn. Last Thursday I instructed your people to pay a
thousand pounds to my husband's account. I repeated the instruction by
letter and I kept a copy of the letter witnessed by my confidential
maid. I also registered the letter and have the receipt for it. . . .
You can see them."
Port Scatho mumbled from over the letter:
"It's to Brownie . . . Yes, a receipt for a letter to Brownie . . ."
She examined the little green slip on both sides. He said: "Last
Thursday. . . . To-day's Monday. . . . An instruction to sell
North-Western stock to the amount of one thousand pounds and
place to the account of . . . Then . . ."
Sylvia said:
"That'll do. . . . You can't angle for time any more. . . . Your nephew
has been in an affair of this sort before. . . . I'll tell you. Last
Thursday at lunch your nephew told me that Christopher's brother's
solicitors had withdrawn all the permissions for overdrafts on the books
of the Groby estate. There were several to members of the family. Your
nephew said that he intended to catch Christopher on the hop--that's his
own expression--and dishonour the next cheque of his that came in. He
said he had been waiting for the chance ever since the war and the
brother's withdrawal had given it him. I begged him not to . . ."
"But, good God," the banker said, "this is unheard of . . ."
"It isn't," Sylvia said. "Christopher has had five snotty, little,
miserable subalterns to defend at court-martials for exactly similar
cases. One was an exact reproduction of this. . . ."
"But, good God," the banker exclaimed again, "men giving their lives for
their country. . . . Do you mean to say Brownie did this out of revenge
for Tietjens' defending at court-martials. . . . And then . . . your
thousand pounds is not shown in your husband's pass-book. . . ."
"Of course it's not," Sylvia said. "It has never been paid in. On Friday
I had a formal letter from your people pointing out that North-Westerns
were likely to rise and asking me to reconsider my position. The same
day I sent an express telling them explicitly to do as I said. . . .
Ever since then your nephew has been on the 'phone begging me not to
save my husband. He was there, just now, when I went out of the room. He
was also beseeching me to fly with him."
Tietjens said:
"Isn't that enough, Sylvia? It's rather torturing."
"Let them be tortured," Sylvia said. "But it appears to be enough."
Port Scatho had covered his face with both his pink hands. He had
exclaimed:
"Oh, my God! Brownie again. . . ."
Tietjens' brother Mark was in the room. He was smaller, browner and
harder than Tietjens and his blue eyes protruded more. He had in one
hand a bowler hat, in the other an umbrella, wore a pepper-and-salt suit
and had race-glasses slung across him. He disliked Port Scatho, who
detested him. He had lately been knighted. He said:
"Hullo, Port Scatho," neglecting to salute his sister-in-law. His eyes,
whilst he stood motionless, rolled a look round the room and rested on a
miniature bureau that stood on a writing-table, in a recess, under and
between bookshelves.
"I see you've still got that cabinet," he said to Tietjens.
Tietjens said:
"I haven't. I've sold it to Sir John Robertson. He's waiting to take it
away till he has room in his collection."
Port Scatho walked, rather unsteadily, round the lunch-table and stood
looking down from one of the long windows. Sylvia sat down on her chair
beside the fireplace. The two brothers stood facing each other,
Christopher suggesting wheat-sacks, Mark, carved wood. All round them,
except for the mirror that reflected bluenesses, the gilt backs of
books. Hullo Central was clearing the table.
"I hear you're going out again to-morrow," Mark said. "I want to settle
some things with you."
"I'm going at nine from Waterloo," Christopher said. "I've not much
time. You can walk with me to the War Office if you like."
Mark's eyes followed the black and white of the maid round the table.
She went out with the tray. Christopher suddenly was reminded of
Valentine Wannop clearing the table in her mother's cottage. Hullo
Central was no faster about it. Mark said:
"Port Scatho! As you're there we may as well finish one point. I have
cancelled my father's security for my brother's overdraft."
Port Scatho said, to the window, but loud enough:
"We all know it. To our cost."
"I wish you, however," Mark Tietjens went on, "to make over from my own
account a thousand a year to my brother as he needs it. Not more than a
thousand in any one year."
Port Scatho said:
"Write a letter to the bank. I don't look after clients' accounts on
social occasions."
"I don't see why you don't," Mark Tietjens said. "It's the way you make
your bread and butter, isn't it?"
Tietjens said:
"You may save yourself all this trouble, Mark. I am closing my account
in any case."
Port Scatho spun round on his heel.
"I beg that you won't," he exclaimed. "I beg that we . . . that we may
have the honour of continuing to have you draw upon us." He had the
trick of convulsively working jaws: his head against the light was like
the top of a rounded gate-post. He said to Mark Tietjens: "You may tell
your friend, Mr. Ruggles, that your brother is empowered by me to draw
on my private account . . . on my personal and private account up to any
amount he needs. I say that to show my estimate of your brother; because
I know he will incur no obligations he cannot discharge."
Mark Tietjens stood motionless; leaning slightly on the crook of his
umbrella on the one side; on the other displaying, at arm's length, the
white silk lining of his bowler hat, the lining being the brightest
object in the room.
"That's your affair," he said to Port Scatho. "All I'm concerned with is
to have a thousand a year paid to my brother's account till further
notice."
Christopher Tietjens said, with what he knew was a sentimental voice, to
Port Scatho. He was very touched; it appeared to him that with the
spontaneous appearance of several names in his memory, and with this
estimate of himself from the banker, his tide was turning and that this
day might indeed be marked by a red stone:
"Of course, Port Scatho, I won't withdraw my wretched little account
from you if you want to keep it. It flatters me that you should." He
stopped and added: "I only wanted to avoid these . . . these family
complications. But I suppose you can stop my brother's money being paid
into my account. I don't want his money."
He said to Sylvia:
"You had better settle the other matter with Port Scatho."
To Port Scatho:
"I'm intensely obliged to you, Port Scatho. . . . You'll get Lady Port
Scatho round to Macmaster's this evening if only for a minute; before
eleven. . . ." And to his brother:
"Come along, Mark. I'm going down to the War Office. We can talk as we
walk."
Sylvia said very nearly with timidity--and again a dark thought went
over Tietjens' mind:
"Do we meet again then? . . . I know you're very busy. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Yes. I'll come and pick you out from Lady Job's, if they don't keep me
too long at the War Office. I'm dining, as you know, at Macmaster's; I
don't suppose I shall stop late."
"I'd come," Sylvia said, "to Macmaster's, if you thought it was
appropriate. I'd bring Claudine Sandbach and General Wade. We're only
going to the Russian dancers. We'd cut off early."
Tietjens could settle that sort of thought very quickly.
"Yes, do," he said hurriedly. "It would be appreciated."
He got to the door: he came back: his brother was nearly through. He
said to Sylvia, and for him the occasion was a very joyful one:
"I've worried out some of the words of that song. It runs:
'Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen: the voice not heard . . .'
Probably it's 'the voice not ever heard' to make up the metre. . . . I
don't know the writer's name. But I hope I'll worry it all out during
the day."
Sylvia had gone absolutely white.
"Don't!" she said. "Oh . . . _don't_." She added coldly: "Don't take the
trouble," and wiped her tiny handkerchief across her lips as Tietjens
went away.
She had heard the song at a charity concert and had cried as she heard
it. She had read, afterwards, the words in the programme and had almost
cried again. But she had lost the programme and had never come across
the words again. The echo of them remained with her like something
terrible and alluring: like a knife she would some day take out and with
which she would stab herself.
III
The two brothers walked twenty steps from the door along the empty Inn
pavements without speaking. Each was completely expressionless. To
Christopher it seemed like Yorkshire. He had a vision of Mark, standing
on the lawn at Groby, in his bowler hat and with his umbrella, whilst
the shooters walked over the lawn, and up the hill to the butts. Mark
probably never had done that; but it was so that his image always
presented itself to his brother. Mark was considering that one of the
folds of his umbrella was disarranged. He seriously debated with himself
whether he should unfold it at once and refold it--which was a great
deal of trouble to take!--or whether he should leave it till he got to
his club, where he would tell the porter to have it done at once. That
would mean that he would have to walk for a mile and a quarter through
London with a disarranged umbrella, which was disagreeable.
He said:
"If I were you I wouldn't let that banker fellow go about giving you
testimonials of that sort."
Christopher said:
"Ah!"
He considered that, with a third of his brain in action, he was over a
match for Mark, but he was tired of discussions. He supposed that some
unpleasant construction would be put by his brother's friend, Ruggles,
on the friendship of Port Scatho for himself. But he had no curiosity.
Mark felt a vague discomfort. He said:
"You had a cheque dishonoured at the club this morning?" Christopher
said:
"Yes."
Mark waited for explanations. Christopher was pleased at the speed with
which the news had travelled: it confirmed what he had said to Port
Scatho. He viewed his case from outside. It was like looking at the
smooth working of a mechanical model.
