"But you!" Valentine Wannop exclaimed. "_You_! what will _you_ do! After

the war!"

"I!" he said rather bewilderedly. "I! . . . Oh, I shall go into the old

furniture business. I've been offered a job. . . ."

She didn't believe he was serious. He hadn't, she knew, ever thought

about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and

pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would

come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage

sale. She cried out:

"Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once?" for

in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.

He said:

"Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably

not itself for the minute. . . ." He was obviously thinking of something

else.

"I've probably been a low cad," he said, "wringing your heart with my

doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always

been--or we've seemed always to me--so alike in our thoughts. I daresay

I wanted you to respect me. . . ."

"Oh, I respect you! I respect you!" she said. "You're as innocent as a

child."

He went on:

"And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late

that one has had a quiet room and a fire and . . . you! To think in

front of. You _do_ make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very

muddled till to-day . . . till five minutes ago! Do you remember our

drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul. . .

But you see . . . Don't you see?"

She said:

"No! What am I to see? I remember . . ."

He said:

"That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the

gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for

me!"

She said:

"Did I say that? . . . Yes, I said that!"

The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out

her arms. . . . She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly

visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for

tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both

hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word

of love or she would have held it; it began with: "Well, I must be . . ."

He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great

waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room. . . .

The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and

unrelenting. Her mother's paper cut down her money; no orders for

serials came in: her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal

diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be

praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the

Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her

desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The

police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then

her brother went to prison: somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness

of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no

milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances.

For three days Mrs. Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew

better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But

there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour

and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in

prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace,

after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being

the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let

his mother use her influence--of which she had still some--to get him

appointed as an A.B. on a mine-sweeper. Great winds became an agony to

Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that

came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better: she took

pride in having a son in a service. She was then the more able to

appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small

mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs. Wannop in effigy in front of

their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs. Wannop ran out and in

the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer

hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs. Wannop's grey hair in the

firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration

card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to

London.

The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts: the air above it

filled with aeroplanes: the roads covered with military cars. There was

then no getting away from the sounds of the war.

Just as they had decided to move Tietjens came back. It was for a moment

heaven to have him in this country. But when, a month later, Valentine

Wannop saw him for a minute, he seemed very heavy, aged and dull. It was

then almost as bad as before, for it seemed to Valentine as if he hardly

had his reason.

On hearing that Tietjens was to be quartered--or, at any rate,

occupied--in the neighbourhood of Ealing, Mrs. Wannop at once took a

small house in Bedford Park, whilst, to make ends meet--for her mother

made terribly little--Valentine Wannop took a post as athletic mistress

in a great school in a not very near suburb. Thus, though Tietjens came

in for a cup of tea almost every afternoon with Mrs. Wannop in the

dilapidated little suburban house, Valentine Wannop hardly ever saw him.

The only free afternoon she had was the Friday, and on that day she

still regularly chaperoned Mrs. Duchemin: meeting her at Charing Cross

towards noon and taking her back to the same station in time to catch

the last train to Rye. On Saturdays and Sundays she was occupied all day

in typing her mother's manuscript.

Of Tietjens, then, she saw almost nothing. She knew that his poor mind

was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said he was a great help

to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory

conclusions--or quite startling and attractive theories--with extreme

rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her

whenever--though it wasn't now very often--she had an article to write

for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her

failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing. . . .

Mrs. Duchemin, then, Valentine Wannop still chaperoned, though there was

no bond any more between them. Valentine knew, for instance, perfectly

well that Mrs. Duchemin, after she had been seen off by train from

Charing Cross, got out at Clapham Junction, took a taxicab back to

Gray's Inn after dark and spent the night with Macmaster, and Mrs.

Duchemin knew quite well that Valentine knew. It was a sort of parade of

circumspection and rightness, and they kept it up even after, at a

sinister registry office, the wedding had taken place, Valentine being

the one witness and an obscure-looking substitute for the usual pew

opener another. There seemed to be, by then, no very obvious reason why

Valentine should support Mrs. Macmaster any more on these rather dreary

occasions, but Mrs. Macmaster said she might just as well, until they

saw fit to make the marriage public. There were, Mrs. Macmaster said,

censorious tongues, and even if these were confuted afterwards it is

difficult, if not impossible, to outrun scandal. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster

was of opinion that the Macmaster afternoons with these geniuses must be

a liberal education for Valentine. But, as Valentine sat most of the

time at the tea-table near the door, it was the backs and side faces of

the distinguished rather than their intellects with which she was most

acquainted. Occasionally, however, Mrs. Duchemin would show Valentine,

as an enormous privilege, one of the letters to herself from men of

genius: usually North British, written, as a rule, from the Continent or

more distant and peaceful climates, for most of them believed it their

duty in these hideous times to keep alive in the world the only

glimmering spark of beauty. Couched in terms so eulogistic as to

resemble those used in passionate love-letters by men more profane,

these epistles recounted, or consulted Mrs. Duchemin as to, their love

affairs with foreign princesses, the progress of their ailments or the

progresses of their souls towards those higher regions of morality in

which floated their so beautiful-souled correspondent.

The letters entertained Valentine and, indeed, she was entertained by

that whole mirage. It was only the Macmaster's treatment of her mother

that finally decided Valentine that this friendship had died; for the

friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing

disillusionments, and Valentine Wannop was a woman of more than usual

loyalty. Indeed, if she couldn't respect Mrs. Duchemin on the old

grounds, she could very really respect her for her tenacity of purpose,

her determination to advance Macmaster and for the sort of ruthlessness

that she put into these pursuits.

Valentine's affection had, indeed, survived even Edith Ethel's continued

denigrations of Tietjens--for Edith Ethel regarded Tietjens as a clog

round her husband's neck, if only because he was a very unpopular man,

grown personally rather unpresentable and always extremely rude to the

geniuses on Fridays. Edith Ethel, however, never made these complaints

that grew more and more frequent as more and more the distinguished

flocked to the Fridays, before Macmaster. And they ceased very suddenly

and in a way that struck Valentine as odd.

Mrs. Duchemin's grievance against Tietjens was that, Macmaster being a

weak man, Tietjens had acted as his banker until, what with interest and

the rest of it, Macmaster owed Tietjens a great sum: several thousand

pounds. And there had been no real reason: Macmaster had spent most of

the money either on costly furnishings for his rooms or on his costly

journeys to Rye. On the one hand Mrs. Duchemin could have found

Macmaster all the bric-a-brac he could possibly have wanted from amongst

the things at the rectory, where no one would have missed them and, on

the other, she, Mrs. Duchemin, would have paid all Macmaster's

travelling expenses. She had had unlimited money from her husband, who

never asked for accounts. But, whilst Tietjens still had influence with

Macmaster, he had used it uncompromisingly against this course, giving

him the delusion--it enraged Mrs. Duchemin to think!--that it would have

been dishonourable. So that Macmaster had continued to draw upon him.

And, most enraging of all, at a period when she had had a power of

attorney over all Mr. Duchemin's fortune and could, perfectly easily,

have sold out something that no one would have missed for the couple of

thousand or so that Macmaster owed, Tietjens had very forcibly refused

to allow Macmaster to agree to anything of the sort. He had again put

into Macmaster's weak head that it would be dishonourable. But Mrs.

Duchemin--and she closed her lips determinedly after she had said

it--knew perfectly well Tietjens' motive. So long as Macmaster owed him

money he imagined that they couldn't close their doors upon him. And

their establishment was beginning to be a place where you meet people of

great influence who might well get for a person as lazy as Tietjens a

sinecure that would suit him. Tietjens, in fact, knew which side his

bread was buttered.

For what, Mrs. Duchemin asked, could there have been dishonourable about

the arrangement she had proposed? Practically the whole of Mr.

Duchemin's money was to come to her: he was by then insane; it was

therefore, morally, her own. But immediately after that, Mr. Duchemin

having been certified, the estate had fallen into the hands of the

Lunacy Commissioners and there had been no further hope of taking the

capital. Now, her husband being dead, it was in the hands of trustees,

Mr. Duchemin having left the whole of his property to Magdalen College

and merely the income to his widow. The income was very large; but

where, with their expenses, with the death duties and taxation, which

were by then merciless, was Mrs. Duchemin to find the money? She was to

be allowed, under her husband's will, enough capital to buy a pleasant

little place in Surrey, with rather a nice lot of land--enough to let

Macmaster know some of the leisures of a country gentleman's lot. They

were going in for shorthorns, and there was enough land to give them a

small golf-course and, in the autumn, a little--oh, mostly

rough!--shooting for Macmaster to bring his friends down to. It would

just run to that. Oh, no ostentation. Merely a nice little place. As an

amusing detail the villagers there already called Macmaster "squire" and

the women curtsied to him. But Valentine Wannop would understand that,

with all these expenses, they couldn't find the money to pay off

Tietjens. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster said she wasn't going to pay off

Tietjens. He had had his chance once: now he could go without, for her.

Macmaster would have to pay it himself and he would never be able to,

his contribution to their housekeeping being what it was. And there were

going to be complications. Macmaster wondered about their little place

in Surrey, saying that he would consult Tietjens about this and that

alteration. But over the doorsill of that place the foot of Tietjens was

never going to go! Never! It would mean a good deal of unpleasantness;

or rather it would mean one sharp: "C-r-r-unch!" And then: Napoo finny!

Mrs. Duchemin sometimes, and with great effect, condescended to use one

of the more picturesque phrases of the day.

To all these diatribes Valentine Wannop answered hardly anything. It was

no particular concern of her's; even if, for a moment, she felt

proprietarily towards Christopher as she did now and then, she felt no

particular desire that his intimacy with the Macmasters should be

prolonged, because she knew he could have no particular desire for its

prolongation. She imagined him turning them down with an unspoken and

good-humoured gibe. And, indeed, she agreed on the whole with Edith

Ethel. It _was_ demoralising for a weak little man like Vincent to have

a friend with an ever-open purse beside him. Tietjens ought not to have

been princely: it was a defect, a quality that she did not personally

admire in him. As to whether it would or wouldn't have been

dishonourable for Mrs. Duchemin to take her husband's money and give it

to Macmaster, she kept an open mind. To all intents and purposes the

money _was_ Mrs. Duchemin's, and if Mrs. Duchemin had then paid

Christopher off it would have been sensible. She could see that later it

had become very inconvenient. There were, however, male standards to be

considered, and Macmaster, at least, passed for a man. Tietjens, who was

wise enough in the affairs of others, had, in that, probably been wise;

for there might have been great disagreeablenesses with trustees and

heirs-at-law had Mrs. Duchemin's subtraction of a couple of thousand

pounds from the Duchemin estate afterwards come to light. The Wannops

had never been large property owners as a family, but Valentine had

heard enough of collateral wranglings over small family dishonesties to

know how very disagreeable these could be.

So she had made little or no comment; sometimes she had even faintly

agreed as to the demoralisation of Macmaster and that had sufficed. For

Mrs. Duchemin had been certain of her rightness and cared nothing at all

for the opinion of Valentine Wannop, or else took it for granted.

And when Tietjens had been gone to France for a little time Mrs.

Duchemin seemed to forget the matter, contenting herself with saying

that he might very likely not come back. He was the sort of clumsy man

who generally got killed. In that case, since no I.O.U.s or paper had

passed, Mrs. Tietjens would have no claim. So that would be all right.

But two days after the return of Christopher--and that was how Valentine

knew he had come back!--Mrs. Duchemin with a lowering brow exclaimed:

"That oaf, Tietjens, is in England, perfectly safe and sound. And now

the whole miserable business of Vincent's indebtedness . . . Oh!"

