CHAPTER IV

They had gone back up the hill so that Levin might telephone to

headquarters for his own car in case the general's chauffeur should not

have the sense to return for him. But that was as far as Tietjens got in

uninterrupted reminiscence of that scene. . . . He was sitting in his

flea-bag, digging idly with his pencil into the squared page of his

note-book which had remained open on his knees, his eyes going over and

over again over the words with which his report on his own case had

concluded--the words: _So the interview ended rather untidily_. Over the

words went the image of the dark hillside with the lights of the town,

now that the air-raid was finished, spreading high up into the sky below

them. . . .

But at that point the doctor's batman had uttered, as if with a jocular,

hoarse irony, the name:

"Poor ---- O Nine Morgan! . . ." and over the whitish sheet of paper on

a level with his nose Tietjens perceived thin films of reddish purple to

be wavering, then a glutinous surface of gummy scarlet pigment. Moving!

It was once more an effect of fatigue, operating on the retina, that was

perfectly familiar to Tietjens. But it filled him with indignation

against his own weakness. He said to himself: Wasn't the name of the

wretched O Nine Morgan to be mentioned in his hearing without his retina

presenting him with the glowing image of the fellow's blood? He watched

the phenomenon, growing fainter, moving to the righthand top corner of

the paper and turning a faintly luminous green. He watched it with a

grim irony.

Was he, he said to himself, to regard himself as responsible for the

fellow's death? Was his inner mentality going to present that claim upon

him. That would be absurd. The end of the earth! The absurd end of the

earth. . . . Yet that insignificant ass Levin had that evening asserted

the claim to go into his, Tietjens of Groby's, relations with his wife.

That was an end of the earth as absurd! It was the unthinkable thing, as

unthinkable as the theory that the officer can be responsible for the

death of the man. . . . But the idea had certainly presented itself to

him. How could he be responsible for the death? In fact--in

literalness--he was. It had depended absolutely upon his discretion

whether the man should go home or not. The man's life or death had been

in his hands. He had followed the perfectly correct course. He had

written to the police of the man's home town, and the police had urged

him not to let the man come home. . . . Extraordinary morality on the

part of a police force! The man, they begged, should not be sent home

because a prize-fighter was occupying his bed and laundry. . . .

Extraordinary common sense, very likely. . . . They probably did not

want to get drawn into a scrap with Red Evans of the Red Castle. . . .

For a moment he seemed to see . . . he actually saw . . . O Nine

Morgan's eyes, looking at him with a sort of wonder, as they had looked

when he had refused the fellow his leave. . . . A sort of wonder!

Without resentment, but with incredulity. As you might look at God, you

being very small and ten feet or so below His throne when He pronounced

some inscrutable judgment! . . . The Lord giveth home-leave, and the

Lord refuseth. . . . Probably not blessed, but queer, be the name of

God-Tietjens!

And at the thought of the man as he was alive and of him now, dead, an

immense blackness descended all over Tietjens. He said to himself: _I am

very tired_. Yet he was not ashamed. . . . It was the blackness that

descends on you when you think of your dead. . . . It comes, at any

time, over the brightness of sunlight, in the grey of evening, in the

grey of the dawn, at mess, on parade; it comes at the thought of one man

or at the thought of half a battalion that you have seen, stretched out,

under sheeting, the noses making little pimples: or not stretched out,

lying face downwards, half buried. Or at the thought of dead that you

have never seen dead at all. . . . Suddenly the light goes out. . . . In

this case it was because of one fellow, a dirty enough man, not even

very willing, not in the least endearing, certainly contemplating

desertion. . . . But your dead . . . _Yours_ . . . Your own. As if

joined to your own identity by a black cord. . . .

In the darkness outside, the brushing, swift, rhythmic pacing of an

immense number of men went past, as if they had been phantoms. A great

number of men in fours, carried forward, irresistibly, by the

overwhelming will of mankind in ruled motion. The sides of the hut were

so thin that it was peopled by an innumerable throng. A sodden voice,

just at Tietjens' head, chuckled: "For God's sake, sergeant-major, stop

these ----. I'm too ---- drunk to halt them. . . ."

It made for the moment no impression on Tietjens' conscious mind. Men

were going past. Cries went up in the camp. Not orders, the men were

still marching. Cries.

Tietjens' lips--his mind was still with the dead--said:

"That obscene Pitkins! . . . I'll have him cashiered for this. . . ." He

saw an obscene subaltern, small, with one eyelid that drooped.

He came awake at that. Pitkins was the subaltern he had detailed to

march the draft to the station and go on to Bailleul under a boozy field

officer of sorts.

McKechnie said from the other bed:

"That's the draft back."

Tietjens said:

"Good God! . . ."

McKechnie said to the batman:

"For God's sake go and see if it is. Come back at once. . . ."

The intolerable vision of the line, starving beneath the moon, of grey

crowds murderously elbowing back a thin crowd in brown, zigzagged across

the bronze light in the hut. The intolerable depression that, in those

days, we felt--that all those millions were the playthings of ants busy

in the miles of corridors beneath the domes and spires that rise up over

the central heart of our comity, that intolerable weight upon the brain

and the limbs, descended once more on those two men lying upon their

elbows. As they listened their jaws fell open. The long, polyphonic

babble, rushing in from an extended line of men stood easy, alone

rewarded their ears.

Tietjens said:

"That fellow won't come back. . . . He can never do an errand and come

back. . . ." He thrust one of his legs cumbrously out of the top of his

flea-bag. He said:

"By God, the Germans will be all over here in a week's time!"

He said to himself:

"If they so betray us from Whitehall that fellow Levin has no right to

pry into my matrimonial affairs. It is proper that one's individual

feelings should be sacrificed to the necessities of a collective entity.

But not if that entity is to be betrayed from above. Not if it hasn't

the ten-millionth of a chance. . . ." He regarded Levin's late incursion

on his privacy as inquiries set afoot by the general. . . . Incredibly

painful to him: like a medical examination into nudities, but perfectly

proper. Old Campion had to assure himself that the other ranks were not

demoralized by the spectacle of officers' matrimonial infidelities. . . .

But such inquiries were not to be submitted to if the whole show were

one gigantic demoralization!

McKechnie said, in reference to Tietjens' protruded foot:

"There's no good your going out. . . . Cowley will get the men into

their lines. He was prepared." He added: "If the fellows in Whitehall

are determined to do old Puffles in, why don't they recall him?"

The legend was that an eminent personage in the Government had a great

personal dislike for the general in command of one army--the general

being nicknamed Puffles. The Government, therefore, were said to be

starving his command of men so that disaster should fall upon his

command.

"They can recall generals easy enough," McKechnie went on, "or anyone

else!"

A heavy dislike that this member of the lower middle classes should have

opinions on public affairs overcame Tietjens. He exclaimed: "Oh, that's

all tripe!"

He was himself outside all contact with affairs by now. But the other

rumour in that troubled host had it that, as a political manœuvre, the

heads round Whitehall--the civilian heads--were starving the army of

troops in order to hold over the allies of Great Britain the threat of

abandoning altogether the Western Front. They were credited with

threatening a strategic manœuvre on an immense scale in the Near East,

perhaps really intending it, or perhaps to force the hands of their

allies over some political intrigue. These atrocious rumours

reverberated backwards and forwards in the ears of all those millions

under the black vault of heaven. All their comrades in the line were to

be sacrificed as a rearguard to their departing host. That whole land

was to be annihilated as a sacrifice to one vanity. Now the draft had

been called back. That seemed proof that the Government meant to starve

the line! McKechnie groaned:

"Poor ---- old Bird! . . . He's booked. Eleven months in the front line,

he's been. . . . Eleven _months_! . . . I was nine, this stretch. With

him."

He added:

"Get back into bed, old bean. . . . I'll go and look after the men if

it's necessary. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"You don't so much as know where their lines are. . . ." And sat

listening. Nothing but the long roll of tongues came to him. He said:

"Damn it! The men ought not to be kept standing in the cold like

that. . . ." Fury filled him beneath despair. His eyes filled with tears.

"God," he said to himself, "the fellow Levin presumes to interfere in my

private affairs. . . . Damn it," he said again, "it's like doing a

little impertinence in a world that's foundering. . . ."

The world was foundering.

"I'd go out," he said, "but I don't want to have to put that filthy

little Pitkins under arrest. He only drinks because he's shellshocked.

He's not man enough else, the unclean little Noncomformist. . . ."

McKechnie said:

"Hold on! . . . I'm a Presbyterian myself. . . ."

Tietjens answered:

"You would be! . . ." He said: "I beg your pardon. . . . There will be

no more parades. . . . The British Army is dishonoured for ever. . . ."

McKechnie said:

"That's all right, old bean. . . ."

Tietjens exclaimed with sudden violence:

"What the hell are you doing in the officers' lines? . . . Don't you

know it's a court-martial offence?"

He was confronted with the broad, mealy face of his regimental

quartermaster-sergeant, the sort of fellow who wore an officer's cap

against the regulations, with a Tommie's silver-plated badge. A man

determined to get Sergeant-Major Cowley's job. The man had come in

unheard under the roll of voices outside. He said:

"Excuse me, sir, I took the liberty of knocking. . . . The

sergeant-major is in an epileptic fit. . . . I wanted your directions

before putting the draft into the tents with the other men. . . ."

Having said that tentatively he hazarded cautiously: "The sergeant-major

throws these fits, sir, if he is suddenly woke up. . . . And

Second-Lieutenant Pitkins woke him very suddenly. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"So you took on you the job of a beastly informer against both of

them. . . . I shan't forget it." He said to himself:

"I'll get this fellow one day . . ." and he seemed to hear with pleasure

the clicking and tearing of the scissors as, inside three parts of a

hollow square, they cut off his stripes and badges.

McKechnie exclaimed:

"Good God, man, you aren't going out in nothing but your pyjamas. Put

your slacks on under your British warm. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Send the Canadian sergeant-major to me at the double. . . ." to the

quarter. "My slacks are at the tailor's, being pressed." His slacks were

being pressed for the ceremony of the signing of the marriage contract

of Levin, the fellow who had interfered in his private affairs. He

continued into the mealy broad face and vague eyes of the

quartermaster: "You know as well as I do that it was the Canadian

sergeant-major's job to report to me. . . . I'll let you off this time,

but, by God, if I catch you spying round the officers' lines again you

are for a D.C.M. . . ."

He wrapped a coarse, Red Cross, grey-wool muffler under the turned-up

collar of his British warm.

"That swine," he said to McKechnie, "spies on the officers' lines in the

hope of getting a commission by catching out ---- little squits like

Pitkins, when they're drunk. . . . I'm seven hundred braces down. Morgan

does not know that I know that I'm that much down. But you can bet he

knows where they have gone. . . ."

McKechnie said:

"I wish you would not go out like that. . . . I'll make you some

cocoa. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I can't keep the men waiting while I dress. . . . I'm as strong as a

horse. . . ."

He was out amongst the bitterness, the mist, and the moongleams on three

thousand rifle barrels, and the voices. . . . He was seeing the Germans

pour through a thin line, and his heart was leaden. . . . A tall,

graceful man swam up against him and said, through his nose, like any

American:

"There has been a railway accident, due to the French strikers. The

draft is put back till three pip emma the day after to-morrow, sir."

Tietjens exclaimed:

"It isn't countermanded?" breathlessly.

The Canadian sergeant-major said:

"No, sir. . . . A railway accident. . . . Sabotage by the French, they

say. . . . Four Glamorganshire sergeants, all nineteen-fourteen men,

killed, sir, going home on leave. But the draft is not cancelled. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Thank God!"

The slim Canadian with his educated voice said:

"You're thanking God, sir, for what's very much to our detriment. Our

draft was ordered for Salonika till this morning. The sergeant in charge

of draft returns showed me the name _Salonika_ scored off in his draft

roster. Sergeant-Major Cowley had got hold of the wrong story. Now it's

going up the line. The other would have been a full two months' more

life for us."