Mark was more troubled. Used as he had been for thirty years to the
vociferous south he had forgotten that there were taciturnities still.
If at his Ministry he laconically accused a transport clerk of
remissness, or if he accused his French mistress--just as
laconically--of putting too many condiments on his nightly mutton-chop,
or too much salt in the water in which she boiled his potatoes, he was
used to hearing a great many excuses or negations, uttered with energy
and continued for long. So he had got into the habit of considering
himself almost the only laconic being in the world. He suddenly
remembered with discomfort--but also with satisfaction--that his brother
was his brother.
He knew nothing about Christopher, for himself. He had seemed to look at
his little brother down avenues, from a distance, the child misbehaving
himself. Not a true Tietjens: born very late: a mother's child,
therefore, rather than a father's. The mother an admirable woman, but
from the South Riding. Soft, therefore, and ample. The elder Tietjens'
children, when they had experienced failures, had been wont to blame
their father for not marrying a woman of their own Riding. So, for
himself, he knew nothing of this boy. He was said to be brilliant: an
un-Tietjens-like quality. Akin to talkativeness! . . . Well, he wasn't
talkative. Mark said:
"What have you done with all the brass our mother left you? Twenty
thousand, wasn't it?"
They were just passing through a narrow way between Georgian houses. In
the next quadrangle Tietjens stopped and looked at his brother. Mark
stood still to be looked at. Christopher said to himself:
"This man has the right to ask these questions!"
It was as if a queer slip had taken place in a moving-picture. This
fellow had become the head of the house: he, Christopher, was the heir.
At that moment, their father, in the grave four months now, was for the
first time dead.
Christopher remembered a queer incident. After the funeral, when they
had come back from the churchyard and had lunched, Mark--and Tietjens
could now see the wooden gesture--had taken out his cigar-case and,
selecting one cigar for himself, had passed the rest round the table. It
was as if people's hearts had stopped beating. Groby had never, till
that day, been smoked in: the father had had his twelve pipes filled and
put in the rose-bushes in the drive. . . .
It had been regarded merely as a disagreeable incident: a piece of bad
taste. . . . Christopher, himself, only just back from France, would not
even have known it as such, his mind was so blank, only the parson had
whispered to him: "And Groby never smoked in till this day."
But now! It appeared a symbol, and an absolutely right symbol. Whether
they liked it or not, here were the head of the house and the heir. The
head of the house must make his arrangements, the heir agree or
disagree; but the elder brother had the right to have his enquiries
answered.
Christopher said:
"Half the money was settled at once on my child. I lost seven thousand
in Russian securities. The rest I spent. . . ."
Mark said:
"Ah!"
They had just passed under the arch that leads into Holborn. Mark, in
turn, stopped and looked at his brother and Christopher stood still to
be inspected, looking into his brother's eyes. Mark said to himself:
"The fellow isn't at least afraid to look at you!" He had been convinced
that Christopher would be. He said:
"You spent it on women? Or where do you get the money that you spend on
women?"
Christopher said:
"I never spent a penny on a woman in my life."
Mark said:
"Ah!"
They crossed Holborn and went by the backways towards Fleet Street.
Christopher said:
"When I say 'woman' I'm using the word in the ordinary sense. Of course
I've given women of our own class tea or lunch and paid for their cabs.
Perhaps I'd better put it that I've never--either before or after
marriage--had connection with any woman other than my wife."
Mark said:
"Ah!"
He said to himself:
"Then Ruggles must be a liar." This neither distressed nor astonished
him. For twenty years he and Ruggles had shared a floor of a large and
rather gloomy building in Mayfair. They were accustomed to converse
whilst shaving in a joint toilet-room, otherwise they did not often meet
except at the club. Ruggles was attached to the Royal Court in some
capacity, possibly as sub-deputy gold-stick-in-waiting. Or he might have
been promoted in the twenty years. Mark Tietjens had never taken the
trouble to enquire. Enormously proud and shut in on himself, he was
without curiosity of any sort. He lived in London because it was
immense, solitary, administrative and apparently without curiosity as to
its own citizens. If he could have found, in the north, a city as vast
and as distinguished by the other characteristics, he would have
preferred it.
Of Ruggles he thought little or nothing. He had once heard the phrase
"agreeable rattle," and he regarded Ruggles as an agreeable rattle,
though he did not know what the phrase meant. Whilst they shaved Ruggles
gave out the scandal of the day. He never, that is to say, mentioned a
woman whose virtue was not purchasable, or a man who would no: sell his
wife for advancement. This matched with Mark's ideas of the south. When
Ruggles aspersed the fame of a man of family from the north, Mark would
stop him with:
"Oh, no. That's not true. He's a Craister of Wantley Fells," or another
name, as the case might be. Half Scotchman, half Jew, Ruggles was very
tall and resembled a magpie, having his head almost always on one side.
Had he been English Mark would never have shared his rooms with him: he
knew indeed few Englishmen of sufficient birth and position to have that
privilege, and, on the other hand, few Englishmen of birth and position
would have consented to share rooms so grim and uncomfortable, so
furnished with horse-hair seated mahogany, or so lit with ground-glass
skylights. Coming up to town at the age of twenty-five, Mark had taken
these rooms with a man called Peebles, long since dead, and he had never
troubled to make any change, though Ruggles had taken the place of
Peebles. The remote similarity of the names had been less disturbing to
Mark Tietjens than would have been the case had the names been more
different. It would have been very disagreeable, Mark often thought, to
share with a man called, say. Granger. As it was he still often called
Ruggles Peebles, and no harm was done. Mark knew nothing of Ruggles'
origins, then--so that, in a remote way, their union resembled that of
Christopher with Macmaster. But whereas Christopher would have given his
satellite the shirt off his back, Mark would not have lent Ruggles more
than a five pound note, and would have turned him out of their rooms if
it had not been returned by the end of the quarter. But, since Ruggles
never had asked to borrow anything at all, Mark considered him an
entirely honourable man. Occasionally Ruggles would talk of his
determination to marry some widow or other with money, or of his
influence with people in exalted stations, but, when he talked like
that, Mark would not listen to him and he soon returned to stories of
purchasable women and venial men.
About five months ago Mark had said one morning to Ruggles:
"You might pick up what you can about my youngest brother Christopher
and let me know."
The evening before that Mark's father had called Mark to him from over
the other side of the smooking-room and had said:
"You might find out what you can about Christopher. He may be in want of
money. Has it occurred to you that he's the heir to the estate! After
you, of course." Mr. Tietjens had aged a good deal after the deaths of
his children. He said: "I suppose you won't marry?" and Mark had
answered:
"No; I shan't marry. But I suppose I'm a better life than Christopher.
He appears to have been a good deal knocked about out there."
Armed then with this commission Mr. Ruggles appears to have displayed
extraordinary activity in preparing a Christopher Tietjens dossier. It
is not often that an inveterate gossip gets a chance at a man whilst
being at the same time practically shielded against the law of libel.
And Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of
the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips. And
Christopher Tietjens had displayed more than his usual insolence to
Ruggles. So Ruggles' coat-tails flashed round an unusual number of doors
and his top-hat gleamed before an unusual number of tall portals during
the next week.
Amongst others he had visited the lady known as Glorvina.
There is said to be a book, kept in a holy of holies, in which bad marks
are set down against men of family and position in England. In this book
Mark Tietjens and his father--in common with a great number of
hard-headed Englishmen of county rank--implicitly believed. Christopher
Tietjens didn't: he imagined that the activities of gentlemen like
Ruggles were sufficient to stop the careers of people whom they
disliked. On the other hand, Mark and his father looked abroad upon
English society and saw fellows, apparently with every qualification for
successful careers in one service or the other; and these fellows got no
advancements, orders, titles or preferments of any kind. Just, rather
mysteriously, they didn't make their marks. This they put down to the
workings of the book.
Ruggles, too, not only believed in the existence of that compilation of
the suspect and doomed, but believed that his hand had a considerable
influence over the inscriptions in its pages. He believed that if, with
more moderation and with more grounds than usual, he uttered
denigrations of certain men before certain personages, it would at least
do those men a great deal of harm. And, quite steadily and with, indeed,
real belief in much of what he said, Ruggles had denigrated Tietjens
before these personages. Ruggles could not see why Christopher had taken
Sylvia back after her elopement with Perowne: he could not see why
Christopher had, indeed, married Sylvia at all when she was with child
by a man called Drake--just as he wasn't going to believe that
Christopher could get a testimonial out of Lord Port Scatho except by
the sale of Sylvia to the banker. He couldn't see anything but money or
jobs at the bottom of these things: he couldn't see how Tietjens
otherwise got the money to support Mrs. Wannop, Miss Wannop and her
child, and to maintain Mrs. Duchemin and Macmaster in the style they
affected, Mrs. Duchemin being the mistress of Christopher. He simply
could see no other solution. It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you
are more altruist than the society that surrounds you.