She had stopped so suddenly and so markedly that even the stoppage of

Valentine's own heart couldn't conceal the oddness from her. Indeed it

was as if there were an interval before she completely realised what the

news was and as if, during that interval, she said to herself:

"It's very queer. It's exactly as if Edith Ethel has stopped abusing him

on my account . . . As if she _knew_!" But how could Edith Ethel know

that she loved the man who had returned? It was impossible! She hardly

knew herself. Then the great wave of relief rolled over her: he was in

England. One day she would see him, there: in the great room. For these

colloquies with Edith Ethel always took place in the great room where

she had last seen Tietjens. It looked suddenly beautiful and she was

resigned to sitting there, waiting for the distinguished.

It was indeed a beautiful room: it had become so during the years. It

was long and high--matching the Tietjens'. A great cut-glass chandelier

from the rectory hung dimly coruscating in the centre, reflected and

re-reflected in convex gilt mirrors, topped by eagles. A great number of

books had gone to make place on the white panelled walls for the

mirrors, and for the fair orange and brown pictures by Turner, also from

the rectory. From the rectory had come the immense scarlet and lapis

lazuli carpet, the great brass fire-basket and appendages, the great

curtains that, in the three long windows, on their peacock blue Chinese

silk showed parti-coloured cranes ascending in long flights--and all the

polished Chippendale arm-chairs. Amongst all these, gracious, trailing,

stopping with a tender gesture to rearrange very slightly the crimson

roses in the famous silver bowls, still in dark blue silks, with an

amber necklace and her elaborate black hair, waved exactly like that of

Julia Domna of the Musée Lapidaire at Arles, moved Mrs. Macmaster--also

from the rectory. Macmaster had achieved his desire: even to the

shortbread cakes and the peculiarly scented tea that came every Friday

morning from Princes Street. And, if Mrs. Macmaster hadn't the pawky,

relishing humour of the great Scots ladies of past days, she had in

exchange her deep aspect of comprehension and tenderness. An

astonishingly beautiful and impressive woman: dark hair; dark, straight

eyebrows; a straight nose; dark blue eyes in the shadows of her hair and

bowed, pomegranate lips in a chin curved like the bow of a Greek

boat. . . .

The etiquette of the place on Fridays was regulated as if by a royal

protocol. The most distinguished and, if possible, titled person was led

to a great walnut-wood fluted chair that stood askew by the fireplace,

its back and seat of blue velvet, heaven knows how old. Over him would

hover Mrs. Duchemin: or, if he were _very_ distinguished, both Mr. and

Mrs. Macmaster. The not so distinguished were led up by turns to be

presented to the celebrity and would then arrange themselves in a

half-circle in the beautiful arm-chairs; the less distinguished still,

in outer groups in chairs that had no arms: the almost undistinguished

stood, also in groups or languished, awestruck on the scarlet leather

window seats. When all were there Macmaster would establish himself on

the incredibly unique hearthrug and would address wise sayings to the

celebrity; occasionally, however, saying a kind thing to the youngest

man present--to give him a chance of distinguishing himself. Macmaster's

hair, at that date, was still black, but not quite so stiff or so well

brushed; his beard had in it greyish streaks and his teeth, not being

quite so white, looked less strong. He wore also a single eyeglass, the

retaining of which in his right eye gave him a slightly agonised

expression. It gave him, however, the privilege of putting his face very

close to the face of anyone upon whom he wished to make a deep

impression. He had lately become much interested in the drama, so that

there were usually several large--and, of course, very reputable and

serious actresses in the room. On rare occasions Mrs. Duchemin would say

across the room in her deep voice:

"Valentine, a cup of tea for his highness," or "Sir Thomas," as the case

might be, and when Valentine had threaded her way through the chairs

with a cup of tea Mrs. Duchemin, with a kind, aloof smile, would say:

"Your highness, this is my little brown bird." But as a rule Valentine

sat alone at the tea-table, the guests fetching from her what they

wanted.

Tietjens came to the Fridays twice during the five months of his stay at

Ealing. On each occasion he accompanied Mrs. Wannop.

In earlier days--during the earliest Fridays--Mrs. Wannop, if she ever

came, had always been installed, with her flowing black, in the throne

and, like an enlarged Queen Victoria, had sat there whilst suppliants

were led up to this great writer. But now: on the first occasion Mrs.

Wannop got a chair without arms in the outer ring, whilst a general

officer commanding lately in chief somewhere in the East, whose military

success had not been considerable, but whose despatches were considered

very literary, occupied, rather blazingly, the throne. But Mrs. Wannop

had chatted very contentedly all the afternoon with Tietjens, and it had

been comforting to Valentine to see Tietjens' large, uncouth, but quite

collected figure, and to observe the affection that these two had for

each other.

But, on the second occasion, the throne was occupied by a very young

woman who talked a great deal and with great assurance. Valentine didn't

know who she was. Mrs. Wannop, very gay and distracted, stood nearly the

whole afternoon by a window. And even at that, Valentine was contented,

quite a number of young men crowding round the old lady and leaving the

younger one's circle rather bare.

There came in a very tall, clean run and beautiful, fair woman,

dressed in nothing in particular. She stood with extreme--with

noticeable--unconcern near the doorway. She let her eyes rest on

Valentine, but looked away before Valentine could speak. She must have

had an enormous quantity of fair tawny hair, for it was coiled in a

great surface over her ears. She had in her hand several visiting cards

which she looked at with a puzzled expression and then laid on a card

table. She was no one who had ever been there before.

Edith Ethel--it was for the second time!--had just broken up the ring

that surrounded Mrs. Wannop, bearing the young men tributary to the

young women in the walnut chair and leaving Tietjens and the older woman

high and dry in a window: thus Tietjens saw the stranger, and there was

no doubt left in Valentine's mind. He came, diagonally, right down the

room to his wife and marched her straight up to Edith Ethel. His face

was perfectly without expression.

Macmaster, perched on the centre of the hearthrug, had an emotion that

was extraordinarily comic to witness, but that Valentine was quite

unable to analyse. He jumped two paces forward to meet Mrs. Tietjens,

held out a little hand, half withdrew it, retreated half a step. The

eyeglass fell from his perturbed eye: this gave him actually an

expression less perturbed, but, in revenge, the hairs on the back of his

scalp grew suddenly untidy. Sylvia, wavering along beside her husband,

held out her long arm and careless hand. Macmaster winced almost at the

contact, as if his fingers had been pinched in a vice. Sylvia wavered

desultorily towards Edith Ethel, who was suddenly small, insignificant

and relatively coarse. As for the young woman celebrity in the

arm-chair, she appeared to be about the size of a white rabbit.

A complete silence had fallen on the room. Every woman in it was

counting the pleats of Sylvia's skirt and the amount of material in it.

Valentine Wannop knew that because she was doing it herself. If one had

that amount of material and that number of pleats one's skirt might hang

like that. . . . For it was extraordinary: it fitted close round the

hips, and gave an effect of length and swing--yet it did not descend as

low as the ankles. It was, no doubt, the amount of material that did

that, like the Highlander's kilt that takes twelve yards to make. And

from the silence Valentine could tell that every woman and most of the

men--if they didn't know that this was Mrs. Christopher Tietjens--knew

that this was a personage of _Illustrated Weekly_, as who should say of

county family, rank. Little Mrs. Swan, lately married, actually got up,

crossed the room and sat down beside her bridegroom. It was a movement

with which Valentine could sympathise.

And Sylvia, having just faintly greeted Mrs. Duchemin, and completely

ignored the celebrity in the arm-chair--in spite of the fact that Mrs.

Duchemin had tried half-heartedly to effect an introduction--stood

still, looking round her. She gave the effect of a lady in a

nurseryman's hot-house considering what flower should interest her,

collectedly ignoring the nurserymen who bowed round her. She had just

dropped her eyelashes, twice, in recognition of two staff officers with

a good deal of scarlet streak about them who were tentatively rising

from their chairs. The staff officers who came to the Macmasters were

not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such.

Valentine was by that time beside her mother, who had been standing all

alone between two windows. She had dispossessed, in hot indignation, a

stout musical critic of his chair and had sat her mother in it. And,

just as Mrs. Duchemin's deep voice sounded, yet a little waveringly:

"Valentine . . . a cup of tea for . . ." Valentine was carrying a cup of

tea to her mother.

Her indignation had conquered her despairing jealousy, if you could call

it jealousy. For what was the good of living or loving when Tietjens had

beside him, for ever, the radiant, kind and gracious perfection. On the

other hand, of her two deep passions, the second was for her mother.

Rightly or wrongly, Valentine regarded Mrs. Wannop as a great, an august

figure: a great brain, a high and generous intelligence. She had

written, at least, one great book, and if the rest of her time had been

frittered away in the desperate struggle to live that had taken both

their lives, that could not detract from that one achievement that

should last and for ever take her mother's name down time. That this

greatness should not weigh with the Macmasters had hitherto neither

astonished nor irritated Valentine. The Macmasters had their game to

play and, for the matter of that, they had their predilections. Their

game kept them amongst the officially influential, the semi-official and

the officially accredited. They moved with such C.B.s, knights,

presidents, and the rest as dabbled in writing or the arts: they went

upwards with such reviewers, art critics, musical writers and

archæologists as had posts in, if possible, first-class public offices

or permanent positions on the more august periodicals. If an imaginative

author seemed assured of position and lasting popularity Macmaster would

send out feelers towards him, would make himself humbly useful, and

sooner or later either Mrs. Duchemin would be carrying on with him one

of her high-souled correspondences--or she wouldn't.

Mrs. Wannop they had formerly accepted as permanent leader writer and

chief critic of a great organ, but the great organ having dwindled and

now disappeared the Macmasters no longer wanted her at their parties.

That was the game--and Valentine accepted it. But that it should have

been done with such insolence, so obviously meant to be noted--for in

twice breaking up Mrs. Wannop's little circle Mrs. Duchemin had not even

once so much as said: "How d'ye do?" to the elder lady!--that was almost

more than Valentine could, for the moment, bear, and she would have

taken her mother away at once and would never have re-entered the house,

but for the compensations.

Her mother had lately written and even found a publisher for a book--and

the book had showed no signs of failing powers. On the contrary, having

been perforce stopped off the perpetual journalism that had dissipated

her energies, Mrs. Wannop had turned out something that Valentine knew

was sound, sane and well done. Abstractions caused by failing attention

to the outside world are not necessarily in a writer signs of failing,

as a writer. It may mean merely that she is giving so much thought to

her work that her other contacts suffer. If that is the case her work

will gain. That this might be the case with her mother was Valentine's

great and secret hope. Her mother was barely sixty: many great works

have been written by writers aged between sixty and seventy. . . .

And the crowding of youngish men round the old lady had given Valentine

a little confirmation of that hope. The book naturally, in the maelstrom

flux and reflux of the time, had attracted little attention, and poor

Mrs. Wannop had not succeeded in extracting a penny for it from her

adamantine publisher: she hadn't, indeed, made a penny for several

months, and they existed almost at starvation point in their little den

of a villa--on Valentine's earnings as athletic teacher. . . . But that

little bit of attention in that semi-public place had seemed, at least,

as a confirmation to Valentine: there probably was something sound, sane

and well done in her mother's work. That was almost all she asked of

life.

And, indeed, whilst she stood by her mother's chair, thinking with a

little bitter pathos that if Edith Ethel had left the three or four

young men to her mother the three or four might have done her poor

mother a little good, with innocent puffs and the like--and heaven knew

they needed that little good badly enough!--a very thin and untidy young

man _did_ drift back to Mrs. Wannop and asked, precisely, if he might

make a note or two for publication as to what Mrs. Wannop was doing.

"Her book," he said, "had attracted so much attention. They hadn't known

that they had still writers among them. . . ."