The man's rather slow voice seemed to continue for a long time. As it

went on Tietjens felt the sunlight dwelling on his nearly coverless

limbs, and the tide of youth returning to his veins. It was like

champagne. He said:

"You sergeants get a great deal too much information. The sergeant in

charge of returns had no business to show you his roster. It's not your

fault, of course. But you are an intelligent man. You can see how useful

that news might be to certain people: people that it's not to your own

interest should know these things. . . ." He said to himself: "A

landmark in history. . . ." And then: "Where the devil did my mind get

hold of that expression at this moment?"

They were walking in mist, down an immense lane, one hedge of which was

topped by the serrated heads and irregularly held rifles that showed

here and there. He said to the sergeant-major: "Call 'em to attention.

Never mind their dressing, we've got to get 'em into bed. Roll-call will

be at nine to-morrow."

His mind said:

"If this means the single command. . . . And it's bound to mean the

single command, it's the turning point. . . . Why the hell am I so

extraordinarily glad? What's it to me?"

He was shouting in a round voice:

"Now then, men, you've got to go six extra in a tent. See if you can

fall out six at a time at each tent. It's not in the drill book, but see

if you can do it for yourselves. You're smart men: use your

intelligences. The sooner you get to bed the sooner you'll be warm. I

wish I was. Don't disturb the men who're already in the tents. They've

got to be up for fatigues to-morrow at five, poor devils. You can lie

soft till three hours after that. . . . The draft will move to the left

in fours. . . . Form fours . . . Left . . ." Whilst the voices of the

sergeants in charge of companies yelped varyingly to a distance in the

quick march order he said to himself:

"Extraordinarily glad. . . . A strong passion. . . . How damn well these

fellows move! . . . Cannon fodder. . . . Cannon fodder. . . . That's

what their steps say. . . ." His whole body shook in the grip of the

cold that beneath his loose overcoat gnawed his pyjamaed limbs. He could

not leave the men, but cantered beside them with the sergeant-major till

he came to the head of the column in the open in time to wheel the first

double company into a line of ghosts that were tents, silent and austere

in the moon's very shadowy light. . . . It appeared to him a magic

spectacle. He said to the sergeant-major: "Move the second company to B

line, and so on," and stood at the side of the men as they wheeled,

stamping, like a wall in motion. He thrust his stick half-way down

between the second and third files. "Now then, a four and half a four to

the right; remaining half-four and next four to the left. Fall out into

first tents to right and left. . . ." He continued saying "First four

and half, this four to the right. . . . Damn you, by the left! How can

you tell which beastly four you belong to if you don't march by the

left. . . . Remember you're soldiers, not new-chum lumbermen. . . ."

It was sheer exhilaration to freeze there on the downside in the

extraordinarily pure air with the extraordinarily fine men. They came

round, marking time with the stamp of guardsmen. He said, with tears in

his voice:

"Damn it all, I gave them that extra bit of smartness. . . . Damn it

all, there's something I've done. . . ." Getting cattle into condition

for the slaughterhouse. . . . They were as eager as bullocks running

down by Camden Town to Smithfield Market. . . . Seventy per cent, of

them would never come back. . . . But it's better to go to heaven with

your skin shining and master of your limbs than as a hulking

lout. . . . The Almighty's orderly room will welcome you better in all

probability. . . . He continued exclaiming monotonously . . . "Remaining

half-four and next four to the left. . . . Hold your beastly tongues when

you fall out. I can't hear myself give orders. . . ." It lasted a long

time. Then they were all swallowed up.

He staggered, his knees wooden-stiff with the cold, and the cold more

intense now the wall of men no longer sheltered him from the wind, out

along the brink of the plateau to the other lines. It gave him

satisfaction to observe that he had got his men into their lines

seventy-five per cent, quicker than the best of the N.C.O.'s who had had

charge of the other lines. Nevertheless, he swore bitingly at the

sergeants: their men were in knots round the entrance to the alleys of

ghost-pyramids. . . . Then there were no more, and he drifted with

regret across the plain towards his country street of huts. One of them

had a coarse evergreen rose growing over it. He picked a leaf, pressed

it to his lips and threw it up into the wind. . . . "That's for

Valentine," he said meditatively. "Why did I do that? . . . Or perhaps

it's for England. . . ." He said: "Damn it all, this is patriotism! . . .

_This_ is patriotism. . . ." It wasn't what you took patriotism as a

rule to be. There were supposed to be more parades about that job! . . .

But this was just a broke to the wide, wheezy, half-frozen Yorkshireman,

who despised every one in England not a Yorkshireman, or from more to

the North, at two in the morning picking a leaf from a rose-tree and

slobbering over it, without knowing what he was doing. And then

discovering that it was half for a pug-nosed girl whom he presumed, but

didn't know, to smell like a primrose; and half for . . . England! . . .

At two in the morning with the thermometer ten degrees below zero. . . .

Damn, it was cold! . . .

And why these emotions? . . . Because England, not before it was time,

had been allowed to decide not to do the dirty on her associates! . . .

He said to himself: "It is probably because a hundred thousand

sentimentalists like myself commit similar excesses of the subconscious

that we persevere in this glorious but atrocious undertaking. All the

same, I didn't know I had it in me!" A strong passion! . . . For his

girl and his country! . . . Nevertheless, his girl was a pro-German. . . .

It was a queer mix-up! . . . Not of course a pro-German, but

disapproving of the preparation of men, like bullocks, with sleek

healthy skins for the abattoirs in Smithfield. . . . Agreeing presumably

with the squits who had been hitherto starving the B.E.F. of men. . . .

A queer mix-up. . . .

At half-past one the next day, in chastened winter sunlight, he mounted

Schomburg, a coffin-headed, bright chestnut, captured from the Germans

on the Marne, by the second battalion of the Glamorganshires. He had not

been on the back of the animal two minutes before he remembered that he

had forgotten to look it over. It was the first time in his life that he

had ever forgotten to look at an animal's hoofs, fetlocks, knees,

nostrils and eyes, and to take a pull at the girth before climbing into

the saddle. But he had ordered the horse for a quarter to one and, even

though he had bolted his cold lunch like a cannibal in haste, there he

was three-quarters of an hour late, and with his head still full of

teasing problems. He had meant to clear his head by a long canter over

the be-hutted downs, dropping down into the city by a bypath.

But the ride did not clear his head--rather, the sleeplessness of the

night began for the first time then to tell on him after a morning of

fatigues, during which he had managed to keep the thought of Sylvia at

arm's length. He had to wait to see Sylvia before he could see what

Sylvia wanted. And morning had brought the common-sense idea that

probably she wanted to do nothing more than pull the string of the

showerbath--which meant committing herself to the first extravagant

action that came into her head--and exulting in the consequences.

He had not managed to get to bed at all the night before. Captain

McKechnie, who had had some cocoa--a beverage Tietjens had never before

tasted--hot and ready for him on his return from the lines, had kept him

till past half-past four, relating with a male fury his really very

painful story. It appeared that he had obtained leave to go home and

divorce his wife, who, during his absence in France, had been living

with an Egyptologist in Government service. Then, acting under

conscientious scruples of the younger school of the day, he had

refrained from divorcing her. Campion had in consequence threatened to

deprive him of his commission. . . . The poor devil--who had actually

consented to contribute to the costs of the household of his wife and

the Egyptologist--had gone raving mad and had showered an extraordinary

torrent of abuse at the decent old fellow that Campion was. . . . A

decent old fellow, really. For the interview, being delicate, had taken

place in the general's bedroom and the general had not felt it

necessary, there being no orderlies or junior officers present, to take

any official notice of McKechnie's outburst. McKechnie was a fellow with

an excellent military record; you could in fact hardly have found a

regimental officer with a better record. So Campion had decided to deal

with the man as suffering from a temporary brain-storm and had sent him

to Tietjen's unit for rest and recuperation. It was an irregularity, but

the general was of a rank to risk what irregularities he considered to

be of use to the service.

It had turned out that McKechnie was actually the nephew of Tietjens'

very old intimate, Sir Vincent Macmaster, of the Department of

Statistics, being the son of his sister who had married the assistant to

the elder Macmaster, a small grocer in the Port of Leith in Scotland. . . .

That indeed had been why Campion had been interested in him.

Determined as he was to show his godson no unreasonable military

favours, the general was perfectly ready to do a kindness that he

thought would please Tietjens. All these pieces of information Tietjens

had packed away in his mind for future consideration and, it being after

four-thirty before McKechnie had calmed himself down, Tietjens had taken

the opportunity to inspect the breakfasts of the various fatigues

ordered for duty in the town, these being detailed for various hours

from a quarter to five to seven. It was a matter of satisfaction to

Tietjens to have seen to the breakfasts, and inspected his cook-houses,

since he did not often manage to make the opportunity and he could by no

means trust his orderly officers.

At breakfast in the depot mess-hut he was detained by the colonel in

command of the depot, the Anglican padre and McKechnie; the colonel,

very old, so frail that you would have thought that a shudder or a cough

would have shaken his bones one from another, had yet a passionate

belief that the Greek Church should exchange communicants with the

Anglican: the padre, a stout, militant Churchman, had a gloomy contempt

for Orthodox theology. McKechnie from time to time essayed to define the

communion according to the Presbyterian rite. They all listened to

Tietjens whilst he dilated on the historic aspects of the various

schisms of Christianity and accepted his rough definition to the effect

that, in transubstantiation, the host actually became the divine

presence, whereas in consubstantiation the substance of the host, as if

miraculously become porous, was suffused with the presence as a sponge

is with water. . . . They all agreed that the breakfast bacon supplied

from store was uneatable and agreed to put up half a crown a week a

piece to get better for their table.

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with

the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval,

good-humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a

colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a

colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but

knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and

the last oak: Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the

Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the

porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants: the

Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it

were, as distinct from the players of the game: the atmosphere of the

estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel

anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little

cricket for the young men. Like Yorkshire of a Saturday afternoon; if

you looked down on the whole broad county you would not see a single

village green without its white flannels. That was why Yorkshire always

leads the averages. . . . Probably by the time you got to heaven you

would be so worn out by work on this planet that you would accept the

English Sunday, for ever, with extreme relief!

With his belief that all that was good in English literature ended with

the seventeenth century, his imaginations of heaven must be

materialist--like Bunyan's. He laughed good-humouredly at his projection

of a hereafter. It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There

would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some

beastly yelping game. . . . Like baseball or Association football. . . .

And heaven? . . . Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside.

Or Chatauqua, wherever that was. . . . And God? A Real Estate Agent,

with Marxist views. . . . He hoped to be out of it before the cessation

of hostilities, in which case he might be just in time for the last

train to the old heaven. . . .

In his orderly hut he found an immense number of papers. On the top an

envelope marked _Urgent_. Private with a huge rubber stamp. From Levin.

Levin, too, must have been up pretty late. It was not about Mrs.

Tietjens, or even Miss de Bailly. It was a private warning that Tietjens

would probably have his draft on his hands another week or ten days, and

very likely another couple of thousand men extra as well. He warned

Tietjens to draw all the tents he could get hold of as soon as

possible. . . . Tietjens called to a subaltern with pimples who was picking

his teeth with a pen-nib at the other end of the hut: "Here, you! . . .

Take two companies of the Canadians to the depot store and draw all the

tents you can get up to two hundred and fifty. . . . Have 'em put alongside

my D lines. . . . Do you know how to look after putting up tents? . . .