Ruggles, however, hadn't any pointers as to whether or no or to what
degree he had really damaged his room-mate's brother. He had talked in
what he considered to be the right quarters, but he hadn't any evidence
that what he had said had got through. It was to ascertain that that he
had called on the great lady, for if anybody knew, she would.
He hadn't definitely ascertained anything, for the great lady was--and
he knew it--a great deal cleverer than himself. The great lady, he was
allowed to discover, had a real affection for Sylvia, her daughter's
close friend, and she expressed real concern to hear that Christopher
Tietjens wasn't getting on. Ruggles had gone to visit her quite openly
to ask whether something better couldn't be done for the brother of the
man with whom he lived. Christopher had, it was admitted, great
abilities; yet neither in his office--in which he would surely have
remained had he been satisfied with his prospects--nor in the army did
he occupy anything but a very subordinate position. Couldn't, he asked,
Glorvina do anything for him? And he added: "It's almost as if he had a
bad mark against him. . . ."
The great lady had said, with a great deal of energy, that she could not
do anything at all. The energy was meant to show how absolutely her
party had been downed, outed and jumped on by the party in power, so
that she had no influence of any sort anywhere. That was an
exaggeration; but it did Christopher Tietjens no good, since Ruggles
chose to take it to mean that Glorvina said she could do nothing because
there _was_ a black mark against Tietjens in the book of the inner
circle to which--if anyone had--the great lady must have had access.
Glorvina, on the other hand, had been awakened to concern for Tietjens.
In the existence of a book she didn't believe: she had never seen it.
But that a black mark of a metaphorical nature might have been scored
against him she was perfectly ready to believe and, when occasion
served, during the next five months, she made enquiries about Tietjens.
She came upon a Major Drake, an intelligence officer, who had access to
the central depôt of confidential reports upon officers, and Major
Drake showed her, with a great deal of readiness, as a specimen, the
report on Tietjens. It was of a most discouraging sort and peppered over
with hieroglyphics, the main point being Tietjens' impecuniosity and his
predilection for the French; and apparently for the French Royalists.
There being at that date and with that Government a great deal of
friction with our Allies this characteristic which earlier had earned
him a certain number of soft jobs had latterly done him a good deal of
harm. Glorvina carried away the definite information that Tietjens had
been seconded to the French artillery as a liaison officer and had
remained with them for some time, but, having been shell-shocked, had
been sent back. After that a mark had been added against him: "Not to be
employed as liaison officer again."
On the other hand, Sylvia's visits to Austrian officer-prisoners had
also been noted to Tietjens' account and a final note added: "Not to be
entrusted with any confidential work."
To what extent Major Drake himself compiled these records the great lady
didn't know and didn't want to know. She was acquainted with the
relationships of the parties and was aware that in certain dark,
full-blooded men the passion for sexual revenge is very lasting, and she
let it go at that. She discovered, however, from Mr. Waterhouse--now
also in retreat--that he had a very high opinion of Tietjens' character
and abilities, and that just before Waterhouse's retirement he had
especially recommended Tietjens for very high promotion. That alone, in
the then state of Ministerial friendships and enmities, Glorvina knew to
be sufficient to ruin any man within range of Governmental influence.
She had, therefore, sent for Sylvia and had put all these matters before
her, for she had too much wisdom to believe that, even supposing there
should be differences between the young people of which she had no
evidence at all, Sylvia could wish to do anything but promote her
husband's material interests. Moreover, sincerely benevolent as the
great lady was towards this couple, she also saw that here was a
possibility of damaging, at least, individuals of the party in power. A
person in a relatively unimportant official position can sometimes make
a very nasty stink if he is unjustly used, has determination and a small
amount of powerful backing. This Sylvia, at least, certainly had.
And Sylvia had received the great lady's news with so much emotion that
no one could have doubted that she was utterly devoted to her husband
and would tell him all about it. This Sylvia had not as yet managed to
do.
Ruggles in the meantime had collected a very full budget of news and
inferences to present to Mark Tietjens whilst shaving. Mark had been
neither surprised nor indignant. He had been accustomed to call all his
father's children, except the brother immediately next him, "the
whelps," and their concerns had been no concerns of his. They would
marry, beget unimportant children who would form collateral lines of
Tietjens and disappear as is the fate of sons of younger sons. And the
deaths of the intermediate brothers had been so recent that Mark was not
yet used to thinking of Christopher as anything but a whelp, a person
whose actions might be disagreeable but couldn't matter. He said to
Ruggles:
"You had better talk to my father about this. I don't know that I could
keep all these particulars accurately in my head."
Ruggles had been only too pleased to, and--with to give him weight, his
intimacy with the eldest son, who certified to his reliability in money
matters and his qualifications for amassing details as to personalities,
acts and promotions--that day, at tea at the club, in a tranquil corner,
Ruggles had told Mr. Tietjens senior that Christopher's wife had been
with child when he had married her; he had hushed up her elopement with
Perowne and connived at other love affairs of hers to his own dishonour,
and was suspected in high places of being a French agent, thus being
marked down as suspect in the great book. . . . All this in order to
obtain money for the support of Miss Wannop, by whom he had had a child,
and to maintain Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin on a scale unsuited to their
means, Mrs. Duchemin being his mistress. The story that Tietjens had had
a child by Miss Wannop was first suggested, and then supported, by the
fact that in Yorkshire he certainly had a son who never appeared in
Gray's Inn.
Mr. Tietjens was a reasonable man: not reasonable enough to doubt
Ruggles' circumstantial history. He believed implicitly in the great
book--which has been believed in by several generations of country
gentlemen: he perceived that his brilliant son had made no advancement
commensurate with either his brilliance or his influence: he suspected
that brilliance was synonymous with reprehensible tendencies. Moreover,
his old friend, General ffolliott, had definitely told him some days
before that he ought to enquire into the goings on of Christopher. On
being pressed ffolliott had, also definitely, stated that Christopher
was suspected of very dishonourable dealings, both in money and women.
Ruggles' allegations came, therefore, as a definite confirmation of
suspicions that appeared only too well backed up.
He bitterly regretted that, knowing Christopher to be brilliant, he had
turned the boy--as is the usual portion of younger sons--adrift, with
what of a competence could be got together, to sink or swim. He had, he
said to himself, always wished to keep at home and under his own eyes
this boy for whom he had had especial promptings of tenderness. His
wife, to whom he had been absolutely attached by a passionate devotion,
had been unusually wrapped up in Christopher, because Christopher had
been her youngest son, born very late. And, since his wife's death,
Christopher had been especially dear to him, as if he had carried about
his presence some of the radiance and illumination that had seemed to
attach to his mother. Indeed, after his wife's death, Mr. Tietjens had
very nearly asked Christopher and his wife to come and keep house for
him at Groby, making, of course, special testamentary provision for
Christopher in order to atone for his giving up his career at the
Department of Statistics. His sense of justice to his other children had
prevented him doing this.
What broke his heart was that Christopher should not only have seduced
but should have had a child by Valentine Wannop. Very grand seigneur in
his habits, Mr. Tietjens had always believed in his duty to patronise
the arts and, if he had actually done little in this direction beyond
purchasing some chocolate-coloured pictures of the French historic
school, he had for long prided himself on what he had done for the widow
and children of his old friend. Professor Wannop. He considered, and
with justice, that he had made Mrs. Wannop a novelist, and he considered
her to be a very great novelist. And his conviction of the guilt of
Christopher was strengthened by a slight tinge of jealousy of his son: a
feeling that he would not have acknowledged to himself. For, since
Christopher, he didn't know how, for he had given his son no
introduction, had become an intimate of the Wannop household, Mrs.
Wannop had completely given up asking him, Mr. Tietjens, clamourously
and constantly for advice. In return she had sung the praises of
Christopher in almost extravagant terms. She had, indeed, said that if
Christopher had not been almost daily in the house or at any rate at the
end of the 'phone she would hardly have been able to keep on working at
full pressure. This had not overpleased Mr. Tietjens. Mr. Tietjens
entertained for Valentine Wannop an affection of the very deepest, the
same qualities appealing to the father as appealed to the son. He had
even, in spite of his sixty odd years, seriously entertained the idea of
marrying the girl. She was a lady: she would have managed Groby very
well; and, although the entail on the property was very strict indeed,
he would, at least, have been able to put her beyond the reach of want
after his death. He had thus no doubt of his son's guilt, and he had to
undergo the additional humiliation of thinking that not only had his son
betrayed this radiant personality, but he had done it so clumsily as to
give the girl a child and let it be known. That was unpardonable want of
management in the son of a gentleman. And now this boy was his heir with
a misbegotten brat to follow. Irrevocably!
All his four tall sons, then, were down. His eldest tied for good to--a
quite admirable!--trollops: his two next dead: his youngest worse than
dead: his wife dead of a broken heart.