A singular, triangular drive had begun through the chairs from the

fireplace. That was how it had seemed to Valentine! Mrs. Tietjens had

looked at them, had asked Christopher a question and, immediately, as if

she were coming through waist-high surf, had borne down Macmaster and

Mrs. Duchemin, flanking her obsequiously, setting aside chairs and their

occupants, Tietjens and the two, rather bashfully following staff

officers, broadening out the wedge.

Sylvia, her long arm held out from a yard or so away, was giving her

hand to Valentine's mother. With her clear, high, unembarrassed voice

she exclaimed, also from a yard or so away, so as to be heard by every

one in the room:

"You're Mrs. Wannop. The great writer! I'm Christopher Tietjens' wife."

The old lady, with her dim eyes, looked up at the younger woman towering

above her.

"You're Christopher's wife!" she said. "I must kiss you for all the

kindness he has shown me."

Valentine felt her eyes filling with tears. She saw her mother stand up,

place both her hands on the other woman's shoulders. She heard her

mother say:

"You're a most beautiful creature. I'm sure you're good!"

Sylvia stood, smiling faintly, bending a little to accept the embrace.

Behind the Macmasters, Tietjens and the staff officers, a little crowd

of goggle eyes had ranged itself.

Valentine was crying. She slipped back behind the tea-urns, though she

could hardly feel the way. Beautiful! The most beautiful woman she had

ever seen! And good! Kind! You could see it in the lovely way she had

given her cheek to that poor old woman's lips. . . . And to live all

day, for ever, beside him . . . she, Valentine, ought to be ready to lay

down her life for Sylvia Tietjens. . . .

The voice of Tietjens said, just above her head:

"Your mother seems to be having a regular triumph," and, with his

good-natured cynicism, he added, "it seems to have upset some

apple-carts!" They were confronted with the spectacle of Macmaster

conducting the young celebrity from her deserted arm-chair across the

room to be lost in the horseshoe of crowd that surrounded Mrs. Wannop.

Valentine said:

"You're quite gay to-day. Your voice is different. I suppose you're

better?" She did not look at him. His voice came:

"Yes! I'm relatively gay!" It went on: "I thought you might like to

know. A little of my mathematical brain seems to have come to life

again. I've worked out two or three silly problems. . . ."

She said:

"Mrs. Tietjens will be pleased."

"Oh!" the answer came. "Mathematics don't interest her any more than

cock-fighting." With immense swiftness, between word and word, Valentine

read into that a hope! This splendid creature did not sympathise with

her husband's activities. But he crushed it heavily by saying: "Why

should she? She's so many occupations of her own that she's unrivalled

at!"

He began to tell her, rather minutely, of a calculation he had made only

that day at lunch. He had gone into the Department of Statistics and had

had rather a row with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln. A pretty title the fellow

had taken! They had wanted him to ask to be seconded to his old

department for a certain job. But he had said he'd be damned if he

would. He detested and despised the work they were doing.

Valentine, for the first time in her life, hardly listened to what he

said. Did the fact that Sylvia Tietjens had so many occupations of her

own mean that Tietjens found her unsympathetic? Of their relationships

she knew nothing. Sylvia had been so much of a mystery as hardly to

exist as a problem hitherto. Macmaster, Valentine knew, hated her. She

knew that through Mrs. Duchemin; she had heard it ages ago, but she

didn't know why. Sylvia had never come to the Macmaster afternoons; but

that was natural. Macmaster passed for a bachelor, and it was excusable

for a young woman of the highest fashion not to come to bachelor teas of

literary and artistic people. On the other hand, Macmaster dined at the

Tietjens quite often enough to make it public that he was a friend of

that family. Sylvia, too, had never come down to see Mrs. Wannop. But

then it would, in the old days, have been a long way to come for a lady

of fashion with no especial literary interests. And no one, in mercy,

could have been expected to call on poor them in their dog kennel in an

outer suburb. They had had to sell almost all their pretty things.

Tietjens was saying that after his tempestuous interview with Lord

Ingleby of Lincoln--she wished he would not be so rude to powerful

people!--he had dropped in on Macmaster in his private room, and finding

him puzzled over a lot of figures had, in the merest spirit of bravado,

taken Macmaster and his papers out to lunch. And, he said, chancing to

look, without any hope at all, at the figures, he had suddenly worked

out an ingenious mystification. It had just come!

His voice had been so gay and triumphant that she hadn't been able to

resist looking up at him. His cheeks were fresh coloured, his hair

shining; his blue eyes had a little of their old arrogance--and

tenderness! Her heart seemed to sing with joy! He was, she felt, her

man. She imagined the arms of his mind stretching out to enfold her.

He went on explaining. He had rather, in his recovered self-confidence,

gibed at Macmaster. Between themselves, wasn't it easy to do what the

Department, under orders, wanted done? They had wanted to rub into our

allies that their losses by devastation had been nothing to write home

about--so as to avoid sending reinforcements to their lines! Well, if

you took just the bricks and mortar of the devastated districts, you

could prove that the loss in bricks, tiles, woodwork and the rest

didn't--and the figures with a little manipulation would prove

it!--amount to more than a normal year's dilapidations spread over the

whole country in peace time. . . . House repairs in a normal year had

cost several million sterling. The enemy had only destroyed just about

so many million sterling in bricks and mortar. And what was a mere

year's dilapidations in house property! You just neglected to do them

and did them next year.

So, if you ignored the lost harvests of three years, the lost industrial

output of the richest industrial region of the country, the smashed

machinery, the barked fruit trees, the three years' loss of four and a

half-tenths of the coal output for three years--and the loss of

life!--we could go to our allies and say:

"All your yappings about losses are the merest bulls. You can perfectly

well afford to reinforce the weak places of your own lines. We intend to

send our new troops to the Near East, where lies our true interest!"

And, though they might sooner or later point out the fallacy, you would

by so much have put off the abhorrent expedient of a single command.

Valentine, though it took her away from her own thoughts, couldn't help

saying:

"But weren't you arguing against your own convictions?"

He said:

"Yes, of course I was. In the lightness of my heart! It's always a good

thing to formulate the other fellow's objections."

She had turned half round in her chair. They were gazing into each

other's eyes, he from above, she from below. She had no doubt of his

love: he, she knew, could have no doubt of hers. She said:

"But isn't it dangerous? To show these people how to do it?"

He said:

"Oh, no, no. No! You don't know what a good soul little Vinnie is. I

don't think you've ever been quite just to Vincent Macmaster! He'd as

soon think of picking my pocket as of picking my brains. The soul of

honour!"

Valentine had felt a queer, queer sensation. She was not sure afterwards

whether she had felt it before she had realised that Sylvia Tietjens was

looking at them. She stood there, very erect, a queer smile on her face.

Valentine could not be sure whether it was kind, cruel, or merely

distantly ironic; but she was perfectly sure it showed, whatever was

behind it, that its wearer knew all that there was to know of her,

Valentine's, feelings for Tietjens and for Tietjens' feelings for

her. . . . It was like being a woman and man in adultery in Trafalgar

Square.

Behind Sylvia's back, their mouths agape, were the two staff officers.

Their dark hairs were too untidy for them to amount to much, but, such

as they were, they were the two most presentable males of the

assembly--and Sylvia had snaffled them.

Mrs. Tietjens said:

"Oh, Christopher! I'm going on to the Basil's."

Tietjens said:

"All right. I'll pop Mrs. Wannop into the tube as soon as she's had

enough of it, and come along and pick you up!"

Sylvia had just drooped her long eyelashes, in sign of salutation, to

Valentine Wannop, and had drifted through the door, followed by her

rather unmilitary military escort in khaki and scarlet.

From that moment Valentine Wannop never had any doubt. She knew that

Sylvia Tietjens knew that her husband loved her, Valentine Wannop, and

that she, Valentine Wannop, loved her husband--with a passion absolute

and ineffable. The one thing she, Valentine, didn't know, the one

mystery that remained impenetrable, was whether Sylvia Tietjens was good

to her husband!

A long time afterwards Edith Ethel had come to her beside the tea-cups

and had apologised for not having known, earlier than Sylvia's

demonstration, that Mrs. Wannop was in the room. She hoped that they

might see Mrs. Wannop much more often. She added after a moment that she

hoped Mrs. Wannop wouldn't, in future, find it necessary to come under

the escort of Mr. Tietjens. They were too old friends for that, surely.

Valentine said:

"Look here, Ethel, if you think that you can keep friends with mother

and turn on Mr. Tietjens after all he's done for you, you're mistaken.

You are really. And mother's a great deal of influence. I don't want to

see you making any mistakes: just at this juncture. It's a mistake to

make nasty rows. And you'd make a very nasty one if you said anything

against Mr. Tietjens to mother. She knows a great deal. Remember. She

lived next door to the rectory for a number of years. And she's got a

dreadfully incisive tongue. . . ."

Edith Ethel coiled back on her feet as if her whole body were threaded

by a steel spring. Her mouth opened, but she bit her lower lip and then

wiped it with a very white handkerchief. She said:

"I hate that man! I detest that man! I shudder when he comes near me."

"I know you do!" Valentine Wannop answered. "But I wouldn't let other

people know it if I were you. It doesn't do you any real credit. He's a

good man."

Edith Ethel looked at her with a long, calculating glance. Then she went

to stand before the fireplace.

That had been five--or at most six--Fridays before Valentine sat with

Mark Tietjens in the War Office waiting hall, and, on the Friday

immediately before that again, all the guests being gone, Edith Ethel

had come to the tea-table and, with her velvet kindness, had placed her

right hand on Valentine's left. Admiring the gesture with a deep

fervour, Valentine knew that that was the end.

Three days before, on the Monday, Valentine, in her school uniform, in a

great store to which she had gone to buy athletic paraphernalia, had run

into Mrs. Duchemin, who was buying flowers. Mrs. Duchemin had been

horribly distressed to observe the costume. She had said:

"But do you go _about_ in that? It's really dreadful." Valentine had

answered:

"Oh, yes. When I'm doing business for the school in school hours I'm

expected to wear it. And I wear it if I'm going anywhere in a hurry

after school hours. It saves my dresses. I haven't got too many."

"But _any_ one might meet you," Edith Ethel said in a note of agony.

"It's very inconsiderate. Don't you _think_ you've been very

inconsiderate? You might meet any of the people who come to our

Fridays!"

"I frequently do," Valentine said. "But they don't seem to mind. Perhaps

they think I'm a Waac officer. That would be quite respectable. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin drifted away, her arms full of flowers and real agony upon

her face.

Now, beside the tea-table she said, very softly:

"My dear, we've decided not to have our usual Friday afternoon next

week." Valentine wondered whether this was merely a lie to get rid of

her. But Edith Ethel went on: "We've decided to have a little evening

festivity. After a great deal of thought we've come to the conclusion

that we ought, now, to make our union public." She paused to await

comment, but Valentine making none she went on: "It coincides very

happily--I can't help feeling it coincides very happily!--with another

event. Not that we set much store by these things. . . . But it has been

whispered to Vincent that next Friday. . . . Perhaps, my dear Valentine,

you, too, will have heard . . ."

Valentine said:

"No, I haven't. I suppose he's got the O.B.E. I'm very glad."

"The Sovereign," Mrs. Duchemin said, "is seeing fit to confer the honour

of knighthood on him."

"Well!" Valentine said. "He's had a quick career. I've no doubt he

deserves it. He's worked very hard. I do sincerely congratulate you.

It'll be a great help to you."

"It's," Mrs. Duchemin said, "not for mere plodding. That's what makes it

so gratifying. It's for a special piece of brilliance, that has marked

him out. It's, of course, a secret. But . . ."