Well then, get Thompson . . . no, Pitkins, to help you. . . ." The

subaltern drifted out sulkily. Levin said that the French railway

strikers, for some political reason, had sabotaged a mile of railway,

the accident of the night before had completely blocked up all the

lines, and the French civilians would not let their own breakdown gangs

make any repairs. German prisoners had been detailed for that fatigue,

but probably Tietjens' Canadian railway corps would be wanted. He had

better hold them in readiness. The strike was said to be a manœuvre for

forcing our hands--to get us to take over more of the line. In that case

they had jolly well dished themselves, for how could we take over more

of the line without more men, and how could we send up more men without

the railway to send them by? We had half a dozen army corps all ready to

go. Now they were all jammed. Fortunately the weather at the front was

so beastly that the Germans could not move. He finished up "Four in the

morning, old bean, _à tantôt_!" the last phrase having been learned

from Mlle de Bailly. Tietjens grumbled that if they went on piling up

the work on him like this he would never get down to the signing of that

marriage contract.

He called the Canadian sergeant-major to him.

"See," he said, "that you keep the Railway Service Corps in camp with

their arms ready, whatever their arms are. Tools, I suppose. Are their

tools all complete? And their muster roll?"

"Girtin has gone absent, sir," the slim dark fellow said, with an air of

destiny. Girtin was the respectable man with the mother to whom Tietjens

had given the two hours' leave the night before.

Tietjens answered:

"He would have!" with a sour grin. It enhanced his views of strictly

respectable humanity. They blackmailed you with lamentable and pathetic

tales and then did the dirty on you. He said to the sergeant-major:

"You will be here for another week or ten days. See that you get your

tents up all right and the men comfortable. I will inspect them as soon

as I have taken my orderly room. Full marching order. Captain McKechnie

will inspect their kits at two."

The sergeant-major, stiff but graceful, had something at the back of his

mind. It came out:

"I have my marching orders for two-thirty this afternoon. The notice for

inserting my commission in depot orders is on your table. I leave for

the O.T.C. by the three train. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Your commission! . . ." It was a confounded nuisance.

The sergeant-major said:

"Sergeant-Major Cowley and I applied for our commissions three months

ago. The communications granting them are both on your table

together. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Sergeant-Major Cowley. . . . Good God! Who recommended you?"

The whole organization of his confounded battalion fell to pieces. It

appeared that a circular had come round three months before--before

Tietjens had been given command of that unit--asking for experienced

first-class warrant officers capable of serving as instructors in

Officers' Training Corps, with commissions. Sergeant-Major Cowley had

been recommended by the colonel of the depot, Sergeant-Major Ledoux by

his own colonel. Tietjens felt as if he had been let down--but of course

he had not been. It was just the way of the army, all the time. You got

a platoon, or a battalion, or, for the matter of that, a dug-out or a

tent, by herculean labours into good fettle. It ran all right for a day

or two, then it all fell to pieces, the personnel scattered to the four

winds by what appeared merely wanton orders, coming from the most

unexpected headquarters, or the premises were smashed up by a chance

shell that might just as well have fallen somewhere else. . . . The

finger of Fate! . . .

But it put a confounded lot more work on him. . . . He said to

Sergeant-Major Cowley, whom he found in the next hut where all the paper

work of the unit was done:

"I should have thought you would have been enormously better off as

regimental sergeant-major than with a commission. I know I would rather

have the job." Cowley answered--he was very pallid and shaken--that

with his unfortunate infirmity, coming on at any moment of shock, he

would be better in a job where he could slack off, like an O.T.C. He had

always been subject to small fits, over in a minute, or couple of

seconds even. . . . But getting too near a H.E. shell--after Noircourt

which had knocked out Tietjens himself--had brought them on, violent.

There was also, he finished, the gentility to be considered. Tietjens

said:

"Oh, the gentility! . . . That's not worth a flea's jump. . . . There

won't be any more parades after this war. There aren't any now. Look at

who your companions will be in an officer's quarters; you'd be in a

great deal better society in any self-respecting sergeants' mess."

Cowley answered that he knew the service had gone to the dogs. All the

same his missis liked it. And there was his daughter Winnie to be

considered. She had always been a bit wild, and his missis wrote that

she had gone wilder than ever, all due to the war. Cowley thought that

the bad boys would be a little more careful how they monkeyed with her

if she was an officer's daughter. . . . There was probably something in

that!

Coming out into the open, confidentially with Tietjens, Cowley dropped

his voice huskily to say:

"Take Quartermaster-Sergeant Morgan for R.S.M., sir."

Tietjens said explosively:

"I'm damned if I will." Then he asked: "Why?" The wisdom of old N.C.O.'s

is a thing no prudent officer neglects.

"He can do the work, sir," Cowley said. "He's out for a commission, and

he'll do his best. . . ." He dropped his husky voice to a still greater

depth of mystery:

"You're over two hundred--I should say nearer three hundred--pounds

down in your battalion stores. I don't suppose you want to lose a sum of

money like that?"

Tietjens said:

"I'm damned if I do. . . . But I don't see. . . . Oh, yes, I do. . . .

If I make him sergeant-major he has to hand over the stores all

complete. . . . To-day. . . . Can he do it?"

Cowley said that Morgan could have till the day after to-morrow. He

would look after things till then.

"But you'll want to have a flutter before you go," Tietjens said. "Don't

stop for me."

Cowley said that he would stop and see the job through. He had thought

of going down into the town and having a flutter. But the girls down

there were a common sort, and it was bad for his complaint. . . . He

would stop and see what could be done with Morgan. Of course it was

possible that Morgan might decide to face things out. He might prefer to

stick to the money he'd got by disposing of Tietjens' stores to other

battalions that were down, or to civilian contractors. And stand a court

martial! But it wasn't likely. He was a Noncomformist deacon, or

pew-opener, or even a minister possibly, at home in Wales. . . . From

near Denbigh! And Cowley had got a very good man, a first-class man, an

Oxford professor, now a lance-corporal at the depot, for Morgan's place.

The colonel would lend him to Tietjens and would get him rated acting

quartermaster-sergeant unpaid. . . . Cowley had it all arranged. . . .

Lance-Corporal Caldicott was a first-class man, only he could not tell

his right hand from his left on parade. Literally could not tell

them. . . .

So the battalion settled itself down. . . . Whilst Cowley and he were at

the colonel's orderly room arranging for the transfer of the

professor--he was really only a fellow of his college--who did not know

his right hand from his left, Tietjens was engaged in the remains of the

colonel's furious argument as to the union of the Anglican and Eastern

rites. The colonel--he was a full colonel--sat in his lovely private

office, a light, gay compartment of a tin-hutment, the walls being

papered in scarlet, with, on the purplish, thick, soft baize of his

table-cover, a tall glass vase from which sprayed out pale Riviera

roses, the gift of young lady admirers amongst the V.A.D.'s in the town

because he was a darling, and an open, very gilt and leather-bound

volume of a biblical encyclopædia beneath his delicate septuagenarian

features. He was confirming his opinion that a union between the Church

of England and the Greek Orthodox Church was the only thing that could

save civilization. The whole war turned on that. The Central Empires

represented Roman Catholicism, the Allies Protestantism and Orthodoxy.

Let them unite. The papacy was a traitor to the cause of civilization.

Why had the Vatican not protested with no uncertain voice about the

abominations practised on the Belgian Catholics? . . .

Tietjens pointed out languidly objections to this theory. The first

thing our ambassador to the Vatican had found out on arriving in Rome

and protesting about massacres of Catholic laymen in Belgium was that

the Russians before they had been a day in Austrian Poland had hanged

twelve Roman Catholic bishops in front of their palaces.

Cowley was engaged with the adjutant at another table. The colonel ended

his theologico-political tirade by saying:

"I shall be very sorry to lose you, Tietjens. I don't know what we shall

do without you. I never had a moment's peace with your unit until you

came."

Tietjens said:

"Well, you aren't losing me, sir, as far as I know."

The colonel said:

"Oh, yes, we are. You are going up the line next week. . . ." He added:

"Now, don't get angry with me. . . . I've protested very strongly to old

Campion--General Campion--that I cannot do without you." And he made,

with his delicate, thin, hairy-backed, white hands a motion as of

washing.

The ground moved under Tietjens' feet. He felt himself clambering over

slopes of mud with his heavy legs and labouring chest. He said:

"Damn it all! ... I'm not fit. . . . I'm C3. . . . I was ordered to live

in an hotel in the town. . . . I only mess here to be near the

battalion."

The colonel said with some eagerness:

"Then you can protest to Garrison. . . . I hope you will. . . . But I

suppose you are the sort of fellow that won't."

Tietjens said:

"No, sir. . . . Of course I cannot protest . . . Though it's probably a

mistake of some clerk. . . . I could not stand a week in the line. . . ."

The profound misery of brooding apprehension in the line was less on

his mind than, precisely, the appalling labour of the lower limbs when

you live in mud to the neck. . . . Besides, whilst he had been in

hospital, practically the whole of his equipment had disappeared from

his kitbag--including Sylvia's two pair of sheets!--and he had no money

with which to get more. He had not even any trench-boots. Fantastic

financial troubles settled on his mind.

The colonel said to the adjutant at the other purple baize-covered

table:

"Show Captain Tietjens those marching orders of his. . . . They're from

Whitehall, aren't they? . . . You never know where these things come

from nowadays. I call them the arrow that flieth by night!"

The adjutant, a diminutive, a positively miniature gentleman with

Coldstream badges up and a dreadfully worried brow, drifted a quarto

sheet of paper out of a pile, across his tablecloth towards Tietjens.

His tiny hands seemed about to fall off at the wrists; his temples

shuddered with neuralgia. He said:

"For God's sake do protest to Garrison if you feel you can. . . . We

_can't_ have more work shoved on us. . . . Major Lawrence and Major

Halkett left the whole of the work of your unit to us. . . ."

The sumptuous paper, with the royal arms embossed at the top, informed

Tietjens that he would report to his VIth battalion on the Wednesday of

next week in preparation for taking up the duties of divisional

transport officer to the XIXth division. The order came from room G 14

R, at the War Office. He asked what the deuce G 14 R was, of the

adjutant, who in an access of neuralgic agony, shook his head miserably,

between his two hands, his elbows on the tablecloth.

Sergeant-Major Cowley, with his air of a solicitor's clerk, said the

room G 14 R was the department that dealt with civilian requests for the

services of officers. To the adjutant who asked what the devil a

civilian request for the employment of officers could have to do with

sending Captain Tietjens to the XIXth division, Sergeant-Major Cowley

presumed that it was because of the activities of the Earl of Beichan.

The Earl of Beichan, a Levantine financier and race-horse owner, was

interesting himself in army horses, after a short visit to the lines of

communication. He also owned several newspapers. So they had been waking

up the army transport-animals' department to please him. The adjutant

would no doubt have observed a Veterinary-Lieutenant Hotchkiss or

Hitchcock. He had come to them through G 14 R. At the request of Lord

Beichan, who was personally interested in Lieutenant Hotchkiss's

theories. He was to make experiments on the horses of the Fourth

Army--in which the XIXth division was then to be found. . . . "So,"

Cowley said, "you'll be under him as far as your horse lines go. If you

go up." Perhaps Lord Beichan was a friend of Captain Tietjens and had

asked for him, too: Captain Tietjens was known to be wonderful with

horses.

Tietjens, his breath rushing through his nostrils, swore he would not go

up the line at the bidding of a hog like Beichan, whose real name was

Stavropolides, formerly Nathan.

He said the army was reeling to its base because of the continual

interference of civilians. He said it was absolutely impossible to get

through his programmes of parades because of the perpetual extra drills

that were forced on them at the biddings of civilians. Any fool who

owned a newspaper, nay, any fool who could write to a newspaper, or any

beastly little squit of a novelist could frighten the Government and the

War Office into taking up one more hour of the men's parade time for

patent manœuvres with jampots or fancy underclothing. Now he was asked

if his men wanted lecturing on the causes of the war and whether he--he,

good God!--would not like to give the men cosy chats on the nature of

the Enemy nations. . . .

The colonel said:

"There, there, Tietjens! . . . There, there! . . . We all suffer alike.

_We've_ got to lecture our men on the uses of a new patent sawdust stove.