A soberly but deeply religious man, Mr. Tietjens' very religion made him
believe in Christopher's guilt. He knew that it is as difficult for a
rich man to go to heaven as it is for a camel to go through the gate in
Jerusalem called the Needle's Eye. He humbly hoped that his Maker would
receive him amongst the pardoned. Then, since he was a rich--an
enormously rich--man, his sufferings on this earth must be very
great. . . .
From tea-time that day until it was time to catch the midnight train for
Bishop's Auckland he had been occupied with his son Mark in the
writing-room of the club. They had made many notes. He had seen his son
Christopher, in uniform, looking broken and rather bloated, the result,
no doubt, of debauch. Christopher had passed through the other end of
the room and Mr. Tietjens had avoided his eye. He had caught the train
and reached Groby, travelling alone. Towards dusk he had taken out a
gun. He was found dead next morning, a couple of rabbits beside his
body, just over the hedge from the little churchyard. He appeared to
have crawled through the hedge, dragging his loaded gun, muzzle
forwards, after him. Hundreds of men, mostly farmers, die from that
cause every year in England. . . .
With these things in his mind--or as much of them as he could keep at
once--Mark was now investigating his brother's affairs. He would have
let things go on longer, for his father's estate was by no means wound
up, but that morning Ruggles had told him that the club had had a cheque
of his brother's returned and that his brother was going out to France
next day. It was five months exactly since the death of their father.
That had happened in March, it was now August: a bright, untidy day in
narrow, high courts.
Mark arranged his thoughts.
"How much of an income," he said, "do you need to live in comfort? If a
thousand isn't enough, how much? Two?"
Christopher said that he needed no money and didn't intend to live in
comfort. Mark said:
"I am to let you have three thousand, if you'll live abroad. I'm only
carrying out our father's instructions. You could cut a hell of a splash
on three thousand in France."
Christopher did not answer.
Mark began again:
"The remaining three thousand then: that was over from our mother's
money. Did you settle it on your girl, or just spend it on her?"
Christopher repeated with patience that he hadn't got a girl.
Mark said:
"The girl who had a child by you. I'm instructed, if you haven't settled
anything already--but father took it that you would have--I was to let
her have enough to live in comfort. How much do you suppose she'll need
to live in comfort? I allow Charlotte four hundred. Would four hundred
be enough? I suppose you want to go on keeping her? Three thousand isn't
a great lot for her to live on with a child."
Christopher said:
"Hadn't you better mention names?"
Mark said:
"No! I never mention names. I mean a woman writer and her daughter. I
suppose the girl is father's daughter, isn't she?"
Christopher said:
"No. She couldn't be. I've thought of it. She's twenty-seven. We were
all in Dijon for the two years before she was born. Father didn't come
into the estate till next year. The Wannops were also in Canada at the
time. Professor Wannop was principal of a university there. I forget the
name."
Mark said:
"So we were. In Dijon! For my French!" He added: "Then she can't be
father's daughter. It's a good thing. I thought, as he wanted to settle
money on them, they were very likely his children. There's a son, too.
He's to have a thousand. What's he doing?"
"The son," Tietjens said, "is a conscientious objector. He's on a
mine-sweeper. A bluejacket. His idea is that picking up mines is saving
life, not taking it."
"Then he won't want the brass yet," Mark said, "it's to start him in any
business. What's the full name and address of your girl? Where do you
keep her?"
They were in an open space, dusty, with half-timber buildings whose
demolition had been interrupted. Christopher halted close to a post that
had once been a cannon; up against this he felt that his brother could
lean in order to assimilate ideas. He said slowly and patiently:
"If you're consulting with me as to how to carry out our father's
intentions, and as there's money in it you had better make an attempt to
get hold of the facts. I wouldn't bother you if it wasn't a matter of
money. In the first place, no money is wanted at this end. I can live on
my pay. My wife is a rich woman, relatively. Her mother is a very rich
woman. . . ."
"She's Rugeley's mistress, isn't she?" Mark asked.
Christopher said:
"No, she isn't. I should certainly say she wasn't. Why should she be?
She's his cousin."
"Then it's your wife who was Rugeley's mistress?" Mark asked. "Or why
should she have the loan of his box?"
"Sylvia also is Rugeley's cousin, of course, a degree further removed,"
Tietjens said. "She isn't anyone's mistress. You can be certain of
that."
"They _say_ she is," Mark answered. "They say she's a regular
tart. . . . I suppose you think I've insulted you."
Christopher said:
"No, you haven't. . . . It's better to get all this out. We're
practically strangers, but you've a right to ask."
Mark said:
"Then you haven't got a girl and don't need money to keep her. . . . You
could have what you liked. There's no reason why a man shouldn't have a
girl, and if he has he ought to keep her decently. . . ."
Christopher did not answer. Mark leaned against the half-buried cannon
and swung his umbrella by its crook.
"But," he said, "if you don't keep a girl what do you do for . . ." He
was going to say "for the comforts of home," but a new idea had come
into his mind. "Of course," he said, "one can see that your wife's
soppily in love with you." He added: "Soppily . . . one can see that
with half an eye. . . ."
Christopher felt his jaw drop. Not a second before--that very
second!--he had made up his mind to ask Valentine Wannop to become his
mistress that night. It was no good, any more, he said to himself. She
loved him, he knew, with a deep; an unshakable passion, just as his
passion for her was a devouring element that covered his whole mind as
the atmosphere envelopes the earth. Were they, then, to go down to death
separated by years, with no word ever spoken? To what end? For whose
benefit? The whole world conspired to force them together! To resist
became a weariness!
His brother Mark was talking on. "I know all about women," he had
announced. Perhaps he did. He had lived with exemplary fidelity to a
quite unpresentable woman, for a number of years. Perhaps the complete
study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest!
Christopher said:
"Look here, Mark. You had better go through all my pass-books for the
last ten years. Or ever since I had an account. This discussion is no
good if you don't believe what I say."
Mark said:
"I don't want to see your pass-books. I believe you."
He added, a second later:
"Why the devil shouldn't I believe you? It's either believing you're a
gentleman or Ruggles a liar. It's only common-sense to believe Ruggles a
liar, in that case. I didn't before because I had no grounds to."
Christopher said:
"I doubt if liar is the right word. He picked up things that were said
against me. No doubt he reported them faithfully enough. Things _are_
said against me. I don't know why."
"Because," Mark said with emphasis, "you treat these south country swine
with the contempt that they deserve. They're incapable of understanding
the motives of a gentleman. If you live among dogs they'll think you've
the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you?" He added:
"I thought you'd been buried so long under their muck that you were as
mucky as they!"
Tietjens looked at his brother with the respect one has to give to a man
ignorant but shrewd. It was a discovery: that his brother was shrewd.
But, of course, he would be shrewd. He was the indispensable head of a
great department. He had to have some qualities. . . . Not cultivated,
not even instructed. A savage! But penetrating!
"We must move on," he said, "or I shall have to take a cab." Mark
detached himself from his half buried cannon.
"What did you do with the other three thousand?" he asked. "Three
thousand is a hell of a big sum to chuck away. For a younger son."
"Except for some furniture I bought for my wife's rooms," Christopher
said, "it went mostly in loans."
"Loans!" Mark exclaimed. "To that fellow Macmaster?"
"Mostly to him," Christopher answered. "But about seven hundred to Dicky
Swipes, of Cullercoats."
"Good God! Why to him?" Mark ejaculated.
"Oh, because he was Swipes, of Cullercoats," Christopher said, "and
asked for it. He'd have had more, only that was enough for him to drink
himself to death on."
Mark said:
"I suppose you don't give money to every fellow that asks for it?"
Christopher said:
"I do. It's a matter of principle."
"It's lucky," Mark said, "that a lot of fellows don't know that. You
wouldn't have much brass left for long."
"I didn't have it for long," Christopher said.
"You know," Mark said, "you couldn't expect to do the princely patron on
a youngest son's portion. It's a matter of taste. I never gave a
ha'penny to a beggar myself. But a lot of the Tietjens were princely.
One generation to addle brass: one to keep: one to spend. That's all
right. . . . I suppose Macmaster's wife _is_ your mistress? That'll
account for it not being the girl. They keep an arm-chair for you."
Christopher said:
"No. I just backed Macmaster for the sake of backing him. Father lent
him money to begin with."
"So he did," Mark exclaimed.
"His wife," Christopher said, "was the widow of Breakfast Duchemin.
_You_ knew Breakfast Duchemin?"
"Oh, _I_ knew Breakfast Duchemin," Mark said. "I suppose Macmaster's a
pretty warm man now. Done himself proud with Duchemin's money."
"Pretty proud!" Christopher said. "They won't be knowing me long now."
"But damn it all!" Mark said. "You've Groby to all intents and purposes.
_I'm_ not going to marry and beget children to hinder you."
Christopher said:
"Thanks. I don't want it."
"Got your knife into me?" Mark asked.
"Yes. I've got my knife into you," Christopher answered. "Into the whole
bloody lot of you, and Ruggles' and ffolliott's and our father!"