"Oh, I know!" Valentine said. "He's worked out some calculations to

prove that losses in the devastated districts, if you ignore machinery,

coal output, orchard trees, harvests, industrial products and so on,

don't amount to more than a year's household dilapidations for

the . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin said with real horror:

"But how did you know? How on _earth_ did you know? . . ." She paused.

"It's such a _dead_ secret. . . . That fellow must have told you. . . .

But how on earth could _he_ know?"

"I haven't seen Mr. Tietjens to speak to since the last time he was

here," Valentine said. She saw, from Edith Ethel's bewilderment, the

whole situation. The miserable Macmaster hadn't even confided to his

wife that the practically stolen figures weren't his own. He desired to

have a little prestige in the family circle; for once a little prestige!

Well! Why shouldn't he have it? Tietjens, she knew, would wish him to

have all he could get. She said therefore:

"Oh, it's probably in the air. . . . It's known the Government want to

break their claims to the higher command. And anyone who could help them

to that would get a knighthood. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin was more calm.

"It's certainly," she said, "Burke'd, as you call it, those beastly

people." She reflected for a moment. "It's probably that," she went on.

"It's in the air. Anything that can help to influence public opinion

against those horrible people is to be welcomed. That's known pretty

widely. . . . No! It could hardly be Christopher Tietjens who thought of

it and told you. It wouldn't enter his head. He's their friend! He would

be . . ."

"He's certainly," Valentine said, "not a friend of his country's

enemies. I'm not myself."

Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed sharply, her eyes dilated.

"What do you mean? What on earth do you dare to mean? I thought you were

a pro-German!"

Valentine said:

"I'm not! I'm not! . . . I hate men's deaths. . . . I hate any men's

deaths. . . . Any men . . ." She calmed herself by main force. "Mr.

Tietjens says that the more we hinder our allies the more we drag the

war on and the more lives are lost. . . . More lives, do you understand?

. . ."

Mrs. Duchemin assumed her most aloof, tender and high air: "My poor

child," she said, "what possible concern can the opinions of that broken

fellow cause anyone? You can warn him from me that he does himself no

good by going on uttering these discredited opinions. He's a marked man.

Finished! It's no good Guggums, my husband, trying to stand up for him."

"He _does_ stand up for him?" Valentine asked. "Though I don't see why

it's needed. Mr. Tietjens is surely able to take care of himself."

"My good child," Edith Ethel said, "you may as well know the worst.

There's not a more discredited man in London than Christopher Tietjens,

and my husband does himself infinite harm in standing up for him. It's

our one quarrel."

She went on again:

"It was all very well whilst that fellow had brains. He was said to have

some intellect, though I could never see it. But now that, with his

drunkenness and debaucheries, he has got himself into the state he is

in; for there's no other way of accounting for his condition! They're

striking him, I don't mind telling you, off the roll of his

office. . . ."

It was there that, for the first time, the thought went through

Valentine Wannop's mind, like a mad inspiration: this woman must at one

time have been in love with Tietjens. It was possible, men being what

they were that she had even once been Tietjens' mistress. For it was

impossible otherwise to account for this spite, which to Valentine

seemed almost meaningless. She had, on the other hand, no impulse to

defend Tietjens against accusations that could not have any possible

grounds.

Mrs. Duchemin was going on with her kind loftiness:

"Of course a fellow like that--in that condition!--could not understand

matters of high policy. It is imperative that these fellows should not

have the higher command. It would pander to their insane spirit of

militarism. They _must_ be hindered. I'm talking, of course, between

ourselves, but my husband says that that is the conviction in the very

highest circles. To let them have their way, even if it led to earlier

success, would be to establish a precedent--so my husband

says!--compared with which the loss of a few lives. . . ."

Valentine sprang up, her face distorted.

"For the sake of Christ," she cried out, "as you believe that Christ

died for you, try to understand that millions of men's lives are at

stake. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin smiled.

"My poor child," she said, "if you moved in the higher circles you would

look at these things with more aloofness. . . ."

Valentine leant on the back of a high chair for support.

"You don't move in the higher circles," she said. "For Heaven's

sake--for your own--remember that you are a woman, not for ever and for

always a snob. You were a good woman once. You stuck to your husband for

quite a long time. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin, in her chair, had thrown herself back.

"My good girl," she said, "have you gone mad?"

Valentine said:

"Yes, very nearly. I've got a brother at sea; I've had a man I loved out

there for an infinite time. You can understand that, I suppose, even if

you can't understand how one can go mad merely at the thoughts of

suffering at all. . . . And I know, Edith Ethel, that you are afraid of

my opinion of you, or you wouldn't have put up all the subterfuges and

concealments of all these years. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin said quickly:

"Oh, my good girl. . . . If you've got personal interests at stake you

can't be expected to take abstract views of the higher matters. We had

better change the subject."

Valentine said:

"Yes, do. Get on with your excuses for not asking me and mother to your

knighthood party."

Mrs. Duchemin, too, rose at that. She felt at her amber beads with long

fingers that turned very slightly at the tips. She had behind her all

her mirrors, the drops of her lustres, shining points of gilt and of the

polish of dark woods. Valentine thought that she had never seen anyone

so absolutely impersonate kindness, tenderness and dignity. She said:

"My dear, I was going to suggest that it was the sort of party to which

you might not care to come. . . . The people will be stiff and formal

and you probably haven't got a frock."

Valentine said:

"Oh, I've got a frock all right. But there's a Jacob's ladder in my

party stockings and that's the sort of ladder you can't kick down." She

couldn't help saying that.

Mrs. Duchemin stood motionless and very slowly redness mounted into her

face. It was most curious to see against that scarlet background the

vivid white of the eyes and the dark, straight eyebrows that nearly met.

And, slowly again her face went perfectly white; then her dark blue eyes

became marked. She seemed to wipe her long, white hands one in the

other, inserting her right hand into her left and drawing it out again.

"I'm sorry," she said in a dead voice. "We had hoped that, if that man

went to France--or if other things happened--we might have continued on

the old friendly footing. But you yourself must see that, with our

official position, we can't be expected to connive . . ."

Valentine said:

"I don't understand!"

"Perhaps you'd rather I didn't go on!" Mrs. Duchemin retorted. "I'd much

rather not go on."

"You'd probably better," Valentine answered.

"We had meant," the elder woman said, "to have a quiet little dinner--we

two and you, before the party--for auld lang syne. But that fellow has

forced himself in, and you see for yourself that we can't have you as

well."

Valentine said:

"I don't see why not. I always like to see Mr. Tietjens!"

Mrs. Duchemin looked hard at her.

"I don't see the use," she said, "of your keeping on that mask. It is

surely bad enough that your mother should go about with that man and

that terrible scenes like that of the other Friday should occur. Mrs.

Tietjens was heroic; nothing less than heroic. But you have no right to

subject us, your friends, to such ordeals."

Valentine said:

"You mean . . . Mrs. Christopher Tietjens . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin went on:

"My husband insists that I should ask you. But I will not. I simply will

not. I invented for you the excuse of the frock. Of course we could have

given you a frock if that man is so mean or so penniless as not to keep

you decent. But I repeat, with our official position we cannot--we

cannot; it would be madness!--connive at this intrigue. And all the more

as the wife appears likely to be friendly with us. She has been once:

she may well come again." She paused and went on solemnly: "And I warn

you, if the split comes--as it must, for what woman could stand it!--it

is Mrs. Tietjens we shall support. She will always find a home here."

An extraordinary picture of Sylvia Tietjens standing beside Edith Ethel

and dwarfing her as a giraffe dwarfs an emu, came into Valentine's head.

She said:

"Ethel! Have I gone mad? Or is it you? Upon my word I can't

understand. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed:

"For God's sake hold your tongue, you shameless thing! You've had a

child by the man, haven't you?"

Valentine saw suddenly the tall silver candlesticks, the dark polished

panels of the rectory and Edith Ethel's mad face and mad hair whirling

before them.

She said:

"No! I certainly haven't. Can you get that into your head? I certainly

haven't." She made a further effort over immense fatigue. "I assure

you--I beg you to believe if it will give you any ease--that Mr.

Tietjens has never addressed a word of love to me in his life. Nor have

I to him. We have hardly talked to each other in all the time we have

known each other."

Mrs. Duchemin said in a harsh voice:

"Seven people in the last five weeks have told me you have had a child

by that brute beast: he's ruined because he has to keep you and your

mother and the child. You won't deny that he has a child somewhere

hidden away? . . ."

Valentine exclaimed suddenly:

"Oh, Ethel, you mustn't . . . you _mustn't_ be jealous of me! If you

only knew you wouldn't be jealous of me. . . . I suppose the child you

were going to have was by Christopher? Men are like that. . . . But not

of me! You need never, never. I've been the best friend you can ever

have had. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed harshly, as if she were being strangled:

"A sort of blackmail! I knew it would come to that! It always does with

your sort. Then do your damnedest, you harlot. You never set foot in

this house again! Go you and rot. . . ." Her face suddenly expressed

extreme fear and with great swiftness she ran up the room. Immediately

afterwards she was tenderly bending over a great bowl of roses beneath

the lustre. The voice of Vincent Macmaster from the door had said:

"Come in, old man. Of course I've got ten minutes. The book's in here

somewhere. . . ."

Macmaster was beside her, rubbing his hands, bending with his curious,

rather abject manner, and surveying her agonisedly with his eyeglass,

which enormously magnified his lashes, his red lower lid and the veins

on his cornea.

"Valentine!" he said, "my dear Valentine. . . . You've heard? We've

decided to make it public. . . . Guggums will have invited you to our

little feast. And there will be a surprise, I believe. . . ."

Edith Ethel looked, as she bent, lamentably and sharply, over her

shoulder at Valentine.

"Yes," she said bravely, aiming her voice at Edith Ethel, "Ethel has

invited me. I'll try to come. . . ."

"Oh, but you must," Macmaster said, "just you and Christopher, who've

been so kind to us. For old time's sake. You could not . . ."

Christopher Tietjens was ballooning slowly from the door, his hand

tentatively held out to her. As they practically never shook hands at

home it was easy to avoid his hand. She said to herself: "Oh! How is it

possible! How could he have. . ." And the terrible situation poured

itself over her mind: the miserable little husband, the desperately

nonchalant lover--and Edith Ethel mad with jealousy! A doomed household.

She hoped Edith Ethel had seen her refuse her hand to Christopher.

But Edith Ethel, bent over her rose bowl, was burying her beautiful face

in flower after flower. She was accustomed to do this for many minutes

on end: she thought that, so, she resembled a picture by the subject of

her husband's first little monograph. And so, Valentine thought, she

did. She was trying to tell Macmaster that Friday evenings were

difficult times for her to get away. But her throat ached too much.

That, she knew, was her last sight of Edith Ethel, whom she had loved

very much. That also, she hoped, would be her last sight of Christopher

Tietjens--whom also she had loved very much. . . . He was browsing along

a bookshelf, very big and very clumsy.

Macmaster pursued her into the stony hall with clamorous repetitions of

his invitation. She couldn't speak. At the great iron-lined door he held

her hand for an eternity, gazing lamentably, his face close up against

hers. He exclaimed in accents of great fear:

"Has Guggums? . . . She _hasn't_ . . ." His face, which when you saw it

so closely was a little blotched, distorted itself with anxiety: he

glanced aside with panic at the drawing-room door.

Valentine burst a voice through her agonised throat.

"Ethel," she said, "has told me she's to be Lady Macmaster. I'm so glad.

I'm so truly glad for you. You've got what you wanted, haven't you?"

His relief let him get out distractedly, yet as if he were too tired to

be any more agitated:

"Yes! yes! . . . It's, of course, a secret. . . . I don't want _him_

told till Friday next . . . so as to be a sort of _bonne bouche_ . . .