If you don't want that job, you can easily get the general to take you

off it. They say you can turn him round your little finger. . . ."

"He's my godfather," Tietjens thought it wise to say. "I never asked him

for a job, but I'm damned if it isn't his duty as a Christian to keep me

out of the clutches of this Greek-'Ebrew pagan peer. . . . He's not even

Orthodox, colonel. . . ."

The adjutant here said that Colour-Sergeant Morgan of their orderly room

wanted a word with Tietjens. Tietjens said he hoped to goodness that

Morgan had some money for him! The adjutant said he understood that

Morgan had unearthed quite a little money that ought to have been paid

to Tietjens by his agents and hadn't.

Colour-Sergeant Morgan was the regimental magician with figures.

Inordinately tall and thin, his body, whilst his eyes peered into

distant columns of cyphers, appeared to be always parallel with the

surface of his table and, as he always answered the several officers

whom he benefited without raising his head, his face was very little

known to his superiors. He was, however, in appearance a very ordinary,

thin, N.C.O. whose spidery legs, when very rarely he appeared on a

parade, had the air of running away with him as a race-horse might do.

He told Tietjens that, pursuant to his instructions and the A.C.P. i 96

b that Tietjens had signed, he had ascertained that command pay at the

rate of two guineas a day and supplementary fuel and light allowance at

the rate of 6_s_. 8_d_. was being paid weekly by the Paymaster-General's

Department to his, Tietjens', account at his agents'. He suggested that

Tietjens should write to his agents that if they did not immediately pay

to his account the sum of £194 13_s_. 4 _d_., by them received from the

Paymaster's Department, he would proceed against the Crown by Petition

of Right. And he strongly recommended Tietjens to draw a cheque on his

own bank for the whole of the money because, if by any chance the agents

had not paid the money in, he could sue them for damages and get them

cast in several thousand pounds. And serve the devils right. They must

have a million or so in hand in unpaid command and detention allowances

due to officers. He only wished he could advertise in the papers

offering to recover unpaid sums due by agents. He added that he had a

nice little computation as to variations in the course of Gunter's

Second Comet that he would like to ask Tietjen's advice about one of

these days. The colour-sergeant was an impassioned amateur astronomer.

So Tietjens' morning went up and down. . . . The money at the moment,

Sylvia being in that town, was of tremendous importance to him and came

like an answer to prayer. It was not so agreeable, however, even in a

world in which, never, never, never for ten minutes did you know whether

you stood on your head or your heels, for Tietjens, on going back to the

colonel's private office, to find Sergeant-Major Cowley coming out of

the next room in which, on account of the adjutant's neuralgia, the

telephone was kept. Cowley announced to the three of them that the

general had the day before ordered his correspondence-corporal to send a

very emphatic note to Colonel Gillum to the effect that he was informing

the competent authority that he had no intention whatever of parting

with Captain Tietjens, who was invaluable in his command. The

correspondence-corporal had informed Cowley that neither he nor the

general knew who was the competent authority for telling Room G 14 R at

the War Office to go to hell, but the matter would be looked up and put

all right before the chit was sent off. . . .

That was good as far as it went. Tietjens was really interested in his

present job, and although he would have liked well enough to have the

job of looking after the horses of a division, or even an army, he felt

that he would rather it was put off till the spring, given the weather

they were having and the state of his chest. And the complication of

possible troubles with Lieutenant Hotchkiss who, being a professor, had

never really seen a horse--or not for ten years!--was something to be

thought about very seriously. But all this appeared quite another matter

when Cowley announced that the civilian authority who had asked for

Tietjens' transfer was the permanent secretary to the Ministry of

Transport. . . .

Colonel Gillum said:

"That's your brother, Mark. . . ." And indeed the permanent secretary to

the Ministry of Transport was Tietjens' brother Mark, known as the

Indispensable Official. Tietjens felt a real instant of dismay. He

considered that his violent protest against the job would appear rather

a smack in the face for poor old wooden-featured Mark who had probably

taken a good deal of trouble to get him the job. Even if Mark should

never hear of it, a man should not slap his brother in the face!

Moreover, when he came to think of his last day in London, he remembered

that Valentine Wannop, who had exaggerated ideas as to the safety of

First Line Transport, had begged Mark to get him a job as divisional

officer. . . . And he imagined Valentine's despair if she heard that

he--Tietjens--had moved heaven and earth to get out of it. He saw her

lower lip quivering and the tears in her eyes. . . . But he probably had

got that from some novel, because he had never seen her lower lip

quiver. He had seen tears in her eyes!

He hurried back to his lines to take his orderly room. In the long hut

McKechnie was taking that miniature court of drunks and defaulters for

him and, just as Tietjens reached it, he was taking the case of Girtin

and two other Canadian privates. . . . The case of Girtin interested

him, and when McKechnie slid out of his seat Tietjens occupied it. The

prisoners were only just being marched in by a Sergeant Davis, an

admirable N.C.O. whose rifle appeared to be part of his rigid body and

who executed an amazing number of stamps in seriously turning in front

of the C.O.'s table. It gave the impression of an Indian war dance. . . .

Tietjens glanced at the charge sheet, which was marked as coming from

the Provost-Marshal's Office. Instead of the charge of absence from

draft he read that of conduct prejudicial to good order and military

discipline in that. . . . The charge was written in a very illiterate

hand; an immense beery lance-corporal of Garrison Military Police, with

a red hat-band, attended to give evidence. . . . It was a tenuous and

disagreeable affair. Girtin had not gone absent, so Tietjens had to

revise his views of the respectable. At any rate of the respectable

Colonial private soldier with mother complete. For there really had been

a mother, and Girtin had been seeing her into the last tram down into

the town. A frail old lady. Apparently, trying to annoy the Canadian,

the beery lance-corporal of the Garrison Military Police had hustled the

mother. Girtin had remonstrated; very moderately, he said. The

lance-corporal had shouted at him. Two other Canadians returning to camp

had intervened and two more police. The police had called the

Canadians ---- conscripts, which was almost more than the Canadians could

stand, they being voluntarily enlisted 1914 or 1915 men. The police--it was

an old trick--had kept the men talking until two minutes after the last

post had sounded and then had run them in for being absent off pass--and

for disrespect to their red hat-bands.

Tietjens, with a carefully measured fury, first cross-examined and then

damned the police witness to hell. Then he marked the charge sheets with

the words "Case explained," and told the Canadians to go and get ready

for his parade. It meant he was aware a frightful row with the

provost-marshal, who was a port-winey old general called O'Hara and

loved his police as if they had been ewe-lambs.

He took his parade, the Canadian troops looking like real soldiers in

the sunlight, went round his lines with the new Canadian sergeant-major,

who had his appointment, thank goodness, from his own authorities; wrote

a report on the extreme undesirability of lecturing his men on the

causes of the war, since his men were either graduates of one or other

Canadian university and thus knew twice as much about the causes of the

war as any lecturer the civilian authorities could provide, or else they

were half-breed Micamuc Indians, Esquimaux, Japanese, or Alaskan

Russians, none of whom could understand any English lecturer. . . . He

was aware that he would have to re-write his report so as to make it

more respectful to the newspaper proprietor peer who, at that time, was

urging on the home Government the necessity of lecturing all the

subjects of His Majesty on the causes of the war. But he wanted to get

that grouse off his chest and its disrespect would pain Levin, who would

have to deal with these reports if he did not get married first. Then he

lunched off army sausage-meat and potatoes, mashed with their skins

complete, watered with an admirable 1906 brut champagne which they

bought themselves, and an appalling Canadian cheese--at the headquarters

table to which the colonel had invited all the subalterns who that day

were going up the line for the first time. They had some h's in their

compositions, but in revenge they must have boasted of a pint of adenoid

growths between them. There was, however, a charming young half-caste

Goa second-lieutenant, who afterwards proved of an heroic bravery. He

gave Tietjens a lot of amusing information as to the working of the

purdah in Portuguese India.

So, at half-past one Tietjens sat on Schomburg, the coffin-headed,

bright chestnut from the Prussian horse-raising establishment near

Celle. Almost a pure thoroughbred, this animal had usually the paces of

a dining-room table, its legs being fully as stiff. But to-day its legs

might have been made of cotton-wool, it lumbered over frosty ground

breathing stertorously and, at the jumping ground of the Deccan Horse, a

mile above and behind Rouen, it did not so much refuse a very moderate

jump as come together in a lugubrious crumple. It was, in the light of a

red, jocular sun, like being mounted on a broken-hearted camel. In

addition, the fatigues of the morning beginning to tell, Tietjens was

troubled by an obsession of O Nine Morgan which he found tiresome to

have to stall off.

"What the hell," he asked of the orderly, a very silent private on a

roan beside him, "what the hell is the matter with his horse? . . . Have

you been keeping him warm?" He imagined that the clumsy paces of the

animal beneath him added to his gloomy obsessions.

The orderly looked straight in front of him over a valley full of

hutments. He said:

"No, sir." The 'oss 'ad been put in the 'oss-standings of G depot. By

the orders of Lieutenant 'Itchcock. 'Osses, Lieutenant 'Itchcock said,

'ad to be 'ardened.

Tietjens said:

"Did you tell him that it was my orders that Schomburg was to be kept

warm? In the stables of the farm behind No. XVI I.B.D."

"The lieutenant," the orderly explained woodenly, "said as 'ow henny

departure f'm 'is orders would be visited by the extreme displeasure of

Lord Breech'em, K.C.V.O., K.C.B., etcetera." The orderly was quivering

with rage.

"You will," Tietjens said very carefully, "when you fall out with the

horses at the Hôtel de la Poste, take Schomburg and the roan to the

stables of La Volonté Farm, behind No. XVI I.B.D." The orderly was to

close all the windows of the stable, stopping up any chinks with

wadding. He would procure, if possible, a sawdust stove, new pattern,

from Colonel Gillum's store and light it in the stables. He was also to

give Schomburg and the roan oatmeal and water warmed as hot as the

horses would take it. . . . And Tietjens finished sharply, "If

Lieutenant Hotchkiss makes any comments, you will refer him to me. As

his C.O."

The orderly seeking information as to horse-ailments, Tietjens said:

"The school of horse-copers, to which Lord Beichan belongs, believes in

the hardening of all horse-flesh other than racing cattle." They bred

racing-cattle; Under six blankets apiece! Personally Tietjens did not

believe in the hardening process and would not permit any animal over

which he had control to be submitted to it. . . . It had been observed

that if any animal was kept at a lower temperature than that of its

normal climatic condition it would contract diseases to which ordinarily

it was not susceptible. . . . If you keep a chicken for two days in a

pail of water it will contract human scarlet-fever or mumps if injected

with either bacillus. If you remove the chicken from the water, dry it,

and restore it to its normal conditions, the scarlet-fever or the mumps

will die out of the animal. . . . He said to the orderly: "You are an

intelligent man. What deduction do you draw?"

The orderly looked away over the valley of the Seine.

"I suppose, sir," he said, "that our 'osses, being kept alwise cold in

their standings, 'as hillnesses they wouldn't otherwise 'ave."

"Well then," Tietjens said, "keep the poor animals warm."

He considered that here was the makings of a very nasty row for himself

if, by any means, his sayings came round to the ears of Lord Beichan.

But that he had to chance. He could not let a horse for which he was

responsible be martyred. . . . There was too much to think about . . .

so that nothing at all stood out to be thought of. The sun was glowing.

The valley of the Seine was blue-grey, like a Gobelin tapestry. Over it

all hung the shadow of a deceased Welsh soldier. An odd skylark was

declaiming over an empty field behind the incinerators' headquarters. . . .

An odd lark. For as a rule larks do not sing in December. Larks sing

only when courting, or over the nest. . . . The bird must be oversexed.

O Nine Morgan was the other thing, that accounting for the

prize-fighter!

They dropped down a mud lane between brick walls into the town. . . .