Mark said: "Ah!"
"You don't suppose I wouldn't have?" Christopher asked.
"Oh, _I_ don't suppose you wouldn't have," Mark answered. "I thought you
were a soft sort of bloke. I see you aren't."
"I'm as North Riding as yourself!" Christopher answered.
They were in the tide of Fleet Street, pushed apart by foot passengers
and separated by traffic. With some of the imperiousness of the officer
of those days Christopher barged across through motor-buses and paper
lorries. With the imperiousness of the head of a department Mark said:
"Here, policeman, stop these damn things and let me get over." But
Christopher was over much the sooner and waited for his brother in the
gateway of the Middle Temple. His mind was completely swallowed up in
the endeavour to imagine the embraces of Valentine Wannop. He said to
himself that he had burnt his boats.
Mark, coming alongside him, said:
"You'd better know what our father wanted."
Christopher said:
"Be quick then. I must get on." He had to rush through his War Office
interview to get to Valentine Wannop. They would have only a few hours
in which to recount the loves of two lifetimes. He saw her golden head
and her enraptured face. He wondered how her face would look,
enraptured. He had seen on it humour, dismay, tenderness, in the
eyes--and fierce anger and contempt for his, Christopher's, political
opinions. His militarism!
Nevertheless they halted by the Temple fountain. That respect was due to
their dead father. Mark had been explaining. Christopher had caught some
of his words and divined the links. Mr. Tietjens had left no will,
confident that his desires as to the disposal of his immense fortune
would be carried out meticulously by his eldest son. He would have left
a will, but there was the vague case of Christopher to be considered.
Whilst Christopher had been a youngest son you arranged that he had a
good lump sum and went, with it, to the devil how he liked. He was no
longer a youngest son: by the will of God.
"Our father's idea," Mark said by the fountain, "was that no settled sum
could keep you straight. His idea was that if you were a bloody pimp
living on women . . . You don't mind?"
"I don't mind your putting it straightforwardly," Christopher said. He
considered the base of the fountain that was half full of leaves. This
civilisation had contrived a state of things in which leaves rotted by
August. Well, it was doomed!
"If you were a pimp living on women," Mark repeated, "it was no good
making a will. You might need uncounted thousands to keep you straight.
You were to have 'em. You were to be as debauched as you wanted, but on
clean money. I was to see how much in all probability that would be and
arrange the other legacies to scale. . . . Father had crowds of
pensioners. . . ."
"How much did father cut up for?" Christopher asked. Mark said:
"God knows. . . . You saw we proved the estate at a million and a
quarter as far as ascertained. But it might be twice that. Or five
times! . . . With steel prices what they have been for the last three
years it's impossible to say what the Middlesbrough district property
won't produce. . . . The death duties even can't catch it up. And there
are all the ways of getting round _them_."
Christopher inspected his brother with curiosity. This
brown-complexioned fellow with bulging eyes, shabby on the whole,
tightly buttoned into a rather old pepper-and-salt suit, with a badly
rolled umbrella, old race-glasses and his bowler hat the only neat thing
about him, was, indeed, a prince. With a rigid outline! All real princes
must look like that. He said:
"Well! You won't be a penny the poorer by me."
Mark was beginning to believe this. He said:
"You won't forgive father?"
Christopher said:
"I won't forgive father for not making a will. I won't forgive him for
calling in Ruggles. I saw him and you in the writing-room the night
before he died. He never spoke to me. He could have. It was clumsy
stupidity. That's unforgiveable."
"The fellow shot himself," Mark said. "You usually forgive a fellow who
shoots himself."
"I don't," Christopher said. "Besides he's probably in heaven and don't
need my forgiveness. Ten to one he's in heaven. He was a good man."
"One of the best," Mark said. "It was I that called in Ruggles though."
"I don't forgive you either," Christopher said.
"But you _must_," Mark said--and it was a tremendous concession to
sentimentality--"take enough to make you comfortable."
"By God!" Christopher exclaimed. "I loathe your whole beastly buttered
toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as
I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted,
hot-house aired beastliness of fornication. . . ." He was carried away,
as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine
Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without
draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. . . . "You won't," he
repeated, "be a penny the poorer by me."
Mark said:
"Well, you needn't get shirty about it. If you won't you won't. We'd
better move on. You've only just time. We'll say that settles it. . . .
Are you, or aren't you, overdrawn at your bank? I'll make that up,
whatever you damn well do to stop it."
"I'm not overdrawn," Christopher said. "I'm over thirty pounds in
credit, and I've an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a
mistake of the bank's."
Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a
bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England.
They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious
umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis
lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved
like marionettes practising crucifixions.
"By God!" he said, "this is the last of England. . . . There's only my
department where they never make mistakes. I tell you, if there were any
mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!" He added: "But
don't you think that I'm going to give up comfort, I'm not. My Charlotte
makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she's got a
tap of French rum that's saved my life over and over again after a
beastly wet day's racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give
her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a
Frenchwoman for managing. . . . By God, I'd marry the doxy if she wasn't
a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn't hurt me. But I couldn't
stomach marrying a Papist. They're not to be trusted."
"You'll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby," Christopher said.
"My son's to be brought up as a Papist."
Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground.
"Eh, but that's a bitter one," he said. "Whatever made ye do that? . . .
I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you
married her." He added: "I'd not like to sleep with that wife of yours.
She's too athletic. It'd be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I
suppose though you're a pair of turtle doves. . . . Eh, but I'd not have
thought ye would have been so weak."
"I only decided this morning," Christopher said, "when my cheque was
returned from the bank. You won't have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about
Groby."
"I can't say I have," Mark answered.
"It's no good trying to explain that side of it then," Christopher said,
"there isn't time. But you're wrong in thinking Sylvia made it a
condition of our marriage. Nothing would have made me consent then. It
has made her a happy woman that I have. The poor thing thought our house
was under a curse for want of a Papist heir."
"What made ye consent now?" Mark asked.
"I've told you," Christopher said, "it was getting my cheque returned to
the club; that on the top of the rest of it. A fellow who can't do
better than that had better let the mother bring up the child. . . .
Besides, it won't hurt a Papist boy to have a father with dishonoured
cheques as much as it would a Protestant. They're not quite English."
"That's true too," Mark said.
He stood still by the railings of the public garden near the Temple
station.
"Then," he said, "if I'd let the lawyers write and tell you the
guarantee for your overdraft from the estate was stopped as they wanted
to, the boy wouldn't be a Papist? You wouldn't have overdrawn."
"I didn't overdraw," Christopher said. "But if you had warned me I
should have made enquiries at the bank and the mistake wouldn't have
occurred. Why didn't you?"
"I meant to," Mark said. "I meant to do it myself. But I hate writing
letters. I put it off. I didn't much like having dealings with the
fellow I thought you were. I suppose that's another thing you won't
forgive me for?"
"No. I shan't forgive you for not writing to me," Christopher said. "You
ought to write business letters."
"I hate writing 'em," Mark said. Christopher was moving on. "There's one
thing more," Mark said. "I suppose the boy is your son?"
"Yes, he's my son," Christopher said.
"Then that's all," Mark said. "I suppose if you're killed you won't mind
my keeping an eye on the youngster?"
"I'll be glad," Christopher said.
They strolled along the Embankment side by side, walking rather slowly,
their backs erected and their shoulders squared because of their
satisfaction of walking together, desiring to lengthen the walk by going
slow. Once or twice they stopped to look at the dirty silver of the
river, for both liked grim effects of landscape. They felt very strong,
as if they owned the land!
Once Mark chuckled and said:
"It's too damn funny. To think of our both being . . . what is it? . . .
monogamists? Well, it's a good thing to stick to one woman . . . you
can't say it isn't. It saves trouble. And you know where you are."
Under the lugubrious arch that leads into the War Office quadrangle
Christopher halted.
"No. I'm coming in," Mark said. "I want to speak to Hogarth. I haven't
spoken to Hogarth for some time. About the transport waggon parks in
Regent's Park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more."
"They say you do it damn well," Christopher said. "They say you're
indispensable." He was aware that his; brother desired to stay with him
as long as possible. He desired it himself.
"I damn well am!" Mark said. He added: "I suppose you couldn't do that
sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses."
"I could," Christopher said, "but I suppose I shall go back to liaison
work."
"I don't think you will," Mark said. "I could put in a word for you with
the transport people."
"I wish you would," Christopher said. "I'm not fit to go back into the
front line. Besides I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry
officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of."
They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and
expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that
hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a
tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to
save the ratepayers' money.
With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an
expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and
distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:
"Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!"
The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with
little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day.
Tietjens had fallen a step back off the curb of the pavement that ran
round the quadrangle. He said:
"I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have
to. They're two different patterns that we see." He added: "This is my
brother Mark."
She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It
was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She
said to Mark:
"I didn't know Mr. Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I've never heard
him speak of you."
Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his
hat.
"I don't suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of _him_," he said, "but
he's my brother all right!"
She stepped on to the asphalte carriage-way and caught between her
fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher's khaki sleeve.
"I must speak to you," she said; "I'm going then."
She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard and
ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She
pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard, it was as
if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked
round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He
had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped
into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world.
The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her
voice was hard between her little teeth. She said:
"Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife
says you were."
Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said
vaguely:
"Ethel? Who's she?" In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr.
and Mrs. Macmaster called each other always "Guggums!" Christopher had
in all probability never heard Mrs. Duchemin's Christian names since his
disaster had swept all names out of his head.
He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space
sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb.
The girl said:
"Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs. Macmaster that is!" She was obviously
waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness:
"No! Certainly not! . . . What was said?"
Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the
green-stained shelter, like a child over a brookside. He was obviously
waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared
to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when
she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any
preparation at all: the girl repeated, without any preparation at all:
"You'd better keep off the grass if you're the Wannop girl. Mrs.
Duchemin is my husband's mistress already. You keep off!"
Christopher said:
"She said that, did she?" He was wondering how Mark kept his balance,
really. The girl said nothing more. She was waiting. With an insistence
that seemed to draw him: a sort of sucking in of his personality. It was
unbearable. He made his last effort of that afternoon.
He said:
"Damn it all. How could you ask such a tomfool question? _You_! I took
you to be an intelligent person. The only intelligent person I know.
Don't you _know_ me?"
She made an effort to retain her stiffening.
"Isn't Mrs. Tietjens a truthful person?" she asked. "I thought she
looked truthful when I saw her at Vincent and Ethel's."
He said:
"What she says she believes. But she only believes what she wants to,
for the moment. If you call that truthful, she's truthful. I've nothing
against her." He said to himself: "I'm not going to appeal to her by
damning my wife."
She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out
of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water.
"Oh," she said, "it _isn't_ true. I _knew_ it wasn't true." She began to
cry.
Christopher said:
"Come along. I've been answering tomfool questions all day. I've got
another tomfool to see here, then I'm through."
She said:
"I can't come with you, crying like this."
He answered:
"Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry." He added: "Besides
there's Mark. He's a comforting ass."
He delivered her over to Mark.
"Here, look after Miss Wannop," he said. "You want to talk to her
anyhow, don't you?" and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shopwalker
into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn't come soon to an
unemotional ass in red, green, blue or pink tabs, who would have
fishlike eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in
tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was
a place where men cried, too!
He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of
corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person
with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair: not dustbins.
The dark man said to him at once:
"Look here! What's the matter with the Command Depôts? You've been
lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies
about? Is it the rotten old colonels in command?"
Tietjens said amiably:
"Look here! I'm not a beastly spy, you know? I've had hospitality from
the rotten old colonels."
The dark man said:
"I daresay you have. But that's what you were sent round for. General
Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He's gone out
now, worse luck. . . . What's the matter with the Command Depôts? Is it
the men? Or is it the officers? You needn't mention names."
Tietjens said:
"Kind of Campion. It isn't the officers and it isn't the men. It's the
foul system. You get men who think they've deserved well of their
country--and they damn well have!--and you crop their heads. . . ."
"That's the M.O.s." the dark man said. "They don't want lice."
"If they prefer mutinies . . ." Tietjens said. "A man wants to walk with
his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don't like being regarded
as convicts. That's how they are regarded."
The dark man said:
"All right. Go on. Why don't you sit down?"
"I'm a little in a hurry," Tietjens said. "I'm going out to-morrow and
I've got a brother and people waiting below."
The dark man said:
"Oh, I'm sorry. . . . But damn. You're the sort of man we want at home.
Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don't."
Tietjens hesitated for a moment.
"Yes!" he said eventually. "Yes, I want to go."
For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his
discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It
had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the
time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal
consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true;
but, whether or no, the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out
as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night
with the girl who was crying downstairs. . . .
He heard in his ear, perfectly distinctly, the lines:
"_The voice that never yet . . .
Made answer to my word_ . . ."
He said to himself:
"That was what Sylvia wanted! I've got that much!" The dark man had said
something. Tietjens repeated:
"I'd take it very unkindly if you stopped my going . . . I want to go."
The dark man said:
"Some do. Some do not. I'll make a note of your name in case you come
back . . . You won't mind going on with your cinder-sifting, if you do?
. . . Get on with your story as quick as you can. And get what fun you
can before you go. They say it's rotten out there. Damn awful! There's a
hell of a strafe on. That's why they want all you."
For a moment Tietjens saw the grey dawn at rail-head with the distant
sound of a ceaselessly boiling pot, from miles away! The army feeling
re-descended upon him. He began to talk about Command Depôts, at great
length and with enthusiasm. He snorted with rage at the way men were
treated in these gloomy places. With ingenious stupidity!
Every now and then the dark man interrupted him with:
"Don't forget that a Command Depôt is a place where sick and wounded go
to get made fit. We've got to get 'em back as soon as we can."
"And do you?" Tietjens would ask.
"No, we don't," the other would answer. "That's what this enquiry is
about."
"You've got," Tietjens would continue, "on the north side of a beastly
clay hill nine miles from Southampton three thousand men from the
Highlands, North Wales, Cumberland. . . . God knows where, as long as
it's three hundred miles from home to make them rather mad with
nostalgia. . . . You allow 'em out for an hour a day during the pub's
closing time: you shave their heads to prevent 'em appealing to local
young women who don't exist, and you don't let 'em carry the
swagger-canes! God knows why! To prevent their poking their eyes out, if
they fall down, I suppose. Nine miles from anywhere, with chalk down
roads to walk on and not a bush for shelter or shade . . . And, damn it,
if you get two men, chums, from the Seaforths or the Argylls you don't
let them sleep in the same hut, but shove 'em in with a lot of fat Buffs
or Welshmen, who stink of leeks and can't speak English. . . ."
"That's the infernal medicals' orders to stop 'em talking all night."
"To make 'em conspire all night not to turn-out for parade," Tietjens
said. "And there's a beastly mutiny begun. . . . And, damn it, they're
fine men. They're first-class fellows. Why don't you--as this is a
Christian land--let 'em go home to convalesce with their girls and pubs
and friends and a little bit of swank, for heroes? Why in God's name
don't you? Isn't there suffering enough?"
"I wish you wouldn't say 'you,'" the dark man said. "It isn't me. The
only A.C.I. I've drafted was to give every Command Depôt a cinema and a
theatre. But the beastly medicals got it stopped . . . for fear
of infection. And, of course, the parsons and Nonconformist
magistrates . . ."
"Well, you'll have to change it all," Tietjens said, "or you'll just
have to say: thank God we've got a navy. You won't have an army. The
other day three fellows--Warwicks--asked me at question time, after a
lecture, why they were shut up there in Wiltshire whilst Belgian
refugees were getting bastards on their wives in Birmingham. And when I
asked how many men made that complaint over fifty stood up. All from
Birmingham. . . ."
The dark man said:
"I'll make a note of that. . . . Go on."
Tietjens went on; for as long as he stayed there he felt himself a man,
doing work that befitted a man, with the bitter contempt for fools that
a man should have and express. It was a letting up: a real last leave.
IV
Mark Tietjens, his umbrella swinging sheepishly, his bowler hat pushed
firmly down on to his ears to give him a sense of stability, walked
beside the weeping girl in the quadrangle.
"I say," he said, "don't give it to old Christopher too beastly hard
about his militarist opinions. . . . Remember, he's going out to-morrow
and he's one of the best."
She looked at him quickly, tears remaining upon her cheeks, and then
away.
"One of the best," Mark said. "A fellow who never told a lie or did a
dishonourable thing in his life. Let him down easy, there's a good girl.
You ought to, you know."
The girl, her face turned away, said:
"I'd lay down my life for him!"
Mark said:
"I know you would. I know a good woman when I see one. And think! He
probably considers that he _is_ . . . offering his life, you know, for
you. And me, too, of course! . . . It's a different way of looking at
things." He gripped her awkwardly but irresistibly by the upper arm. It
was very thin under her blue cloth coat. He said to himself:
"By Jove! Christopher likes them skinny. It's the athletic sort that
attracts him. This girl is as clean run as . . ." He couldn't think of
anything as clean run as Miss Wannop, but he felt a warm satisfaction at
having achieved an intimacy with her and his brother. He said:
"You aren't going away? Not without a kinder word to him. You think! He
might be killed. . . . Besides. Probably he's never killed a German. He
was a liaison officer. Since then he's been in charge of a dump where
they sift army dustbins. To see how they can give the men less to eat.
That means that the civilians get more. You don't object to his giving
civilians more meat? . . . It isn't even helping to kill Germans. . . ."
He felt her arm press his hand against her warm side.
"What's he going to do now?" she asked. Her voice wavered.