He's practically certain to go out again on Saturday. . . . They're

sending out a great batch of them . . . for the big push. . . ." At that

she tried to draw her hand from his: she missed what he was saying. It

was something to the effect that he would give it all for a happy little

party. She caught the rather astonishing words: "_Wie der alten schoenen

Zeit._" She couldn't tell whether it was his or her eyes that were full

of tears. She said:

"I believe . . . I believe you're a kind man!"

In the great stone hall, hung with long Japanese paintings on silk, the

electric light suddenly jumped; it was at best a sad, brown place.

He exclaimed:

"I, too, beg you to believe that I will never abandon . . ." He glanced

again at the inner door and added: "You both . . . I will never abandon

. . . you both!" he repeated.

He let go her hand: she was on the stone stairs in the damp air. The

great door closed irresistibly behind her, sending a whisper of air

downwards.

V

Mark Tietjens' announcement that his father had after all carried out

his long-standing promise to provide for Mrs. Wannop in such a way as to

allow her to write for the rest of her life only the more lasting kind

of work, delivered Valentine Wannop of all her problems except one. That

one loomed, naturally and immediately, immensely large.

She had passed a queer, unnatural week, the feeling dominating its

numbness having been, oddly, that she would have nothing to do on

Friday! This feeling recurred to her whilst she was casting her eyes

over a hundred girls all in their cloth jumpers and men's black ties,

aligned upon asphalte; whilst she was jumping on trams; whilst she was

purchasing the tinned or dried fish that formed the staple diet of

herself and her mother; whilst she was washing-up the dinner-things;

upbraiding the house agent for the state of the bath, or bending closely

over the large but merciless handwriting of the novel of her mother's

that she was typing. It came, half as a joy, half mournfully across her

familiar businesses; she felt as a man might feel who, luxuriating in

the anticipation of leisure, knew that it was obtained by being

compulsorily retired from some laborious but engrossing job. There would

be nothing to do on Fridays!

It was, too, as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she

would never know the end. Of the fairy-tale she knew the end: the

fortunate and adventurous tailor had married his beautiful and

be-princessed goose girl, and was well on the way to burial in

Westminster Abbey--or at any rate to a memorial service, the squire

being actually buried amongst his faithful villagers. But she would

never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch

tiles they wanted to line their bathroom. . . . She would never know.

Yet witnessing similar ambitions had made up a great deal of her life.

And, she said to herself, there was another tale ended. On the surface

the story of her love for Tietjens had been static enough. It had begun

in nothing and in nothing it had ended. But, deep down in her being--ah!

it had progressed enough. Through the agency of two women! Before the

scene with Mrs. Duchemin there could, she thought, have been few young

women less preoccupied than she with the sexual substrata, either of

passion or of life. Her months as a domestic servant had accounted for

that, sex, as she had seen it from a back kitchen, having been a

repulsive affair, whilst the knowledge of its manifestations that she

had thus attained had robbed it of the mystery which caused most of the

young women whom she knew to brood upon these subjects.

Her conviction: as to the moral incidence of sex were, she knew, quite

opportunist. Brought up amongst rather "advanced" young people, had she

been publicly challenged to pronounce her views she would probably, out

of loyalty to her comrades, have declared that neither morality nor any

ethical aspects were concerned in the matter. Like most of her young

friends, influenced by the advanced teachers and tendential novelists of

the day, she would have stated herself to advocate an--of course,

enlightened!--promiscuity. That, before the revelations of Mrs.

Duchemin! Actually she had thought very little about the matter.

Nevertheless, even before that date, had her deeper feelings been

questioned she would have reacted with the idea that sexual incontinence

was extremely ugly and chastity to be prized in the egg and spoon race

that life was. She had been brought up by her father--who, perhaps, was

wiser than appeared on the surface--to admire athleticism, and she was

aware that proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety,

cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the

heading of abnegation. She couldn't have lived amongst the Ealing

servant-class--the eldest son of the house in which she had been

employed bad been the defendant in a peculiarly scabrous breach of

promise case, and the comments of the drunken cook on this and similar

affairs had run the whole gamut from the sentimentally reticent to the

extreme of coarseness according to the state of her alcoholic

barometer--she couldn't then have lived among the Ealing servant-class

and come to any other subliminal conclusion. So that, dividing the world

into bright beings on the one hand and, on the other, into the mere

stuff to fill graveyards whose actions during life couldn't matter, she

had considered that the bright beings must be people whose public

advocating of enlightened promiscuity went along with an absolute

continence. She was aware that enlightened beings occasionally fell away

from these standards in order to become portentous Egerias; but the Mary

Wollstonecrafts, the Mrs. Taylors, and the George Eliots of the last

century she had regarded humorously as rather priggish nuisances.

Indeed, being very healthy and very hard worked, she had been in the

habit of regarding the whole matter, if not humorously, then at least

good-humouredly, as a nuisance.

But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a

first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs. Duchemin

had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely

æsthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and

infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook.

The language that she had used about her lover--calling him always "that

oaf" or "that beast"!--had seemed literally to pain the girl internally,

as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports at each

two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through the

darkness from the rectory.

And she had never heard what had become of Mrs. Duchemin's baby. Next

day Mrs. Duchemin had been as suave, as circumspect, and as collected as

ever. Never a word more had passed between them on the subject. This

left in Valentine Wannop's mind a dark patch--as it were of murder--at

which she must never look. And across the darkened world of her sexual

tumult there flitted continually the quick suspicion that Tietjens might

have been the lover of her friend. It was a matter of the simplest

analogy. Mrs. Duchemin had appeared a bright being: so had Tietjens. But

Mrs. Duchemin was a foul whore. . . . How much more then must Tietjens,

who was a man, with the larger sexual necessities of the male . . . Her

mind always refused to complete the thought.

Its suggestion wasn't to be combated by the idea of Vincent Macmaster

himself: he was, she felt, the sort of man that it was almost a

necessity for either mistress or comrade to betray. He seemed to ask for

it. Besides, she once put it to herself, how could any woman, given the

choice and the opportunity--and God knows there was opportunity

enough--choose that shadowy, dried leaf, if there were the splendid

masculinity of Tietjens in whose arms to lie. She so regarded these two

men. And that shadowy conviction was at once fortified and appeased

when, a little later, Mrs. Duchemin herself began to apply to Tietjens

the epithets of "oaf" and "beast"--the very ones that she had used to

designate the father of her putative child!

But then Tietjens must have abandoned Mrs. Duchemin; and, if he had

abandoned Mrs. Duchemin, he must be available for her, Valentine Wannop!

The feeling, she considered, made her ignoble; but it came from depths

of her being that she could not control and, existing, it soothed her.

Then, with the coming of the war, the whole problem died out, and

between the opening of hostilities and what she had known to be the

inevitable departure of her lover, she had surrendered herself to what

she thought to be the pure physical desire for him. Amongst the

terrible, crashing anguishes of that time, there had been nothing for it

but surrender! With the unceasing--the never ceasing--thought of

suffering; with the never ceasing idea that her lover, too, must soon be

so suffering, there was in the world no other refuge. No other!

She surrendered. She waited for him to speak the word, or look the look

that should unite them. She was finished. Chastity: napoo finny! Like

everything else!

Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In

the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in

which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the

village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer,

little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to

take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body,

thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or

not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it

was thus love worked upon the body--and that it would stop for ever at

that!

But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her.

It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her

whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you

are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if

physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid

itself. The moon so draws the tides.

Once before, for a fraction of a second, after the long, warm night of

their drive, she had felt that impulsion. Now, years after, she was to

know it all the time, waking or half waking; and it would drive her from

her bed. She would stand all night at the open window till the stars

paled above a world turned grey. It could convulse her with joy; it

could shake her with sobs and cut through her breast like a knife.

The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed

beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her

mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago: he had been

going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what

a love scene was. It passed without any mention of the word "love"; it

passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word

they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way,

when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of

your lover beating upon your heart.

Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster

furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he

had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world--"To

no other soul in the world," he had said!--his doubts, his misgivings

and his fears: it was that every word he uttered and that came to her,

during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered

the word "Come" she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the

earth; if he had said, "There is no hope," she would have known the

finality of despair. Having said neither he said, she knew: "This is our

condition; so we must continue!" And she knew, too, that he was telling

her that he, like her, was . . . oh, say on the side of the angels. She

was then, she knew, so nicely balanced that, had he said, "Will you

to-night be my mistress?" she would have said "Yes"; for it was as if

they had been, really, at the end of the world.

But his abstention not only strengthened her in her predilection for

chastity; it restored to her her image of the world as a place of

virtues and endeavours. For a time at least she again hummed beneath her

breath upon occasion, for it seemed as if her heart sang within her. And

there was restored to her her image of her lover as a beautiful spirit.

She had been able to look at him across the tea-table of their dog

kennel in Bedford Park, during the last months, almost as she had looked

across the more shining table of the cottage near the rectory. The

deterioration that she knew Mrs. Duchemin to have worked in her mind was

assuaged. It could even occur to her that Mrs. Duchemin's madness had

been no more than a scare to be followed by no necessary crime.

Valentine Wannop had re-become her confident self in a world of at least

straight problems.

But Mrs. Duchemin's outbreak of a week ago had driven the old phantoms

across her mind. For Mrs. Duchemin she had still had a great respect.

She could not regard her Edith Ethel as merely a hypocrite; or, indeed,

as a hypocrite at all. There was her great achievement of making

something like a man of that miserable little creature--as there had

been her other great achievement of keeping her unfortunate husband for

so long out of a lunatic asylum. That had been no mean feat; neither

feat had been mean. And Valentine knew that Edith Ethel really loved

beauty, circumspection, urbanity. It was no hypocrisy that made her

advocate the Atalanta race of chastity. But, also, as Valentine Wannop

saw it, humanity has these doublings of strong natures; just as the

urbane and grave Spanish nation must find its outlet in the shrieking

lusts of the bull-ring or the circumspect, laborious and admirable city

typist must find her derivative in the cruder lusts of certain

novelists, so Edith Ethel must break down into physical sexualities--and

into shrieked coarseness of fishwives. How else, indeed, do we have

saints? Surely, alone, by the ultimate victory of the one tendency over

the other!

But now after her farewell scene with Edith Ethel a simple

re-arrangement of the pattern had brought many of the old doubts at

least temporarily back. Valentine said to herself that, just because of

the very strength of her character, Edith Ethel couldn't have been

brought down to uttering her fantastic denunciation of Tietjens, the

merely mad charges of debauchery and excesses and finally the sexually

lunatic charge against herself, except under the sting of some such

passion as jealousy. She, Valentine, couldn't arrive at any other

conclusion. And, viewing the matter as she believed she now did, more

composedly, she considered with seriousness that, men being what they

are, her lover respecting, or despairing of, herself had relieved the

grosser necessities of his being--at the expense of Mrs. Duchemin, who

had, no doubt, been only too ready.

And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this

suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards the

Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going from

her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life

stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the long,

hard thing that life is. And on the Thursday two minor, or major,

worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced himself as

coming home for several days' leave, and she had the trouble of thinking

that she would have forced upon her a companionship and a point of view

that would be coarsely and uproariously opposed to anything that

Tietjens stood for--or for which he was ready to sacrifice himself.

Moreover she would have to accompany her brother to a number of riotous

festivities whilst all the time she would have to think of Tietjens as

getting hour by hour nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in

contact with enemy forces. In addition her mother had received an

enviably paid for commission from one of the more excitable Sunday

papers to write a series of articles on extravagant matters connected

with the hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully--more

particularly as Edward was coming home--that Valentine Wannop had

conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her mother. . . .

It would have meant very little waste of time, and the £60 that it

would have brought in would have made all the difference to them for

months and months.