PART II

CHAPTER I

In the admirably appointed, white-enamelled, wickerworked, bemirrored

lounge of the best hotel of that town Sylvia Tietjens sat in a

wickerwork chair, not listening rather abstractedly to a staff-major who

was lachrymosely and continuously begging her to leave her bedroom door

unlocked that night. She said:

"I don't know. . . . Yes, perhaps. . . . I don't know. . . ." And looked

distantly into a bluish wall-mirror that, like all the rest, was framed

with white-painted cork bark. She stiffened a little and said:

"There's Christopher!"

The staff-major dropped his hat, his stick and his gloves. His black

hair, which was without parting and heavy with some preparation of a

glutinous kind, moved agitatedly on his scalp. He had been saying that

Sylvia had ruined his life. Didn't Sylvia know that she had ruined his

life? But for her he might have married some pure young thing. Now he

exclaimed:

"But what does he want? . . . Good God! . . . what does he want?"

"He wants," Sylvia said, "to play the part of Jesus Christ."

Major Perowne exclaimed:

"Jesus Christ! . . . But he's the most foul-mouthed officer in the

general's command. . . ."

"Well," Sylvia said, "if you had married your pure young thing she'd

have . . . What is it? . . . cuckolded you within nine months. . . ."

Perowne shuddered a little at the word. He mumbled:

"I don't see. ... It seems to be the other way . . ."

"Oh, no, it isn't," Sylvia said. "Think it over. . . . Morally, _you're_

the husband. . . . _Im_morally, I should say. . . . Because he's the man I

want. . . . He looks ill. . . . Do hospital authorities always tell

wives what is the matter with their husbands?"

From his angle in the chair from which he had half-emerged Sylvia seemed

to him to be looking at a blank wall.

"I don't see him," Perowne said.

"I can see him in the glass," Sylvia said. "Look! From here you can see

him."

Perowne shuddered a little more.

"I don't want to see him. . . . I have to see him sometimes in the

course of duty. . . . I don't like to . . . ."

Sylvia said:

"_You_," in a tone of very deep contempt. "You only carry chocolate

boxes to flappers. . . . How can he come across you in the course of

duty? . . . You're not a _soldier_!"

Perowne said:

"But what are we going to do? What will _he_ do?"

"I," Sylvia answered, "shall tell the page-boy when he comes with his

card to say that I'm engaged. . . . I don't know what _he'll_ do. Hit

you, very likely. . . . He's looking at your back now. . . ."

Perowne became rigid, sunk into his deep chair.

"But he _couldn't_!" he exclaimed agitatedly. "You said that he was

playing the part of Jesus Christ. Our Lord wouldn't hit people in an

hotel lounge. . . ."

"Our Lord!" Sylvia said contemptuously. "What do you know about our

Lord? . . . Our Lord was a gentleman. . . . Christopher is playing at

being our Lord calling on the woman taken in adultery. . . . He's giving

me the social backing that his being my husband seems to him to call

for."

A one-armed, bearded _maître d'hôtel_ approached them through groups

of arm-chairs arranged for _tête-à-tête_. He said:

"Pardon . . . I did not see madame at first. . . ." And displayed a card

on a salver. Without looking at it, Sylvia said:

"_Dîtes à ce monsieur_ . . . that I am occupied." The _maître

d'hôtel_ moved austerely away.

"But he'll smash me to pieces . . ." Perowne exclaimed. "What am I to

do? . . . What the deuce am I to do?" There would have been no way of

exit for him except across Tietjens' face.

With her spine very rigid and the expression of a snake that fixes a

bird, Sylvia gazed straight in front of her and said nothing until she

exclaimed:

"For God's sake leave off trembling. . . . He would not do anything to a

girl like you. . . . He's a man. . . ." The wickerwork of Perowne's

chair had been crepitating as if it had been in a railway car. The sound

ceased with a jerk. . . . Suddenly she clenched both her hands and let

out a hateful little breath of air between her teeth.

"By the immortal saints," she exclaimed, "I swear I'll make his wooden

face wince yet."

In the bluish looking-glass, a few minutes before, she had seen the

agate-blue eyes of her husband, thirty feet away, over arm-chairs and

between the fans of palms. He was standing, holding a riding-whip,

looking rather clumsy in the uniform that did not suit him. Rather

clumsy and worn out, but completely expressionless! He had looked

straight into the reflection of her eyes and then looked away. He moved

so that his profile was towards her, and continued gazing motionless at

an elk's head that decorated the space of wall above glazed doors giving

into the interior of the hotel. The hotel servant approaching him, he

had produced a card and had given it to the servant, uttering three

words. She saw his lips move in the three words: Mrs. Christopher

Tietjens. She said, beneath her breath:

"Damn his chivalry! . . . Oh, God damn his chivalry!" She knew what was

going on in his mind. He had seen her, with Perowne, so he had neither

come towards her nor directed the servant to where she sat. For fear of

embarrassing her! He would leave it to her to come to him if she wished.

The servant, visible in the mirror, had come and gone deviously back,

Tietjens still gazing at the elk's head. He had taken the card and

restored it to his pocket-book and then had spoken to the servant. The

servant had shrugged his shoulders with the formal hospitality of his

class and, with his shoulders still shrugged and his one hand pointing

towards the inner door, had preceded Tietjens into the hotel. Not one

line of Tietjens' face had moved when he had received back his card. It

had been then that Sylvia had sworn that she would yet make his wooden

face wince. . . .

His face was intolerable. Heavy; fixed. Not insolent, but simply gazing

over the heads of all things and created beings, into a word too distant

for them to enter. . . . And yet it seemed to her, since he was so

clumsy and worn out, almost not sporting to persecute him. It was like

whipping a dying bulldog. . . .

She sank back into her chair with a movement almost of discouragement.

She said:

"He's gone into the hotel. . . ."

Perowne lurched agitatedly forward in his chair. He exclaimed that he

was going. Then he sank discouragedly back again:

"No, I'm not," he said, "I'm probably much safer here. I might run

against him going out."

"You've realized that my petticoats protect you," Sylvia said

contemptuously. "Of course, Christopher would never hit anyone in my

presence."

Major Perowne was interrupting her by asking:

"What's he going to do? What's he doing in the hotel?"

Mrs. Tietjens said:

"Guess!" She added: "What would you do in similar circumstances?"

"Go and wreck your bedroom," Perowne answered with promptitude. "It's

what I did when I found you had left Yssingueux."

Sylvia said:

"Ah, that was what the place was called."

Perowne groaned:

"You're callous," he said. "There's no other word for it. Callous.

That's what you are."

Sylvia asked absently why he called her callous at just that juncture.

She was imagining Christopher stumping clumsily along the hotel corridor

looking at bedrooms, and then giving the hotel servant a handsome tip to

ensure that he should be put on the same floor as herself. She could

almost hear his not disagreeable male voice that vibrated a little from

the chest and made her vibrate.

Perowne was grumbling on. Sylvia was callous because she had forgotten

the name of the Brittany hamlet in which they had spent three blissful

weeks together, though she had left it so suddenly that all her outfit

remained in the hotel.

"Well, it wasn't any kind of a beanfeast for me," Sylvia went on, when

she again gave him her attention. "Good heavens! . . . Do you think it

_would_ be any kind of a beanfeast with you, _pour tout potage_? Why

should I remember the name of the hateful place?"

Perowne said:

"Yssingueux-les-Pervenches, such a pretty name," reproachfully.

"It's no good," Sylvia answered, "your trying to awaken sentimental

memories in me. You will have to make me forget what you were like if

you want to carry on with me. . . . I'm stopping here and listening to

your corncrake of a voice because I want to wait until Christopher goes

out of the hotel . . . Then I am going to my room to tidy up for Lady

Sachse's party and you will sit here and wait for me."

"I'm _not_," Perowne said, "going to Lady Sachse's. Why, _he_ is going to be

one of the principal witnesses to sign the marriage contract. And Old

Campion and all the rest of the staff are going to be there. . . . You

don't catch _me_. . . . An unexpected prior engagement is my line. No

fear."

"You'll come with me, my little man," Sylvia said, "if you ever want to

bask in my smile again. . . . I'm not going to Lady Sachse's alone,

looking as if I couldn't catch a man to escort me, under the eyes

of half the French house of peers. . . . If they've got a house of

peers! . . . You don't catch _me_. . . . No fear!" she mimicked his creaky

voice. "You can go away as soon as you've shown yourself as my

escort. . . ."

"But, good God!" Perowne cried out, "that's just what I mustn't do.

Campion said that if he heard any more of my being seen about with you

he would have me sent back to my beastly regiment. And my beastly

regiment is in the trenches. . . . You don't see _me_ in the trenches, do

you?"

"I'd rather see you there than in my own room," Sylvia said. "Any day!"

"Ah, there you are!" Perowne exclaimed with animation. "What guarantee

have I that if I do what you want I shall bask in your smile as you call

it? I've got myself into a most awful hole, bringing you here without

any papers. You never told me you hadn't any papers. General O'Hara, the

P.M., has raised a most awful strafe about it. . . . And what have I got

for it? . . . Not the ghost of a smile. . . . And you should see old

O'Hara's purple face! . . . Someone woke him from his afternoon nap to

report to him about your heinous case and he hasn't recovered from the

indigestion yet. . . . Besides, he hates Tietjens . . . Tietjens is

always chipping away at his military police . . . O'Hara's lambs. . . ."

Sylvia was not listening, but she was smiling a slow smile at an inward

thought. It maddened him.

"What's your game?" he exclaimed. "Hell and hounds, what's your game? . . .

You can't have come here to see . . . _him_. You don't come here to

see me, as far as I can see. Well then . . ."

Sylvia looked round at him with all her eyes, wide open as if she had

just awakened from a deep sleep.

"I didn't know I was coming," she said. "It came into my head to come

suddenly. Ten minutes before I started. And I came. I didn't know papers

were wanted. I suppose I could have got them if I had wanted them. . . .

You never asked me if I had any papers. You just froze on to me and had

me into your special carriage. ... I didn't know you were coming."

That seemed to Perowne the last insult. He exclaimed:

"Oh, damn it, Sylvia! you _must_ have known. . . . You were at the

Quirks' squash on Wednesday evening. And _they_ knew. My best friends."

"Since you ask for it," she said, "I didn't know. . . . And I would not

have come by that train if I had known you would be going by it. You

force me to say rude things to you." She added: "Why can't you be more

conciliatory?" to keep him quiet for a little. His jaw dropped down.

She was wondering where Christopher had got the money to pay for a bed

at the hotel. Only a very short time before she had drawn all the

balance of his banking account, except for a shilling. It was the middle

of the month and he could not have drawn any more pay. . . . That, of

course, was a try on her part. He might be forced into remonstrating. In

the same way she had tried on the accusation that he had carried off her

sheets. It was sheer wilfulness, and when she looked again at his

motionless features she knew that she had been rather stupid. . . . But

she was at the end of her tether: she had before now tried making

accusations against her husband, but she had never tried inconveniencing

him. . . . Now she suddenly realized the full stupidity of which she had

been guilty. He would know perfectly well that those petty

frightfulnesses of hers were not in the least in her note; so he would

know, too, that each of them was just a try on. He would say: "She is

trying to make me squeal. I'm damned if I will!"

She would have to adopt much more formidable methods. She said: "He

shall . . . he shall . . . he _shall_ come to heel."

Major Perowne had now closed his jaw. He was reflecting. Once he

mumbled: "More _conciliatory_! Holy smoke!"