"That's what I'm here about," Mark said. "I'm going in to see old
Hogarth. You don't know Hogarth? Old General Hogarth? I think I can get
him to give Christopher a job with the transport. A safe job. Safeish!
No beastly glory business about it. No killing beastly Germans
either. . . . I beg your pardon, if you like Germans."
She drew her arm from his hand in order to look him in the face.
"Oh!" she said, "_you_ don't want him to have any beastly military
glory!" The colour came back into her face: she looked at him open eyed.
He said:
"No! Why the devil should he?" He said to himself: "She's got enormous
eyes: a good neck: good shoulders: good breasts: clean hips: small
hands. She isn't knock-kneed: neat ankles. She stands well on her feet.
Feet not too large! Five foot four, say! A real good filly!" He went on
aloud: "Why in the world should he want to be a beastly soldier? He's
the heir to Groby. That ought to be enough for one man."
Having stood still sufficiently long for what she knew to be his
critical inspection, she put her hand in turn, precipitately, under his
arm and moved him towards the entrance steps.
"Let's be quick then," she said. "Let's get him into your transport at
once. Before he goes to-morrow. Then we'll know he's safe."
He was puzzled by her dress. It was very business-like, dark blue and
very short. A white blouse with a black silk, man's tie. A wideawake,
with, on the front of the band, a cipher.
"You're in uniform yourself," he said. "Does your conscience let you do
war work?"
She said:
"No. We're hard up. I'm taking the gym classes in a great big school to
turn an honest penny. . . . _Do_ be quick!"
Her pressure on his elbow flattered him. He resisted it a little,
hanging back, to make her more insistent. He liked being pleaded with by
a pretty woman: Christopher's girl at that.
He said:
"Oh, it's not a matter of minutes. They keep 'em weeks at the base
before they send 'em up. . . . We'll fix him up all right, I've no
doubt. We'll wait in the hall till he comes down."
He told the benevolent commissionaire, one of two in a pulpit in the
crowded grim hall, that he was going up to see General Hogarth in a
minute or two. But not to send a bell-boy. He might be some time yet.
He sat himself beside Miss Wannop, clumsily on a wooden bench, humanity
serging over their toes as if they had been on a beach. She moved a
little to make room for him and that, too, made him feel good. He said:
"You said just now: 'we' are hard up. Does 'we' mean you and
Christopher?"
She said:
"I and Mr. Tietjens. Oh, no! I and mother! The paper she used to write
for stopped. When your father died, I believe. He found money for it, I
think. And mother isn't suited to free-lancing. She's worked too hard in
her life."
He looked at her, his round eyes protruding.
"I don't know what that is, free-lancing," he said. "But you've got to
be comfortable. How much do you and your mother need to keep you
comfortable? And put in a bit more so that Christopher could have a
mutton-chop now and then!"
She hadn't really been listening. He said with some insistence: "Look
here! I'm here on business. Not like an elderly admirer forcing himself
on you. Though, by God, I do admire you too. . . . But my father wanted
your mother to be comfortable. . . ."
Her face, turned to him, became rigid.
"You don't mean . . ." she began. He said:
"You won't get it any quicker by interrupting. I have to tell my stories
in my own way. My father wanted your mother to be comfortable. He said
so that she could write books, not papers. I don't know what the
difference is: that's what he said. He wants you to be comfortable too.
. . . You've not got any encumbrances? Not . . . oh, say a business: a
hat shop that doesn't pay? Some girls have. . . ."
She said: "No. I just teach . . . oh, _do_ be quick. . . ."
For the first time in his life he dislocated the course of his thoughts
to satisfy a longing in some one else.
"You may take it to go on with," he said, "as if my father had left your
mother a nice little plum." He cast about to find his scattered
thoughts.
"He has! He _has_! After all!" the girl said. "Oh, thank God!"
"There'll be a bit for you, if you like," Mark said, "or perhaps
Christopher won't let you. He's ratty with me. And something for your
brother to buy a doctor's business with." He asked: "You haven't
fainted, have you?" She said:
"No. I don't faint. I cry."
"That'll be all right," he answered. He went on: "That's your side of
it. Now for mine. I want Christopher to have a place where he'll be sure
of a mutton-chop and an arm-chair by the fire. And someone to be good
for him. _You're_ good for him. I can see that. I know women!"
The girl was crying, softly and continuously. It was the first moment of
the lifting of strain that she had known since the day before the
Germans crossed the Belgian frontier, near a place called Gemmenich.
It had begun with the return of Mrs. Duchemin from Scotland. She had
sent at once for Miss Wannop to the rectory, late at night. By the light
of candles in tall silver stocks, against oak panelling she had seemed
like a mad block of marble, with staring, dark eyes and mad hair. She
had exclaimed in a voice as hard as a machine's:
"How do you get rid of a baby? You've been a servant. You ought to
know!"
That had been the great shock, the turning-point, of Valentine Wannop's
life. Her last years before that had been of great tranquillity, tinged
of course with melancholy because she loved Christopher Tietjens. But
she had early learned to do without, and the world as she saw it was a
place of renunciations, of high endeavour and sacrifice. Tietjens had to
be a man who came to see her mother and talked wonderfully. She had been
happy when he had been in the house--she in the housemaid's pantry,
getting the tea-things. She had, besides, been very hard worked for her
mother; the weather had been, on the whole, good, the corner of the
country in which they lived had continued to seem fresh and agreeable.
She had had excellent health, got an occasional ride on the _qui-tamer_
with which Tietjens had replaced Joel's rig; and her brother had done
admirably at Eton, taking such a number of exhibitions and things that,
once at Magdalen, he had been nearly off his mother's hands. An
admirable, gay boy, not unlikely to run for, as well as being a credit
to, his university, if he didn't get sent down for his political
extravagances. He was a Communist!
And at the rectory there had been the Duchemins, or rather Mrs. Duchemin
and, during most week-ends, Macmaster somewhere about.
The passion of Macmaster for Edith Ethel and of Edith Ethel for
Macmaster had seemed to her one of the beautiful things of life. They
seemed to swim in a sea of renunciations, of beautiful quotations, and
of steadfast waiting. Macmaster did not interest her personally much,
but she took him on trust because of Edith Ethel's romantic passion and
because he was Christopher Tietjens' friend. She had never heard him say
anything original; when he used quotations they would be apt rather than
striking. But she took it for granted that he was the right man--much as
you take it for granted that the engine of an express train in which you
are is reliable. The right people have chosen it for you. . . .
With Mrs. Duchemin, mad before her, she had the first intimation that
her idolised friend, in whom she had believed as she had believed in the
firmness of the great, sunny earth, had been the mistress of her
lover--almost since the first day she had seen him. . . . And that Mrs.
Duchemin had, stored somewhere, a character of an extreme harshness and
great vulgarity of language. She raged up and down in the candlelight,
before the dark oak panelling, screaming coarse phrases of the deepest
hatred for her lover. Didn't the oaf know his business better than
to . . .? The dirty little Port of Leith fish-handler. . . .
What, then, were tall candles in silver sticks for? And polished
panelling in galleries?
Valentine Wannop couldn't have been a little ash-cat in worn cotton
dresses, sleeping under the stairs, in an Ealing household with a
drunken cook, an invalid mistress and three over-fed men, without
acquiring a considerable knowledge of the sexual necessities and
excesses of humanity. But, as all the poorer helots of great cities
hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance, and
suave wealth, she had always considered that, far from the world of
Ealing and its county councillors who over-ate and neighed like
stallions, there were bright colonies of beings, chaste, beautiful in
thought, altruist and circumspect.
And, till that moment, she had imagined herself on the skirts of such a
colony. She presupposed a society of beautiful intellects centring in
London round her friends. Ealing she just put out of her mind. She
considered: she had, indeed once heard Tietjens say that humanity was
made up of exact and constructive intellects on the one hand and on the
other of stuff to fill graveyards. . . . Now, what had become of the
exact and constructive intellects?
Worst of all, what became of her beautiful inclination towards Tietjens,
for she couldn't regard it as anything more? Couldn't her heart sing any
more whilst she was in the housemaid's pantry and he in her mother's
study? And what became, still more, of what she knew to be Tietjens'
beautiful inclination towards her? She asked herself the eternal
question--and she knew it to be the eternal question--whether no man and
woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. And, looking at
Mrs. Duchemin, rushing backwards and forwards in the light of candles,
blue-white of face and her hair flying, Valentine Wannop said: "No! no!
The tiger lying in the reeds will always raise its head!" But tiger . . .
it was more like a peacock. . . .
Tietjens, raising his head from the other side of the tea-table and
looking at her with his long, meditative glance from beside her mother:
ought he then, instead of blue and protruding, to have eyes divided
longitudinally in the blacks of them--that should divide, closing or
dilating, on a yellow ground, with green glowings of furtive light?