But Tietjens, whom Mrs. Wannop had come to rely on as her right hand man

in these matters, had, it appeared, shown an unexpected recalcitrancy.

He had, Mrs. Wannop said, hardly seemed himself and had gibed at the two

first subjects proposed--that of "war babies" and the fact that the

Germans were reduced to eating their own corpses--as being below the

treatment of any decent pen. The illegitimacy rate, he had said, had

shown very little increase; the French-derived German word "_Cadaver_"

meant bodies of horses or cattle; _Leichnam_ being the German for the

word "corpse." He had practically refused to have anything to do with

the affair.

As to the _Cadaver_ business Valentine agreed with him, as to the "war

babies" she kept a more open mind. If there weren't any war babies it

couldn't, as far as she could see, matter whether one wrote about them;

it couldn't certainly matter as much as to write about them, supposing

the poor little things to exist. She was aware that this was immoral,

but her mother needed the money desperately and her mother came first.

There was nothing for it, therefore, but to plead with Tietjens, for

Valentine knew that without so much of moral support from him as would

be implied by a good-natured, or an enforced sanction of the article,

Mrs. Wannop would drop the matter and so would lose her connection with

the excitable paper which paid well. It happened that on the Friday

morning Mrs. Wannop received a request that she would write for a Swiss

review a propaganda article about some historical matter connected with

the peace after Waterloo. The pay would be practically nothing, but the

employment was at least relatively dignified, and Mrs. Wannop--which was

quite in the ordinary course of things!--told Valentine to ring Tietjens

up and ask him for some details about the Congress of Vienna at which,

before and after Waterloo, the peace terms had been wrangled out.

Valentine rang up--as she had done hundreds of times; it was to her a

great satisfaction that she was going to hear Tietjens speak once more

at least. The telephone was answered from the other end, and Valentine

gave her two messages, the one as to the Congress of Vienna, the other

as to war babies. The appalling speech came back:

"Young woman! You'd better keep off the grass. Mrs. Duchemin is already

my husband's mistress. You keep off." There was about the voice no human

quality; it was as if from an immense darkness the immense machine had

spoken words that dealt blows. She answered; and it was as if a

substratum of her mind of which she knew nothing must have been prepared

for that very speech; so that it was not her own "she" that answered

levelly and coolly:

"You have probably mistaken the person you are speaking to. Perhaps you

will ask Mr. Tietjens to ring up Mrs. Wannop when he is at liberty."

The voice said:

"My husband will be at the War Office at 4.15. He will speak to you

there--about your war babies. But I'd keep off the grass if I were you!"

The receiver at the other end was hung up.

She went about her daily duties. She had heard of a kind of pine kernel

that was very cheap and very nourishing, or at least very filling. They

had come to it that it was a matter of pennies balanced against the

feeling of satiety, and she visited several shops in search of this

food. When she had found it she returned to the dog kennel; her brother

Edward had arrived. He was rather subdued. He brought with him a piece

of meat which was part of his leave ration. He occupied himself with

polishing up his sailor's uniform for a rag-time party to which they

were to go that evening. They were to meet plenty of conchies, he said.

Valentine put the meat--it was a Godsend, though very stringy!--on to

stew with a number of chopped vegetables. She went up to her room to do

some typing for her mother.

The nature of Tietjens' wife occupied her mind. Before, she had barely

thought about her: she had seemed unreal; so mysterious as to be a myth!

Radiant and high-stepping: like a great stag! But she must be cruel! She

must be vindictively cruel to Tietjens himself, or she could not have

revealed his private affairs! Just broadcast; for she could not, bluff

it how she might, have been certain of to whom she was speaking! A thing

that wasn't done! But she had delivered her cheek to Mrs. Wannop; a

thing, too, that wasn't done! Yet so kindly! The telephone bell rang

several times during the morning. She let her mother answer it.

She had to get the dinner, which took three-quarters of an hour. It was

a pleasure to see her mother eat so well; a good stew, rich and heavy

with haricot beans. She herself couldn't eat, but no one noticed, which

was a good thing. Her mother said that Tietjens had not yet telephoned,

which was very inconsiderate. Edward said: "What! The Huns haven't

killed old Feather Bolster yet? But of course he's been found a safe

job." The telephone on the sideboard became a terror to Valentine; at

any moment his voice might . . . Edward went on telling anecdotes of how

they bamboozled petty officers on mine-sweepers. Mrs. Wannop listened to

him with the courteous, distant interest of the great listening to

commercial travellers. Edward desired draught ale and produced a two

shilling piece. He seemed very much coarsened; it was, no doubt, only on

the surface. In these days everyone was very much coarsened on the

surface.

She went with a quart jug to the jug and bottle department of the

nearest public-house--a thing she had never done before. Even at Ealing

the mistress hadn't allowed her to be sent to a public-house; the cook

had had to fetch her dinner beer herself or have it sent in. Perhaps the

Ealing mistress had exercised more surveillance than Valentine had

believed; a kind woman, but an invalid. Nearly all day in bed. Blind

passion overcame Valentine at the thought of Edith Ethel in Tietjens'

arms. Hadn't she got her own eunuch? Mrs. Tietjens had said: "Mrs.

Duchemin is his mistress!" _Is!_ Then he might be there now!

In the contemplation of that image she missed the thrills of buying beer

in a bottle and jug department. Apparently it was like buying anything

else, except for the smell of beer on the sawdust. You said: "A quart of

the best bitter!" and a fat, quite polite man, with an oily head and a

white apron, took your money and filled your jug. . . . But Edith Ethel

had abused Tietjens so foully! The more foully the more certain it made

it! . . . Draught beer in a jug had little marblings of burst foam on

its brown surface. It mustn't be spilt at the kerbs of crossings!--the

more certain it made it! Some women did so abuse their lovers after

sleeping with them, and the more violent the transports the more frantic

the abuse. It was the "_post-dash-tristis_" of the Rev. Duchemin! Poor

devil! Tristis! Tristis!

_Terra tribus scopulis vastum_ . . . _Not_ longum!

Brother Edward began communing with himself, long and unintelligibly as

to where he should meet his sister at 19.30 and give her a blow-out! The

names of restaurants fell from his lips into her panic. He decided

hilariously and not quite steadily--a quart is a lot to a fellow from a

mine-sweeper carrying no booze at all!--on meeting her at 7.20 at High

Street and going to a pub he knew; they would go on to the dance

afterwards. In a studio. "Oh, God!" her heart said, "if Tietjens should

want her then!" To be his; on his last night. He might! Everybody was

coarsened then; on the surface. Her brother rolled out of the house,

slamming the door so that every tile on the jerry-built dog kennel rose

and sat down again.

She went upstairs and began to look over her frocks. She couldn't tell

what frocks she looked over; they lay like aligned rags on the bed, the

telephone bell ringing madly. She heard her mother's voice, suddenly

assuaged: "Oh! oh! . . . It's you!" She shut her door and began to pull

open and to close drawer after drawer. As soon as she ceased that

exercise her mother's voice became half audible; quite audible when she

raised it to ask a question. She heard her say: "Not get her into

trouble . . . Of _course_!" then it died away into mere high sounds.

She heard her mother calling:

"Valentine! Valentine! Come down. . . . Don't you want to speak to

Christopher? . . . Valentine! Valentine! . . ." And then another burst:

"Valentine . . . Valentine . . . _Valentine_ . . ." As if she had been a

puppy dog! Mrs. Wannop, thank God, was on the lowest step of the creaky

stairs. She had left the telephone. She called up:

"Come down. I want to tell you! The dear boy has saved me! He always

saves me! What shall I do now he's gone?"

"He saved others: himself he could not save!" Valentine quoted bitterly.

She caught up her wideawake. She wasn't going to prink herself for him.

He must take her as she was. . . . Himself he could not save! But he did

himself proud! With women! . . . Coarsened! But perhaps only on the

surface! She herself! . . . She was running downstairs!

Her mother had retreated into the little parlour: nine feet by nine; in

consequence, at ten feet it was too tall for its size. But there was in

it a sofa with cushions. . . . With her head upon those cushions,

perhaps. . . . If he came home with her! Late! . . .

Her mother was saying: He's a splendid fellow. . . . A root idea for a

war baby article. . . . If a Tommy was a decent fellow he abstained

because he didn't want to leave his girl in trouble. . . . If he wasn't

he chanced it because it might be his last chance. . . .

"A message to me!" Valentine said to herself. "But _which_

sentence. . . ." She moved, absently, all the cushions to one end of the

sofa. Her mother exclaimed:

"He sent his love! His mother was lucky to have such a son!" and turned

into her tiny hole of a study.

Valentine ran down over the broken tiles of the garden path, pulling her

wideawake firmly on. She had looked at her wrist watch; it was two and

twelve: 14.45. If she was to walk to the War Office by 4.15--16.15--a

sensible innovation!--she must step out. Five miles to Whitehall. God

knows what, then! Five miles back! Two and a half, diagonally, to High

Street Station by half-past 19! Twelve and a half miles in five hours or

less. And three hours dancing on the top of it. And to dress! . . . She

needed to be fit . . . And, with violent bitterness, she said:

"Well! I'm fit. . . ." She had an image of the aligned hundred of girls

in blue jumpers and men's ties keeping whom fit had kept her super-fit.

She wondered how many of them would be men's mistresses before the year

was out. It was August then. But perhaps none! Because she had kept them

fit. . . .

"Ah!" she said, "if I had been a loose woman, with flaccid breasts and a

soft body. All perfumed!" . . . But neither Sylvia Tietjens nor Ethel

Duchemin were soft. They might be scented on occasion! But they could

not contemplate with equanimity doing a twelve mile walk to save a few

pence and dancing all night on top of it! She could! And perhaps the

price she paid was just that; she was in such hard condition she hadn't

moved him to . . . She perhaps exhaled such an aura of sobriety,

chastity and abstinence as to suggest to him that . . . that a decent

fellow didn't get his girl into trouble before going to be killed. . . .

Yet if he were such a town bull! . . . She wondered how she knew such

phrases. . . .

The sordid and aligned houses seemed to rush past her in the mean August

sunshine. That was because if you thought hard time went quicker; or

because after you noticed the paper shop at this corner you would be up

to the boxes of onions outside the shop of the next corner before you

noticed anything else.

She was in Kensington Gardens, on the north side; she had left the poor

shops behind. . . . In sham country, with sham lawns, sham avenues, sham

streams. Sham people pursuing their ways across the sham grass. Or no!

Not sham! In a vacuum! No! "Pasteurised" was the word! Like dead milk.

Robbed of their vitamines. . . .

If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a larger pile to put

into the leering--or compassionate--taxicabman's hand after he had

helped her support her brother into the dog kennel door. Edward would be

dead drunk. She had fifteen shillings for the taxi . . . If she gave a

few coppers more it seemed generous. . . . What a day to look forward to

still! Some days were lifetimes!

She would rather die than let Tietjens pay for the cab!

Why? Once a taximan had refused payment for driving her and Edward all

the way to Chiswick, and she hadn't felt insulted. She had paid him; but

she hadn't felt insulted! A sentimental fellow; touched at the heart by

the pretty sister--or perhaps he didn't really believe it was a

sister--and her incapable bluejacket brother! Tietjens was a sentimental

fellow too. . . . What was the difference? . . . And then! The mother a

dead, heavy sleeper; the brother dead drunk. One in the morning! He

couldn't refuse her! Blackness: cushions! She had arranged the cushions,

she remembered. Arranged them subconsciously! Blackness! Heavy sleep;

dead drunkenness! . . . Horrible! . . . A disgusting affair! An affair

of Ealing. . . . It shall make her one with all the stuff to fill

graveyards. . . . Well, what else was she, Valentine Wannop: daughter of

her father? And of her mother? Yes! But she herself . . . Just a little

nobody!