She was feeling suddenly in spirits: it was the sight of Christopher had

done it: the perfect assurance that they were going to live under the

same roof again. She would have betted all she possessed and her

immortal soul on the chance that he would not take up with the Wannop

girl. And it would have been betting on a certainty! . . . But she had

had no idea what their relations were to be, after the war. At first she

had thought that they had parted for good when she had gone off from

their flat at four o'clock in the morning. It had seemed logical. But,

gradually, in retreat at Birkenhead, in the still, white, nun's room,

doubt had come upon her. It was one of the disadvantages of living as

they did that they seldom spoke their thoughts. But that was also at

times an advantage. She had certainly meant their parting to be for

good. She had certainly raised her voice in giving the name of her

station to the taxi-man with the pretty firm conviction that he would

hear her; and she had been pretty well certain that he would take it as

a sign that the breath had gone out of their union. . . . Pretty

certain. But not quite! . . .

She would have died rather than write to him; she would die, now, rather

than give any inkling that she wanted them to live under the same roof

again. . . . She said to herself:

"Is he writing to that girl?" And then: "No! . . . I'm certain that he

isn't." . . . She had had all his letters stopped at the flat, except

for a few circulars that she let dribble through to him, so that he

might imagine that all his correspondence was coming through. From the

letters to him that she did read she was pretty sure that he had given

no other address than the flat in Gray's Inn. . . . But there had been

no letters from Valentine Wannop. . . . Two from Mrs. Wannop, two from

his brother Mark, one from Port Scatho, one or two from brother officers

and some officials chits. . . . She said to herself that, if there _had_

been any letters from that girl, she would have let all his letters go

through, including the girl's. . . . Now she was not so certain that she

would have.

In the glass she saw Christopher marching woodenly out of the hotel,

along the path that led from door to door behind her. . . . It came to

her with extraordinary gladness--the absolute conviction that he was not

corresponding with Miss Wannop. The absolute conviction. . . . If he had

come alive enough to do that he would have looked different. She did not

know how he would have looked. But different . . . Alive! Perhaps

self-conscious: perhaps . . . satisfied . . .

For some time the major had been grumbling about his wrongs. He said

that he followed her about all day, like a lap-dog, and got nothing for

it. Now she wanted him to be conciliatory. She said she wanted to have a

man on show as escort. Well then, an escort got something. . . . At just

this moment he was beginning again with:

"Look here . . . will you let me come to your room to-night or will you

not?"

She burst into high, loud laughter. He said:

"Damn it all, it isn't any laughing matter! . . . Look here! You don't

know what I risk. . . . There are A.P.M.'s and P.M.'s and deputy

sub-acting A.P.M.'s walking about the corridors of all the hotels in

this town, all night long. . . . It's as much as my job is worth. . . ."

She put her handkerchief to her lips to hide a smile that she knew would

be too cruel for him not to notice. And even when she took it away, he

said:

"Hang it all, what a cruel-looking fiend you are! . . . Why the devil do

I hang around you? . . . There's a picture that my mother's got, by

Burne-Jones . . . A cruel-looking woman with a distant smile . . . Some

vampire ... La belle Dame sans Merci . . . That's what you're like."

She looked at him suddenly with considerable seriousness. . . .

"See here, Potty . . ." she began. He groaned:

"I believe you'd like me to be sent to the beastly trenches. . . . Yet a

big, distinguished-looking chap like me wouldn't have a chance. . . . At

the first volley the Germans fired, they'd pick me off. . . ."

"Oh, Potty," she exclaimed, "try to be serious for a minute. . . . I

tell you I'm a woman who's trying . . . who's desperately wanting . . .

to be reconciled to her husband! . . . I would not tell that to another

soul. . . . I would not tell it to myself. . . . But one owes

something . . . a parting scene, if nothing else. . . . Well,

something . . . to a man one's been in bed with. . . . I didn't give you a

parting scene at . . . ah, Yssingueux-les-Pervenches ... so I give you

this tip instead. . . ."

He said:

"Will you leave your bedroom door unlocked, or won't you?"

She said:

"If that man would throw his handkerchief to me, I would follow him

round the world in my shift! . . . Look here . . . see me shake when I

think of it. . . ." She held out her hand at the end of her long arm:

hand and arm trembled together, minutely, then very much. . . . "Well,"

she finished, "if you see that and still want to come to my room . . .

your blood be on your own head. . . ." She paused for a breath or two

and then said:

"You can come. . . . I won't lock my door. . . . But I don't say that

you'll get anything . . . or that you'll like what you get . . . That's

a fair tip. . . ." She added suddenly: "You _sale fat_ . . . take what

you get and be damned to you! . . ."

Major Perowne had suddenly taken to twirling his moustaches; he said:

"Oh, I'll chance the A.P.M.'s. . . ."

She suddenly coiled her legs into her chair.

"I know now what I came here for," she said.

Major Wilfrid Fosbrooke Eddicker Perowne of Perowne, the son of his

mother, was one of those individuals who have no history, no strong

proclivities, nothing, his knowledge seemed to be bounded by the

contents of his newspaper for the immediate day; at any rate, his

conversation never went any farther. He was not bold, he was not shy: he

was neither markedly courageous nor markedly cowardly. His mother was

immoderately wealthy, owned an immense castle that hung over crags,

above a western sea, much as a birdcage hangs from a window of a high

tenement building, but she received few or no visitors, her cuisine

being indifferent and her wine atrocious. She had strong temperance

opinions and, immediately after the death of her husband, she had

emptied the contents of his cellar, which were almost as historic as his

castle, into the sea, a shudder going through county-family and no, or

almost no, characteristics. He had done England. But even this was not

enough to make Perowne himself notorious.

His mother allowed him--after an eyeopener in early youth--the income of

a junior royalty, but he did nothing with it. He lived in a great house

in Palace Gardens, Kensington, and he lived all alone with rather a

large staff of servants who had been selected by his mother, but they

did nothing at all, for he ate all his meals, and even took his bath and

dressed for dinner at the Bath Club. He was otherwise parsimonious.

He had, after the fashion of his day, passed a year or two in the army

when young. He had been first gazetted to His Majesty's Forty-second

Regiment, but on the Black Watch proceeding to India he had exchanged

into the Glamorganshires, at that time commanded by General Campion and

recruiting in and around Lincolnshire. The general had been an old

friend of Perowne's mother, and, on being promoted to brigadier, had

taken Perowne on to his staff as his galloper, for, although Perowne

rode rather indifferently, he had a certain social knowledge and could

be counted on to know how correctly to address a regimental invitation

to a dowager countess who had married a viscount's third son. . . . As a

military figure otherwise he had a very indifferent word of command, a

very poor drill and next to no control of his men, but he was popular

with his batmen, and in a rather stiff way was presentable in the old

scarlet uniform or the blue mess jacket. He was exactly six foot, to a

hairbreadth, in his stockings, had very dark eyes, and a rather grating

voice; the fact that his limbs were a shade too bulky for his trunk,

which was not at all corpulent, made him appear a little clumsy. If in a

club you asked what sort of a fellow he was your interlocutor would tell

you, most probably, that he had or was supposed to have warts on his

head, this to account for his hair which all his life he had combed

back, unparted from his forehead. But as a matter of fact he had no

warts on his head.

He had once started out on an expedition to shoot big game in Portuguese

East Africa. But on its arrival his expedition was met with the news

that the natives of the interior were in revolt, so Perowne had returned

to Kensington Palace Gardens. He had had several mild successes with

women, but, owing to his habits of economy and fear of imbroglios, until

the age of thirty-four, he had limited the field of his amours to young

women of the lower social orders. . . .

His affair with Sylvia Tietjens might have been something to boast

about, but he was not boastful, and indeed he had been too hard hit when

she had left him even to bear to account lyingly for the employment of

the time he had spent with her in Brittany. Fortunately no one took

sufficient interest in his movements to wait for his answer to their

indifferent questions as to where he had spent the summer. When his mind

reverted to her desertion of him moisture would come out of his eyes,

undemonstratively, as water leaves the surface of a sponge. . . .

Sylvia had left him by the simple expedient of stepping without so much

as a reticule on to the little French tramway that took you to the main

railway line. From there she had written to him in pencil on a closed

correspondence card that she had left him because she simply could not

bear either his dullness or his craking voice. She said they would

probably run up against each other in the course of the autumn season in

town and, after purchase of some night, things, had made straight for

the German spa to which her mother had retreated.

At the later date Sylvia had no difficulty in accounting to herself for

her having gone off with such an oaf: she had simply reacted in a

violent fit of sexual hatred, from her husband's mind. And she could not

have found a mind more utterly dissimilar than Perowne's in any decently

groomed man to be found in London. She could recall, even in the French

hotel lounge, years after, the almost painful emotion of joyful hatred

that had visited her when she had first thought of going off with him.

It was the self-applause of one who has just hit upon an excruciatingly

inspiring intellectual discovery. In her previous transitory

infidelities to Christopher she had discovered that, however presentable

the man with whom she might have been having an affair, and however

short the affair, even if it were only a matter of a week-end . . .

Christopher had spoilt her for the other man. It was the most damnable

of his qualities that to hear any other man talk of any subject--any,

any subject--from stable form to the balance of power, or from the voice

of a given opera singer to the recurrence of a comet--to have to pass a

week-end with any other man and hear his talk after having spent the

inside of the week with Christopher, hate his ideas how you might, was

the difference between listening to a grown man and, with an intense

boredom, trying to entertain an inarticulate schoolboy. As beside him,

other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up. . . .

Just before, with an extreme suddenness, consenting to go away with

Perowne, the illuminating idea had struck her: If I did go away with him

it would be the most humiliating thing I could do to Christopher. . . .

And just when the idea _had_ struck her, beside her chair in the

conservatory at a dance given by the general's sister, Lady Claudine

Sandbach, Perowne, his voice rendered more throaty and less disagreeable

than usual by emotion, had been going on and on begging her to elope

with him. . . . She had suddenly said:

"Very well . . . let's. . . ."

His emotion had been so unbridled in its astonishment that she had, even

at that, almost been inclined to treat her own speech as a joke and to

give up the revenge. . . . But the idea of the humiliation that

Christopher must feel proved too much for her. For, for your wife to

throw you over for an attractive man is naturally humiliating, but that

she should leave you publicly for a man of hardly any intelligence at

all, you priding yourself on your brains, must be nearly as mortifying a

thing as can happen to you.

But she had hardly set out upon her escapade before two very serious

defects in her plan occurred to her with extreme force: the one that,

however humiliated Christopher might feel she would not be with him to

witness his humiliation; the other that, oaf as she had taken Perowne to

be in casual society, in close daily relationship he was such an oaf as

to be almost insufferable. She had imagined that he would prove a person

out of whom it might be possible to make _something_ by a judicious course

of alternated mothering and scorn: she discovered that his mother had

already done for him almost all that woman could do. For, when he had

been an already rather backward boy at a private school, his mother had

kept him so extremely short of pocket-money that he had robbed other

boys' desks of a few shillings here and there--in order to subscribe

towards a birthday present for the head master's wife. His mother, to

give him a salutary lesson, had given so much publicity to the affair

that he had become afflicted with a permanent bent towards shyness that

rendered him by turns very mistrustful of himself or very boastful and,

although he repressed manifestations of either tendency towards the

outside world, the continual repression rendered him almost incapable of

any vigorous thought or action. . . .

That discovery did not soften Sylvia towards him: it was, as she

expressed it, _his_ funeral and, although she would have been ready for

any normal job of smartening up a roughish man, she was by no means

prepared to readjust other women's hopeless maternal misfits.

So she had got no farther than Ostend, where they had proposed to spend

a week or so at the tables, before she found herself explaining to some

acquaintances whom she met that she was in that gay city merely for an

hour or two, between trains, on the way to join her mother in a German

health resort. The impulse to say that had come upon her by surprise,

for, until that moment, being completely indifferent to criticism, she

had intended to cast no veil at all over her proceedings. But, quite

suddenly, on seeing some well-known English faces in the casino it had

come over her to think that, however much she imagined Christopher to be

humiliated by her going off with an oaf like Perowne, that humiliation

must be as nothing compared with that which she might be expected to

feel at having found no one better than an oaf like Perowne to go off

with. Moreover . . . she began to miss Christopher.