She was aware that Edith Ethel had done her an irreparable wrong, for
you cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same. Or not for
years. Nevertheless she stayed with Mrs. Duchemin until far into the
small hours, when that lady fell, a mere parcel of bones in a peacock
blue wrapper, into a deep chair and refused to move or speak; nor did
she afterwards slacken in her faithful waiting on her friend. . . .
On the next day came the war. That was a nightmare of pure suffering,
with never a let-up, day or night. It began on the morning of the fourth
with the arrival of her brother from some sort of Oxford Communist
Summer School on the Broads. He was wearing a German corps student's cap
and was very drunk. He had been seeing German friends off from Harwich.
It was the first time she had ever seen a drunken man, so that was a
good present to her.
Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his
father, he had his mother's hooked nose and was always a little
imbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened
for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very
vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn't hitherto
mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper: her brother, when he
had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption.
But her mother had only chuckled.
The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood
and to torture: neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as
if--so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived
with her--in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her
knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers
to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture, and flay off
all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner
of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling and vitriolic, one hand
clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British
soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting
from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom
Edward Wannop affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause
disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had
failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being
ducked in a horse-pond, shot or otherwise martyrised. That made it
obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war.
If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled
and terrorised millions would have thrown down their arms!
Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was
in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother,
who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs. Wannop had said:
"What does your wife think about it?"
Tietjens had answered:
"Oh, Mrs. Tietjens is a pro-German. . . . Or no, that isn't exact! She
has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly
all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war.
She can't bear the thought of physical suffering. I can't blame her."
Mrs. Wannop was no longer listening: her daughter was.
For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man
and far less of an inclination--the war and Mrs. Duchemin between them.
He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a
man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on.
She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him.
One Friday afternoon at Macmaster's she had had a long talk with him:
the first she had had since the drive and the accident.
Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons--and that had
been some time before the war--Valentine Wannop had accompanied Mrs.
Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the rectory.
Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs. Duchemin drifting about the large
book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists.
On this occasion--a November day of very chilly, wet--there had been
next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually full.
Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin had taken a Mr. Spong, an architect, into
the dining-room to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi's _Views of
Rome_ that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster.
A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting close together in the far
window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr. Jegg
used the word "inhibition." Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he
had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea
over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat side by side on
the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire
warming their backs. He said:
"Well, Miss Wannop. What have you been doing?" and they drifted into
talking of the war. You couldn't not. She was astonished not to find him
so loathsome as she had expected, for, just at that time, with the facts
that were always being driven into her mind by the pacifist friends of
her brother and with continual brooding over the morals of Mrs.
Duchemin, she had an automatic feeling that all manly men were
lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over
battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of
sadism. She knew that this view of Tietjens was wrong, but she cherished
it.
She found him--as subconsciously she knew he was--astonishingly mild.
She had too often watched him whilst he listened to her mother's tirades
against the Kaiser, not to know that. He did not raise his voice, he
showed no emotion. He said at last:
"You and I are like two people . . ." He paused and began again more
quickly: "Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read
differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read
'Monkey's Soap'; if you look back when you've passed it's 'Needs no
Rinsing.' . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we
both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we
stood side by side we should see yet a third. . . . But I hope we
respect each other. We're both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect
you and I hope you respect me."
She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr. Jegg, across
the room, said: "The failure to co-ordinate . . ." and then dropped his
voice.
Tietjens looked at her attentively.
"You don't respect me?" he asked. She kept obstinately silent.
"I'd have liked you to have said it," he repeated.
"Oh," she cried out, "how can I respect you when there is all this
suffering? So much pain! Such torture . . . I can't sleep . . . Never . . .
I haven't slept a whole night since . . . Think of the immense
spaces, stretching out under the night . . . I believe pain and fear
must be worse at night. . . ." She knew she was crying out like that
because her dread had come true. When he had said: "I'd have liked you
to have said it," using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man,
too, was going.
And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she
confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would
say farewell to her: like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just
occasionally, using the word "we"--and perhaps without intention--he had
let her know that he loved her.
Mr. Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs. Haviland was already at
the door.
"We'll leave you to have your war talk out," Mr. Jegg said. He added:
"For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of
things that's preservable. I can't help saying that."
She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:
"Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He _must_!" The deepest of
her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly
known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils
the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple,
but very faint. "You must! You _must_!" she said to herself. There came
back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the
moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog
into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body
towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden
lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall. . . . She saw the white
disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm
night. . . .
Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing
on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they
had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for
its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great
dining-room at the Duchemins. He got down from the fire-seat with a
weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a
little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue:
"Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the
office. That, too, won't be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor
Vinnie thinks matters." He added: "It's queer, dear . . ." In the tumult
of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said "dear." . . .
"Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have
just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep
at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at
night. . . . And she, too, said that she could not respect me. . . ."
She sprang up.
"Oh," she said, "she didn't mean it. _I_ didn't mean it. Almost every
man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don't you see it's a
desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can
we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?" She
added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned:
"Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from
your point of view? You're more useful--you know you're more useful to
your country here than . . ."
He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great
gentleness and concern.
"I can't reconcile it with my conscience," he said. "In this affair
there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don't
mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on. We
ought. But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul."
The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of
the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were
speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as
soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit
heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil
resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his
conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again.
That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing
straightforward: for him or for any man. One could have fought with a
clean heart for a civilisation: if you like for the eighteenth century
against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against
the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at
once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a
catspaw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was
nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was
just bearable. One could keep at one's job--which was faking statistics
against the other fellow--until you were sick and tired of faking and
your brain reeled. And then some!
It was probably impolitic to fake--to overstate!--a case against enemy
nations. The chickens would come home to roost in one way or another,
probably. Perhaps they wouldn't. That was a matter for one's superiors.
Obviously! And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows. Stupid,
but relatively disinterested. But now! . . . What was one to do? . . .
He went on, almost mumbling. . . .
She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily
clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own
so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily
unselfish. He didn't betray one thought of self-interest . . . not one!
He was saying:
"But now! . . . with this crowd of boodlers! . . . Supposing one's asked
to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to
force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to,
say, Salonika--when they and you and common-sense and everyone and
everything else, know it's disastrous? . . . And from that to monkeying
with our own forces. . . . Starving particular units for political . . ."
He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said:
"I can't, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your
sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations."
She said passionately:
"They're not! They're not! How dare you say such a thing?"
He answered:
"It doesn't matter . . . No! I'm sure you're not . . . But, anyhow,
these things are official. One can't, if one's scrupulous, even talk
about them . . . And then . . . You see it means such infinite deaths of
men, such an infinite prolongation . . . all this interference for
side-ends! . . . I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over
their heads. . . . And then . . . I'm to carry out their orders because
they're my superiors. . . . But helping them means unnumbered
deaths. . . ."
He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile:
"You see!" he said, "we're perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn't
think you're the only one that sees all the deaths and all the
sufferings. All, you see: I, too, am a conscientious objector. My
conscience won't let me continue any longer with these fellows. . . ."
She said:
"But isn't there any other . . ."
He interrupted:
"No! There's no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these
affairs. I suppose I'm more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I'm
not. But my conscience won't let me use my brain in this service. So
I've a great, hulking body! I'll admit I'm probably not much good. But
I've nothing to live for: what I stand for isn't any more in this world
What I want, as you know, I can't have. So . . ."
She exclaimed bitterly:
"Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two
bullets in front of two small anæmic fellows. . . . And how can you say
you'll have nothing to live for? You'll come back. You'll do your good
work again. You know you did good work . . ."
He said:
"Yes! I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I've come to believe I
did. . . . But no! They'll never let me back. They've got me out, with
all sorts of bad marks against me. They'll pursue me, systematically. . . .
You see in such a world as this, an idealist--or perhaps it's only
a sentimentalist--must be stoned to death. He makes the others so
uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf. . . . No; they'll get me,
one way or the other. And some fellow--Macmaster here--will do my jobs.
He won't do them so well, but he'll do them more dishonestly. Or no. I
oughtn't to say dishonestly. He'll do them with enthusiasm and
righteousness. He'll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense
docility and unction. He'll fake figures against our allies with the
black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when _that_ war comes, he'll do the
requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priests
of Baal. And he'll be right. It's all we're fitted for. We ought never
to have come into this war. We ought to have snaffled other peoples'
colonies as the price of neutrality. . . ."
"Oh!" Valentine Wannop said, "how can you so hate your country?"
He said with great earnestness:
"Don't say it! Don't believe it! Don't even for a moment think it! I
love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey,
mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a
grosser name . . . and all the rest of the rubbish--you remember the
field between the Duchemins and your mother's--and we have always been
boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so
we've built up the great tradition that we love. . . . But, for the
moment, it's painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than
Walpole's. But one's too near them. One sees of Walpole that he
consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt: one doesn't
see his methods. . . . My son, or his son, will only see the glory of
the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won't
know about the methods. They'll teach him at school that across the
counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Though
that was another discreditable affair. . . ."