They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty. . . . But her brother

was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking treason.

At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas couldn't

for the moment concern him. . . . That 'bus touched her skirt as she ran

for the island. . . . It might have been better. . . . But one hadn't

the courage!

She was looking at patterned deaths under a little green roof, such as

they put over bird shelters. Her heart stopped! Before, she had been

breathless! She was going mad. She was dying. . . . All these deaths!

And not merely the deaths. . . . The waiting for the approach of death;

the contemplation of the parting from life! This minute you were; that,

and you weren't! What was it like? Oh heaven, she knew. . . . She stood

there contemplating parting from . . . One minute you were; the

next . . . Her breath fluttered in her chest. . . . Perhaps he

wouldn't come . . .

He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him and

said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and his like

responsible! . . . He had apparently a brother, a responsible one too!

Browner complexioned! . . . But he! He! He! He! completely calm; with

direct eyes. . . . It wasn't possible. "_Holde Lippen: klaare Augen:

heller Sinn_. . . ." Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And

the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn't look at you so, unless . . .

She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he belonged--more

than to any browner, mere civilian, brother!--to her! She was going to

ask him! If he answered: "Yes! I am such a man!" she was going to say:

"Then you must take me too! If them, why not me? I must have a child. I

too!" She desired a child. She would overwhelm these hateful lodestones

with a flood of argument; she imagined--she felt--the words going

between her lips. . . . She imagined her fainting mind; her consenting

limbs. . . .

His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings.

Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word from him.

Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence

than words can enhance a love that exists. He might as well have recited

the names of railway stations. His eyes, his unconcerned face, his

tranquil shoulders; they were what acquitted him. The greatest love

speech he had ever and could ever make her was when, harshly and

angrily, he said something like:

"Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better"--brushing her aside as if

she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to her!

She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said

"Pink! pink!" The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against

her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed. . . . It was just a

problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him. . . . Good _for_ him

was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like

water that goes off the boil. . . . "Waters stilled at even." Nonsense.

It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save _his_

brother. . . . Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm

feeling settled down upon her; this was _her_ brother; the next to the

best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with

another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff!

She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah,

never so grateful as to the other--who had done nothing!

Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the

blessed word Transport! "They," so Mark said: he and she--the family

feeling again--were going to get Christopher into the Transport. . . .

By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of

the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who

could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment.

"Hooray!" he had written to his mother, "I've been off my feed;

recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they're putting me senior N.C.O. of

First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally

front line caboodle!" Valentine had had to read this letter in the

scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she

had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But

charity begins surely with the char! She had had to. Now she could thank

God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his

mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber

wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. "Why," one

sentence ran, "our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics.

Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b----y

hell to the man who walks across it!" There the O.C. practised casting

with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. "That'll show you what

a soft job it is!" the sergeant had finished triumphantly. . . .

So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall;

downright, healthy middle-class--or perhaps upper middle-class--for the

Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible,

mocassined shoes the tide of humanity flowed before her hard bench.

There were two commissionaires, the one always benevolent, the other

perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of her; on the other, a

brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy

efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his

mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a knob. She could

not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to conciliate her; but

she knew she would know in a minute.

For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost

mathematically symmetrical. _Now_ she was an English middle-class

girl--whose mother had a sufficient income--in blue cloth, a wideawake

hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she shouldn't

have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five

minutes ago, she had been . . . She could not even remember what she had

been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town . . . No, she

could not think the words. . . . A raging stallion then! If now he

should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the table, she

would retreat.

It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old

man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick. . . . When the old

man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman

came out . . . It was exactly like that! She hadn't time to work out the

analogy. But it was like that. . . . In rainy weather the whole world

altered. Darkened! . . . The cat-gut that turned them slackened . . .

slackened. . . . But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the

stick!

Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance:

"We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother. . . ."

It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how

little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr.

Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years ago. Her

mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting, Mr. Tietjens

alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it up to her. He

was making it up. In no princely fashion, but adequately, as a

gentleman.

Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bell-boy came up

to him and said: "Mr. Riccardo!" Mark Tietjens said: "No! He's gone!" He

continued:

"Your brother. . . . Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a

practice, a good practice! When he's a full-fledged sawbones." He

stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his umbrella

handle; he was extremely nervous.

"Now you!" he said. "Two or three hundred. A year of course! The capital

absolutely your own. . . ." He paused: "But I warn you! Christopher

won't like it. He's got his knife into me. I wouldn't grudge you . . .

oh, any sum!" . . . He waved his hand to indicate an amount boundless in

its figures. "I know you keep Christopher straight," he said. "The only

person that could!" He added: "Poor devil!"

She said:

"He's got his knife into you? Why?"

He answered vaguely:

"Oh, there's been all this talk. . . . Untrue, of course."

She said:

"People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps because

there's been delay in settling the estate."

He said:

"Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!"

"Then they have been saying," she exclaimed, "things against . . .

against me. And him!"

He exclaimed in anguish:

"Oh, but I ask you to believe . . . I beg you to believe that I believe

. . . _you_! Miss Wannop!" He added grotesquely: "As pure as dew that

lies within Aurora's sun-tipped . . ." His eyes stuck out like those of

a suffocating fish. He said: "I beg you not on that account to hand the

giddy mitten to . . ." He writhed in his tight double collar. "His

wife!" he said . . . "She's no good to . . . _for_ him! . . . She's

soppily in love with him. But no _good_ . . ." He very nearly sobbed.

"You're the only . . ." he said, "I _know_ . . ."

It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle

des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Fivepence! But

what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year. . . . Two

hundred and forty times five. . . .

Mark said brightly:

"If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred. . . . You say

that's ample to give Christopher his chop. . . . And settled on her

three . . . four . . . I like to be exact . . . hundred a year. . . .

The capital of it: with remainder to you . . ." His interrogative face

beamed.

She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood

Mrs. Duchemin's:

"You couldn't expect us, with our official position . . . to

connive . . ." Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She _couldn't_ be

expected. . . . She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right!

You can't ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! . . .

It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said--to Mark:

"It's as if the whole world had conspired . . . like a carpenter's

vice--to force us . . ." she was going to say "together. . . ." But he

burst in, astonishingly:

"He must have his buttered toast . . . and his mutton chop . . . and

Rhum St. James!" He said: "Damn it all. . . . You were made for him. . . .

You can't blame people for coupling you. . . . They're forced to it. . . .

If you hadn't existed they'd have had to invent you . . . Like Dante

for . . . who was it? . . . Beatrice? There _are_ couples like that."

She said:

"Like a carpenter's vice. . . . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven't

we resisted?"

His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the

pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:

"You won't . . . because of my ox's hoof . . . desert . . ."

She said:--she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.

"I ask you to believe that I will never . . . abandon . . ."

It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. Micawber!

Christopher Tietjens--in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his

best uniform--spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had approached her

from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she had been

turned towards Mark on his bench:

"Come along! Let's get out of this!" He was, she asked herself, getting

out of this! Towards what?

Like mutes from a funeral--or as if she had been, between the brothers,

a prisoner under escort--they walked down steps; half righted towards

the exit arch; one and a half righted to face Whitehall. The brothers

grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over her head. They crossed, by

the islands, Whitehall, where the 'bus had brushed her skirt. Under an

archway--

In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other. Mark

said:

"I suppose you won't shake hands!"

Christopher said:

"No! Why should I?" She herself had cried out to Christopher:

"Oh, _do_!" (The wireless squares overhead no longer concerned her. Her

brother was, no doubt, getting drunk in a bar in Piccadilly. . . . A

surface coarseness!)

Mark said:

"Hadn't you better? You might get killed! A fellow just getting killed

would not like to think he had refused to shake his brother by the

hand!"

Christopher had said: "Oh . . . well!"

During her happiness over this hyperborean sentimentality he had gripped

her thin upper arm. He had led her past swans--or possibly huts; she

never remembered which--to a seat that had over it, or near it, a

weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish:

"Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from

Waterloo."

She had answered:

"Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve. . . . I have to

see my brother home. . . . He will be drunk. . . ." She meant to say:

"Oh, my darling, I have wanted you so much. . . ."

She said instead:

"I have arranged the cushions. . . ."

She said to herself:

"Now whatever made me say that? It's as if I had said: 'You'll find the

ham in the larder under a plate. . . .' No tenderness about it. . . ."

She went away, up a cockle-shelled path, between ankle-high railings,

crying bitterly. An old tramp, with red weeping eyes and a thin white

beard, regarded her curiously from where he lay on the grass. He

imagined himself the monarch of that landscape.

"That's women!" he said with the apparently imbecile enigmaticality of

the old and the hardened. "Some do!" He spat into the grass; said: "Ah!"

then added: "Some do not!"

VI

He let himself in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind him, in

the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious

whisperings up the great stone stairs. These sounds irritated him. If

you shut a heavy door on an enclosed space it will push air in front of

it and there will be whisperings; the atmosphere of mystery was absurd.

He was just a man, returning after a night out. . . . Two-thirds, say,

of a night out! It must be half-past three. But what the night had

lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects. . . .

He laid his cane down on the invisible oak chest and, through the

tangible and velvety darkness that had always in it the chill of the

stone of walls and stairs, he felt for the handle of the breakfast-room

door.

Three long parallelograms existed: pale glimmerings above, cut

two-thirds of the way down by the serrations of chimney pot and

roof-shadows! Nine full paces across the heavy piled carpet; then he

ought to reach his round-backed chair, by the left-hand window. He

reached his round-backed chair by the left-hand window. He sank into it;

it fitted exactly his back. He imagined that no man had ever been so

tired and that no man had ever been so alone! A small, alive sound

existed at the other end of the room; in front of him existed one and a

half pale parallelograms. They were the reflection of the windows of the

mirror; the sound was no doubt Calton, the cat. Something alive, at any

rate! Possibly Sylvia at the other end of the room, waiting for him, to

see what he looked like. Most likely! It didn't matter!

His mind stopped! Sheer weariness!

When it went on again it was saying:

"Naked shingles and surges drear . . ." and, "On these debatable borders

of the world!" He said sharply: "Nonsense!" The one was either _Calais

beach_ or _Dover sands_ of the whiskered man: Arnold. . . . He would be

seeing them both within the twenty-four hours. . . . But no! He was

going from Waterloo. Southampton, Havre, therefore! . . . The other was

by that detestable fellow: "the subject of our little monograph!" . . .

What a long time ago! . . . He saw a pile of shining despatch cases: the

inscription "_This rack is reserved for_ . . .": a coloured--pink and

blue!--photograph of Boulogne sands and the held up squares, the proofs

of "our little . . ." What a long time ago! He heard his own voice

saying in the new railway carriage, proudly, clearly and with male

hardness:

"_I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of

course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again

no talking about it_. . . ." His voice--his own voice--came to him as if

from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn long-distance

one! Ten years . . .

If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman. . . . Damn it, he

doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent fellow.

. . . His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running

one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:

"Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury," and:

"Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!"

He said:

"But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands

didn't meet. . . . I don't believe I've shaken hands. . . . I don't

believe I've touched the girl . . . in my life. . . . Never once! . . .

Not the hand-shaking sort. . . . A nod! . . . A meeting and parting! . . .

English, you know . . . But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders. . . .

On the bank! . . . _On such short acquaintance!_ I said to myself

then . . . Well, we've made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up! . . .

Atoned. . . . As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was

dying. . . ."

He, his conscious self, said:

"But it was probably the drunken brother. . . . You don't beguile

virgins with the broken seals of perjury in Kensington High Street at

two at night supporting, one on each side, a drunken bluejacket with

intermittent legs. . . ."

"Intermittent!" was the word. "Intermittently functioning!"