These feelings did not grow any less intense in the rather stuffy but

inconspicuous hotel in the Rue St. Roque in Paris to which she

immediately transported the bewildered but uncomplaining Perowne, who

had imagined that he was to be taken to Wiesbaden for a course of light

gaieties. And Paris, when you avoid the more conspicuous resorts, and

when you are unprovided with congenial companionship can prove nearly as

overwhelming as is, say, Birmingham on a Sunday.

So that Sylvia waited for only just long enough to convince herself that

her husband had no apparent intention of applying for an immediate

divorce and had, indeed, no apparent intention of doing anything at all.

She sent him, that is to say, a postcard saying that letters and other

communications would reach her at her inconspicuous hotel--and it

mortified her not a little to have to reveal the fact that her hotel was

so inconspicuous. But, except that her own correspondence was forwarded

to her with regularity, no communications at all came from Tietjens.

In an air-resort in the centre of France to which she next removed

Perowne, she found herself considering rather seriously what it might be

expected that Tietjens _would_ do. Through indirect and unsuspecting

allusions in letters from her personal friends she found that if

Tietjens did not put up, he certainly did not deny, the story that she

had gone to nurse or be with her mother, who was supposed to be

seriously ill. . . . That is to say, her friends said how rotten it was

that her mother, Mrs. Satterthwaite, should be so seriously ill; how

rotten it must be for her to be shut up in a potty little German kur-ort

when the world could be so otherwise amusing: and how well Christopher

whom they saw from time to time seemed to be getting on considering how

rotten it must be for him to be left all alone. . . .

At about this time Perowne began to become, if possible, more irritating

than ever. In their air-resort, although the guests were almost entirely

French, there was a newly opened golf-course, and at the game of golf

Perowne displayed an inefficiency and at the same time a morbid conceit

that were surprising in one naturally lymphatic. He would sulk for a

whole evening if either Sylvia or any Frenchman beat him in a round,

and, though Sylvia was by then completely indifferent to his sulking,

what was very much worse was that he became gloomily and loud-voicedly

quarrelsome over his games with foreign opponents.

Three events, falling within ten minutes of each other, made her

determined to get as far away from that air-resort as was feasible. In

the first place she observed at the end of the street some English

people called Thurston, whose faces she faintly knew, and the emotion

she suddenly felt let her know how extremely anxious she was that she

should let it remain feasible for Tietjens to take her back. Then, in

the golf club-house, to which she found herself fiercely hurrying in

order to pay her bill and get her clubs, she overheard the conversation

of two players that left no doubt in her mind that Perowne had been

detected in little meannesses of moving his ball at golf or juggling

with his score. . . . This was almost more than she could stand. And, at

the same moment, her mind, as it were, condescended to let her remember

Christopher's voice as it had once uttered the haughty opinion that no

man one could speak to would ever think of divorcing any woman. If he

could not defend the sanctity of his hearth he must lump it unless the

woman wanted to divorce him. . . .

At the time when he had said it her mind--she had been just then hating

him a good deal--had seemed to take no notice of the utterance. But now

that it presented itself forcibly to her again it brought with it the

thought: Supposing he wasn't really only talking through his hat!

. . . She dragged the wretched Perowne off his bed where he had been

lost in an after-lunch slumber and told him that they must both leave

that place at once, and, that as soon as they reached Paris or some

larger town where he could find waiters and people to understand his

French, she herself was going to leave him for good. They did not, in

consequence, get away from the air-resort until the six o'clock train

next morning. Perowne's passion of rage and despair at the news that she

wished to leave him took an inconvenient form, for instead of announcing

any intention of committing suicide, as might have been expected, he

became gloomily and fantastically murderous. He said that unless Sylvia

swore on a little relic of St. Anthony she carried that she had no

intention of leaving him he would incontinently kill her. He said, as he

said for the rest of his days, that she had ruined his life and caused

great moral deterioration in himself. But for her he might have married

some pure young thing. Moreover, influencing him against his mother's

doctrines, she had forced him to drink wine, by an effect of pure scorn.

Thus he had done harm, he was convinced, both to his health and to his

manly proportions. . . . It was indeed for Sylvia one of the most

unbearable things about this man--the way he took wine. With every glass

he put to his lips he would exclaim with an unbearable titter some such

imbecility as: Here is another nail in my coffin. And he had taken to

wine, and even to stronger liquor, very well.

Sylvia had refused to swear by St. Anthony. She definitely was not going

to introduce the saint into her amorous affairs, and she definitely was

not going to take on any relic an oath that she meant to break at an

early opportunity. There was such a thing as playing it too low down:

there are dishonours to which death is preferable. So, getting hold of

his revolver at a time when he was wringing his hands, she dropped it

into the water-jug and then felt reasonably safe.

Perowne knew no French and next to nothing about France, but he had

discovered that the French did nothing to you for killing a woman who

intended to leave you. Sylvia, on the other hand, was pretty certain

that, without a weapon, he could not do much to her. If she had had no

other training at her very expensive school she had had so much drilling

in calisthenics as to be singularly mistress of her limbs, and, in the

interests of her beauty she had always kept herself very fit. . . .

She said at last:

"Very well. We will go to Yssingueux-les-Pervenches. . . ."

A rather pleasant French couple in the hotel had spoken of this little

place in the extreme west of France as a lonely paradise, they having

spent their honeymoon there. . . . And Sylvia wanted a lonely paradise

if there was going to be any scrapping before she got away from

Perowne. . . .

She had no hesitation as to what she was going to do: the long journey

across half France by miserable trains had caused her an agony of

home-sickness! Nothing less! . . . It was a humiliating disease from

which to suffer. But it was unavoidable, like mumps. You had to put up

with it. Besides, she even found herself wanting to see her child, whom

she imagined herself to hate, as having been the cause of all her

misfortunes. . . .

She therefore prepared, after great thought, a letter telling Tietjens

that she intended to return to him. She made the letter as nearly as

possible like one she would write announcing her return from a country

house to which she should have been invited for an indefinite period,

and she added some rather hard instructions about her maid, these being

intended to remove from the letter any possible trace of emotion. She

was certain that, if she showed any emotion at all, Christopher would

never take her under his roof again. . . . She was pretty certain that

no gossip had been caused by her escapade. Major Thurston had been at

the railway station when they had left, but they had not spoken--and

Thurston was a very decentish, brown-moustached fellow, of the sort that

does not gossip.

It had proved a little difficult to get away, for Perowne during several

weeks watched her like an attendant in a lunatic asylum. But at last the

idea presented itself to him that she would never go without her frocks,

and, one day, in a fit of intense somnolence after a lunch, washed down

with rather a large quantity of the local and fiery cordial, he let her

take a walk alone. . . .

She was by that time tired of men . . . or she imagined that she was;

for she was not prepared to be certain, considering the muckers she saw

women coming all round her over the most unpresentable individuals. Men,

at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon

acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost

always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when

you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes

in any sort of intimacy with any man before you said: "But I've read all

this before. . . ." You knew the opening, you were already bored by the

middle, and, especially, you knew the end. . . .

She remembered, years ago, trying to shock her mother's spiritual

adviser, Father Consett, whom they had lately murdered in Ireland, along

with Casement. . . . The poor saint had not in the least been shocked.

He had gone her one better. For when she had said something like that

her idea of a divvy life--they used in those days to say divvy--would be

to go off with a different man every week-end, he had told her that

after a short time she would be bored already by the time the poor dear

fellow was buying the railway tickets. . . .

And, by heavens, he had been right. . . . For when she came to think of

it, from the day that poor saint had said that thing in her mother's

sitting-room in the little German spa--Lobscheid, it must have been

called--in the candle-light, his shadow denouncing her from all over the

walls, to now when she sat in the palmish wickerwork of that hotel that

had been new-whitely decorated to celebrate hostilities, never once had

she sat in a train with a man who had any right to look upon himself as

justified in mauling her about. . . . She wondered if, from where he sat

in heaven, Father Consett would be satisfied with her as he looked down

into that lounge. . . . Perhaps it was really he that had pulled off

that change in her. . . .

Never once till yesterday. . . . For perhaps the unfortunate Perowne

might just faintly have had the right yesterday to make himself for

about two minutes--before she froze him into a choking, pallid snowman

with goggle eyes--the perfectly loathsome thing that a man in a railway

train becomes. . . . Much too bold and yet stupidly awkward with the

fear of the guard looking in at the window, the train doing over sixty,

without corridors. . . . No, never again for _me_, father, she addressed

her voice towards the ceiling. . . .

Why in the world couldn't you get a man to go away with you and be

just--oh, light comedy--for a whole, a whole blessed week-end. For a

whole blessed life. . . Why not? . . . Think of it . . . A whole blessed

life with a man who was a good sort and yet didn't go all gurgly in the

voice, and cod-fish-eyed and all-overish--to the extent of not being

able to find the tickets when asked for them. . . . Father, dear, she

said again upwards, if I could find men like that, that would be just

heaven . . . where there is no marrying. . . . But, of course, she went

on almost resignedly, he would not be faithful to you. . . . And then:

one would have to stand it. . . .

She sat up so suddenly in her chair that beside her, too, Major Perowne

nearly jumped out of his wickerwork, and asked if _he_ had come back. . . .

She explained:

"No, I'd be damned if I would. . . . I'd be damned, I'd be damned, I'd

be damned if I would. . . . Never. Never. By the living God!"

She asked fiercely of the agitated major:

"Has Christopher got a girl in this town? . . . You'd better tell me the

truth!"

The major mumbled:

"He . . . No. . . . He's too much of a stick. . . . He never even goes

to Suzette's. . . . Except once to fetch out some miserable little squit

of a subaltern who was smashing up Mother Hardelot's furniture. . . ."

He grumbled:

"But you shouldn't give a man the jumps like that! . . . Be

conciliatory, you said. . . ." He went on to grumble that her manners

had not improved since she had been at Yssingueux-les-Pervenches, . . .

and then went on to tell her that in French the words _yeux des

pervenches_ meant eyes of periwinkle blue. And that was the only French

he knew, because a Frenchman he had met in the train had told him so and

he had always thought that if _her_ eyes had been periwinkle blue . . .

"But you're not listening. . . . Hardly polite, I call it," he had

mumbled to a conclusion. . . .

She was sitting forward in her chair still clenching her hand under her

chin at the thought that perhaps Christopher had Valentine Wannop in

that town. That was perhaps why he elected to remain there. She asked:

"Why does Christopher stay on in this God-forsaken hole? . . . The

inglorious base, they call it. . .

"Because he's jolly well got to. . . ." Major Perowne said. "He's got to

do what he's told. . . ."

She said: "Christopher! . . . You mean to say they'd keep a man like

_Christopher_ anywhere he didn't want to be . . ."

"They'd jolly well knock spots off him if he went away," Major Perowne

exclaimed. . . . "What the deuce do you think your blessed fellow is? . . .

The King of England? . . ." He added with a sudden sombre ferocity:

"They'd shoot him like anybody else if he bolted. . . . What do _you_

think?"

She said: "But all that wouldn't prevent his having a girl in this

town?"

"Well, he hasn't got one," Perowne said. "He sticks up in that blessed

old camp of his like a blessed she-chicken sitting on addled eggs. . . .

That's what they say of him. . . . I don't know anything about the

fellow. . . ."