At one point the boy had broken from them and run with astonishing

velocity along the dull wood paving of an immense empty street. When

they had caught him up he had been haranguing under black hanging trees,

with an Oxford voice, an immobile policeman:

"You're the fellows!" he'd been exclaiming, "who make old England what

she is! You keep the peace in our homes! You save us from the vile

excesses. . . ."

Tietjens himself he had always addressed with the voice and accent of a

common seaman; with his coarsened surface voice!

He had the two personalities. Two or three times he had said:

"Why don't you kiss the girl? She's a _nice_ girl, isn't she? You're a

poor b----y Tommie, ain't cher? Well, the poor b----y Tommies ought to

have all the nice girls they want! That's straight, isn't it? . . ."

And, even at that time they hadn't known what was going to happen. . . .

There are certain cruelties. . . . They had got a four-wheel cab at

last. The drunken boy had sat beside the driver; he had insisted. . . .

Her little, pale, shrunken face had gazed straight before her. . . . It

hadn't been possible to speak; the cab, rattling all over the road had

pulled up with frightful jerks when the boy had grabbed at the

reins. . . . The old driver hadn't seemed to mind; but they had had to

subscribe all the money in their pockets to pay him after they had carried

the boy into the black house. . . .

Tietjens' mind said to him:

"Now when they came to her father's house so nimbly she slipped in, and

said: 'There is a fool without and is a maid within. . . .'"

He answered dully:

"Perhaps that's what it really amounts to. . . ." He had stood at the

hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the

sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds,

like the laughter of unknown races from darkness. He had turned and

walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed:

"It's perhaps too . . . untidy . . ."

She had said:

"Yes! Yes . . . Ugly . . . Too . . . oh . . . _private_!"

He said, he remembered:

"But . . . for ever . . ."

She said, in a great hurry:

"But when you come back. . . . Permanently. And . . . oh, as if it were

in public." . . . "I don't know," she had added. "_Ought_ we? . . . I'd

be ready. . . ." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask."

He had said at some time: "But obviously. . . . Not under _this_

roof. . . ." And he had added: "We're the sort that . . . _do

not_!"

She had answered, quickly too:

"Yes--that's it. We're that sort!" And then she had asked: "And Ethel's

party? Was it a great success?" It hadn't, she knew, been an

inconsequence. He had answered:

"Ah . . . _That's_ permanent. . . . _That's_ public. . . . There

was Rugeley. The Duke . . . Sylvia brought him. She'll be a great

friend! . . . And the President of the . . . Local Government Board, I

think . . . And a Belgian . . . equivalent to Lord Chief Justice . . . and,

of course, Claudine Sandbach. . . . Two hundred and seventy; all of the

best, the modestly-elated Guggumses said as I left! And Mr.

Ruggles . . . Yes! . . . They're established. . . . No place for me!"

"Nor for _me_!" she had answered. She added: "But I'm glad!"

Patches of silence ran between them: they hadn't yet got out of the

habit of thinking they had to hold up the drunken brother. That had

seemed to last for a thousand painful months. . . . Long enough to

acquire a habit. The brother seemed to roar: "Haw--Haw--Kuryasch. . . ."

And after two minutes: "Haw--Haw--Kuryasch. . . ." Hungarian, no doubt!

He said:

"It was splendid to see Vincent standing beside the Duke. Showing him a

first edition! Not of course _quite_ the thing for a, after all, wedding

party! But how was Rugeley to know that? . . . And Vincent not in the

least servile! He even corrected cousin Rugeley over the meaning of the

word _colophon_! The first time he ever corrected a superior! . . .

Established, you see! . . . And _practically_ cousin Rugeley. . . . Dear

Sylvia Tietjens' cousin, so the next to nearest thing! Wife of Lady

Macmaster's _oldest_ friend. . . . Sylvia going to them in their--quite

modest!--little place in Surrey. . . . As for us," he had concluded

"they also serve who only stand and wait. . . ."

She said:

"I suppose the rooms looked lovely."

He had answered:

"Lovely. . . . They'd got all the pictures by that beastly fellow up

from the rectory study in the dining-room on dark oak panelling. . . . A

fair blaze of bosoms and nipples and lips and pomegranates. . . The

tallest silver candlesticks of course. . . . You remember, silver

candlesticks and dark oak. . . ."

She said:

"Oh, my dear . . . Don't . . . _Don't_!"

He had just touched the rim of his helmet with his folded gloves.

"So we just wash out!" he had said.

She said:

"Would you take this bit of parchment. . . . I got a little Jew girl to

write on it in Hebrew:" It's "God bless you and keep you: God watch over

you at your goings out and at . . ."

He tucked it into his breast pocket.

"The talismanic passage," he said. "Of course I'll wear it. . . ."

She said:

"If we _could_ wash out this afternoon. . . . It would make it easier

to bear. . . . Your poor mother, you know, she was dying when we

last . . ."

He said:

"You remember _that_ . . . Even then you . . . And if I hadn't gone to

Lobscheid. . ."

She said:

"From the first moment I set eyes on you. . . ."

He said:

"And I . . . from the first moment . . . I'll tell you . . . If I looked

out of a door . . . It was all like sand. . . . But to the half left a

little bubbling up of water. That could be trusted. To keep on for ever.

. . . You, perhaps, won't understand."

She said:

"Yes! I know!"

"They were seeing landscapes. . . . Sand dunes; close-cropped. . . .

Some negligible shipping; a stump-masted brig from Archangel. . . ."

"From the first moment," he repeated.

She said:

"If we _could_ wash out . . ."

He said, and for the first moment felt grand, tender, protective:

"Yes, you _can_," he said. "You cut out from this afternoon, just before

4.58 it was when I said that to you and you consented . . . I heard the

Horse Guards clock. . . . To now. . . . Cut it out; and join time up. . . .

It _can_ be done. . . . You know they do it surgically; for some

illness; cut out a great length of the bowel and join the tube up. . . .

For colitis, I think. . . ."

She said:

"But I _wouldn't_ cut it out. . . . It was the first spoken sign."

He said:

"No it wasn't. . . . From the very beginning . . . with every

word. . . ."

She exclaimed:

"You felt that. . . . Too! . . . We've been pushed, as in a carpenter's

vice. . . . We couldn't have got away. . . ."

He said: "By God! That's it. . . ."

He suddenly saw a weeping willow in St. James's Park; 4.59! He had just

said: "Will you be my mistress to-night?" She had gone away, half left

her hands to her face. . . . A small fountain; half left. That could be

trusted to keep on for ever. . . .

Along the lake side, sauntering, swinging his crooked stick, his

incredibly shiny top-hat perched sideways, his claw-hammer coat tails,

very long, flapping out behind, in dusty sunlight, his magpie pince-nez

gleaming, had come, naturally, Mr. Ruggles. He had looked at the girl;

then down at Tietjens, sprawled on his bench. He had just touched the

brim of his shiny hat. He said:

"Dining at the club to-night? . . ."

Tietjens said: "No; I've resigned."

With the aspect of a long-billed bird chewing a bit of putridity,

Ruggles said:

"Oh, but we've had an emergency meeting of the committee . . . the

committee was sitting . . . and sent you a letter asking you to

reconsider. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I know. . . . I shall withdraw my resignation to-night. . . . And

resign again to-morrow morning."

Ruggles' muscles had relaxed for a quick second, then they stiffened.

"Oh, I say!" he had said. "Not that. . . . You couldn't do that. . . .

Not to the _club_! . . . It's never been done. . . . It's an

insult. . . ."

"It's meant to be," Tietjens said. "Gentlemen shouldn't be expected to

belong to a club that has certain members on its committee."

Ruggles' deepish voice suddenly grew very high.

"Eh, I say, you know!" he squeaked.

Tietjens had said:

"I'm not vindictive. . . . But I _am_ deadly tired: of all old women and

their chatter."

Ruggles had said:

"I don't . . ." His face had become suddenly dark brown, scarlet and

then brownish purple. He stood droopingly looking at Tietjens' boots.

"Oh! Ah! Well!" he said at last. "See you at Macmaster's to-night. . . .

A great thing his knighthood. First-class man. . . ."

That had been the first Tietjens had heard of Macmaster's knighthood; he

had missed looking at the honours' list of that morning. Afterwards,

dining alone with Sir Vincent and Lady Macmaster, he had seen, pinned

up, a back view of the Sovereign doing something to Vincent; a photo for

next morning's papers. From Macmaster's embarrassed hushings of Edith

Ethel's explanation that the honour was for special services of a

specific kind Tietjens guessed both the nature of Macmaster's service

and the fact that the little man hadn't told Edith Ethel who,

originally, had done the work. And--just like his girl--Tietjens had let

it go at that. He didn't see why poor Vincent shouldn't have that little

bit of prestige at home--under all the monuments! But he hadn't--though

through all the evening Macmaster, with the solicitude and affection of

a cringing Italian greyhound, had hastened from celebrity to celebrity

to hang over Tietjens, and although Tietjens knew that his friend was

grieved and appalled, like any woman, at his, Tietjens', going out again

to France--Tietjens hadn't been able to look Macmaster again in the

face. . . . He had felt ashamed. He had felt, for the first time in his

life, ashamed!

Even when he, Tietjens, had slipped away from the party--to go to his

good fortune!--Macmaster had come panting down the stairs, running after

him, through guests coming up. He had said:

"Wait . . . You're not going. . . . I want to . . ." With a miserable

and appalled glance he had looked up the stairs; Lady Macmaster might

have come out too. His black, short beard quivering and his wretched

eyes turned down, he had said:

"I wanted to explain. . . . This miserable knighthood. . . ."

Tietjens patted him on the shoulder, Macmaster being on the stairs above

him.

"It's all right, old man," he had said--and with real affection: "We've

powlered up and down enough for a little thing like that not to . . .

I'm very glad. . . ." Macmaster had whispered:

"And Valentine. . . . She's not here to-night. . . ."

He had exclaimed:

"By God! . . . If I thought . . ." Tietjens had said: "It's all right.

It's all right. She's at another party. . . . I'm going on . . ."

Macmaster had looked at him doubtingly and with misery, leaning over and

clutching the clammy banisters.

"Tell her . . ." he said . . . "Good God! You may be killed. . . . I beg

you . . . I beg you to believe . . . I will . . . Like the apple of my

eye. . . ." In the swift glance that Tietjens took of his face he could

see that Macmaster's eyes were full of tears.

They both stood looking down at the stone stairs for a long time.

Then Macmaster had said: "Well . . ."

Tietjens had said: "Well . . ." But he hadn't been able to look at

Macmaster's eyes, though he had felt his friend's eyes pitiably

exploring his own face. . . . "A backstairs way out of it," he had

thought; a queer thing that you couldn't look in the face a man you were

never going to see again!

"But by God," he said to himself fiercely, when his mind came back again

to the girl in front of him, "this isn't going to be another backstairs

exit. . . . I must tell her. . . . I'm damned if I don't make an

effort. . . ."

She had her handkerchief to her face.

"I'm always crying," she said. . . . "A little bubbling spring that can

be trusted to keep on. . . ."

He looked to the right and to the left. Ruggles or General Someone with

false teeth that didn't fit _must_ be coming along. The street with its

sooty boskage was clean empty and silent. She was looking at him. He

didn't know how long he had been silent, he didn't know where he had

been; intolerable waves urged him towards her.

After a long time he said:

"Well . . ."

She moved back. She said:

"I won't watch you out of sight. . . . It is unlucky to watch anyone out

of sight. . . . But I will never . . . I will never cut what you said

then out of my memory . . ." She was gone; the door shut. He had

wondered what she would never cut out of her memory. That he had asked

her that afternoon to be his mistress?

He had caught, outside the gates of his old office, a transport lorry

that had given him a lift to Holborn. . . .

THE END