Listening vindictively and indolently, she thought she caught in his

droning tones a touch of the homicidal lunacy that had used to underlie

his voice in the bedroom at Yssingueux. The fellow had undoubtedly about

him a touch of the dull, mad murderer of the police-courts. With a

sudden animation she thought:

"Suppose he tried to murder Christopher. . . ." And she imagined her

husband breaking the fellow's back across his knee, the idea going

across her mind as fire traverses the opal. Then, with a dry throat, she

said to herself:

"I've got to find out whether he has that girl in Rouen. . . ." Men stuck

together. The fellow Perowne might well be protecting Tietjens. It would

be unthinkable that any rules of the service could keep Christopher in

that place. They could not shut up the upper classes. If Perowne had any

sense he would know that to shield Tietjens was the way not to get

her. . . . But he had no sense. . . . Besides, sexual solidarity was a

terribly strong thing. . . . She knew that she herself would not give a

woman's secrets away in order to get her man. Then . . . how was she to

ascertain whether the girl was not in that town? How? . . . She imagined

Tietjens going home every night to her. . . . But he was going to spend

that night with herself. . . . She knew that. . . . Under that roof. . . .

Fresh from the other. . . .

She imagined him there, now. . . . In the parlour of one of the little

villas you see from the tram on the top of the town. . . . They were

undoubtedly, now, discussing her. . . . Her whole body writhed, muscle

on muscle, in her chair. . . . She must discover. . . . But how do you

discover? Against a universal conspiracy. . . . This whole war was an

agapemone. . . . You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable

women. . . . It was what war was for. . . . All these men, crowded in

this narrow space. . . . She stood up:

"I'm going," she said, "to put on a little powder for Lady Sachse's

feast. . . . You needn't stay if you don't want to. . . ." She was going

to watch every face she saw until it gave up the secret of where in that

town Christopher had the Wannop girl hidden. . . . She imagined her

freckled, snubnosed face pressed--squashed was the word--against his

cheek. . . . She was going to investigate. . . .

CHAPTER II

She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at

dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the

telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small

tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey,

forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases

resembled the veins of a leaf. . . . A very trustworthy small tradesman:

the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply

you with paraffin. . . . He was saying to her:

"If, ma'am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten

you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd. . . ."

And she had exclaimed:

"You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday

afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails. . . . And two

thousand nine hundred toothbrushes. . . ."

"I told him," her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, "that

these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their

toothbrushes. . . . Imperial troops _will_ use the brush they clean

their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to

show the medical officer. . . ."

"It sounds," she said with a little shudder, "as if you were all

schoolboys playing a game. . . . And you say my husband really occupies

his mind with such things. . . ."

Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap

of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and

therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that

he had had for nearly ten years--a splendid bit of leather,

that!--answered nevertheless stoutly:

"Madam! If the brains of an army aren't, the life of an army _is_ . . .

in its feet. . . . And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its

teeth. . . . Your husband, ma'am, is an admirable officer. . . . He says

that no draft he turns out shall. . . ."

She said:

"He spent three hours in . . . You say, foot and kit inspection. . . ."

Second-Lieutenant Cowley said:

"Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit . . . but he

looked at every foot himself. . . ."

She said:

"That took him from two till five. . . . Then he had tea, I suppose. . . .

And went to . . . What is it? . . . The papers of the draft. . . ."

Second-Lieutenant Cowley said, muffledly through his moustache:

"If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters . . . I _have_

heard. . . . You might, madam . . . I'm a married man myself . . . with

a daughter. . . . And the army is not very good at writing letters. . . .

You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy,

ma'am. . . ."

She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his

confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she

said handsomely:

"Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much

obliged. . . . Of course my husband would not have time to write very

full letters. . . . He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run

after . . ."

He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter:

"The captain run after skirts. . . . Why, I can number on my hands the

times he's been out of my sight since he's had the battalion!"

A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia.

"Why," Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, "if we _had_ a laugh against him it

was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting on addled

eggs. . . . For it's only a rag-time army, as the saying is, when you've

said the best for it that you can. . . . And look at the other

commanding officers we've had before we had him. . . . There was Major

Brooks. . . . Never up before noon, if then, and out of camp by

two-thirty. Get your returns ready for signing before then or never get

'em signed. . . . And Colonel Potter . . . Bless my soul . . . 'e

wouldn't sign any blessed papers at all. . . . He lived down here in

this hotel, and we never saw him up at the camp at all. . . . But the

captain. . . . We always say that . . . if 'e was a Chelsea adjutant

getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams. . . ."

With her indolent and gracious beauty--Sylvia knew that she was

displaying indolent and gracious beauty--Sylvia leaned over the

tablecloth listening for items in the terrible indictment that,

presently, she was going to bring against Tietjens. . . . For the morality

of these matters is this: . . . If you have an incomparably beautiful

woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her. . . .

Nature exacts that of you . . . until you are unfaithful to her

with a snub-nosed girl with freckles: that, of course, being a reaction,

is still in a way occupying yourself with your woman! . . . But to

betray her with a battalion. . . . That is against decency, against

Nature. . . . And for him, Christopher Tietjens, to come down to the

level of the men you met here! . . .

Tietjens, mooning down the room between tables, had more than his

usually aloof air since he had just come out of a telephone box. He

slipped, a weary mass, into the polished chair between her and the

lieutenant. He said:

"I've got the washing arranged for . . ." and Sylvia gave to herself a

little hiss between the teeth, of vindictive pleasure! This was indeed

betrayal to a battalion. He added: "I shall have to be up in camp before

four-thirty to-morrow morning. . . ."

Sylvia could not resist saying:

"Isn't there a poem . . . _Ah me, the dawn, the dawn, it comes too

soon_! . . . said of course by lovers in bed? . . . Who was the poet?"

Cowley went visibly red to the roots of his hair and evidently beyond.

Tietjens finished his speech to Cowley, who had remonstrated against his

going up to the camp so early by saying that he had not been able to get

hold of an officer to march the draft. He then said in his leisurely

way:

"There were a great many poems with that refrain in the Middle Ages. . . .

You are probably thinking of an albade by Arnaut Daniel, which someone

translated lately. . . . An albade was a song to be sung at dawn when,

presumably, no one but lovers would be likely to sing. . . ."

"Will there," Sylvia asked, "be anyone but you singing up in your camp

to-morrow at four?"

She could not help it. . . . She knew that Tietjens had adopted his slow

pomposity in order to give the grotesque object at the table with them

time to recover from his confusion. She hated him for it. What right had

he to make himself appear a pompous ass in order to shield the confusion

of anybody?

The second-lieutenant came out of his confusion to exclaim, actually

slapping his thigh:

"There you are, madam. . . . Trust the captain to know everything! . . .

I don't believe there's a question under the sun you could ask him that

he couldn't answer. . . . They say up at the camp . . ." He went on with

long stories of all the questions Tietjens _had_ answered up at the

camp. . . .

Emotion was going all over Sylvia . . . at the proximity of Tietjens.

She said to herself: "Is this to go on for ever?" Her hands were ice-cold.

She touched the back of her left hand with the fingers of her right.

It _was_ ice-cold. She looked at her hands. They were bloodless. . . .

She said to herself: "It's pure sexual passion . . . it's pure

sexual passion . . . God! Can't I get over this?" She said: "Father! . . .

You used to be fond of Christopher. . . . _Get_ our Lady to get me over

this. . . . It's the ruin of him and the ruin of me. But, oh _damn_,

don't! . . . For it's all I have to live for. . . ." She said: "When he

came mooning back from the telephone I thought it was all right. . . . I

thought what a heavy wooden-horse he looked. . . . For two minutes. . . .

Then it's all over me again. . . . I want to swallow my saliva and I

can't. My throat won't work. . . ."

She leaned one of her white bare arms on the tablecloth towards the

walrus-moustache that was still snuffling gloriously:

"They used to call him Old Sol at school," she said. "But there's one

question of Solomon's he could not answer. . . . The one about the way

of a man with . . . Oh, a maid! . . . Ask him what happened before the

dawn ninety-six--no, ninety-eight days ago. . . ."

She said to herself: "I can't help it. . . . Oh, I _can't_ help it. . . ."

The ex-sergeant-major was exclaiming happily:

"Oh, no one ever said the captain was one of these thought-readers. . . .

It's real solid knowledge of men and things he has. . . . Wonderful

how he knows the men considering he was not born in the service. . . .

But there, your born gentleman mixes with men all his days and knows

them. Down to the ground and inside their puttees. . . ."

Tietjens was looking straight in front of him, his face perfectly

expressionless.

"But I bet I got him, . . ." she said to herself and then to the

sergeant-major:

"I suppose now an army officer--one of your born gentlemen--when

a back-from-leave train goes out from any of the great

stations--Paddington, say--to the front . . . He knows how all the men

are feeling. . . . But not what the married women think . . . or the . . .

the girl. . . ."

She said to herself: "Damn it, how clumsy I am getting! . . . I used to

be able to take his hide off with a word. Now I take sentences at a

time. . . ."

She went on with her uninterrupted sentence to Cowley:

"Of course he may never be going to see his only son again, so it makes

him sensitive. . . . The officer at Paddington, I mean. . . ."

She said to herself: "By God, if that beast does not give in to me

to-night he never _shall_ see Michael again. . . . Ah, but I got him. . . ."

Tietjens had his eyes closed, round each of his high-coloured

nostrils a crescent of whiteness was beginning. And increasing. . . .

She felt a sudden alarm and held the edge of the table with her extended

arm to steady herself. . . . Men went white at the nose like that when

they were going to faint. . . . She did not want him to faint. . . . But

he _had_ noticed the word Paddington. . . . Ninety-eight days before. . . .

She had counted every day since. . . . She had got that much

information. . . . She had said _Paddington_ outside the house at dawn

and he had taken it as a farewell. He _had_ . . . He had imagined himself

free to do what he liked with the girl. . . . Well, he wasn't. . . .

That was why he was white about the gills. . . .

Cowley exclaimed loudly:

"Paddington! . . . It isn't from there that back-from-leave trains go.

Not for the front: the B.E.F. . . . Not from Paddington. . . . The

Glamorganshires go from there to the depot. . . . And the Liverpools. . . .

They've got a depot at Birkenhead. . . . Or is that the Cheshires? . . ."

He asked of Tietjens: "Is it the Liverpools or the Cheshires that

have a depot at Birkenhead, sir? . . . You remember we recruited a draft

from there when we were at Penhally. ... At any rate, you go to

Birkenhead from Paddington. . . . I was never there myself. . . . They

say it's a nice place. . . ."

Sylvia said--she did not want to say it:

"It's quite a nice place . . . but I should not think of staying there

for ever. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"The Cheshires have a training camp--not a depot--near Birkenhead. And

of course there are R.G.A.'s there. . . ." She had been looking away

from him. . . . Cowley exclaimed:

"You were nearly off, sir," hilariously. "You had your peepers shut. . . ."

Lifting a champagne glass, he inclined himself towards her. "You must

excuse the captain, ma'am," he said. "He had no sleep last night. . . .

Largely owing to my fault. . . . Which is what makes it so kind of

him. . . . I tell you, ma'am, there are few things I would not do for the

captain. . . ." He drank his champagne and began an explanation: "You

may not know, ma'am, this is a great day for me. . . . And you and the

captain are making it the greatest day of my life. . . ." Why, at four

this morning there hadn't been a wretcheder man in Ruin town. . . . And

now . . . He must tell her that he suffered from an unfortunate--a

miserable--complaint. . . . One that makes one have to be careful of

celebrations. . . . And to-day was a day that he had to celebrate. . . .

But he dare not have done it where Sergeant-Major Ledoux is along with a

lot of their old mates. . . . "I dare not . . . I dussn't!" he

finished. . . . "So I might have been sitting, now, at this very moment,

up in the cold camp. . . . But for you and the captain. . . . Up in the

cold camp. . . . You'll excuse me, ma'am. . . ."

Sylvia felt that her lids were suddenly wavering:

"I might have been myself," she said, "in a cold camp, too . . . if I

hadn't thrown myself on the captain's mercy! . . . At Birkenhead, you

know. . . . I happened to be there till three weeks ago. . . . It's

strange that you mentioned it. . . . There _are_ things like signs . . .

but you're not a Catholic! They could hardly be coincidences. . . ."

She was trembling. . . . She looked, fumblingly opening it, into the

little mirror of her powder-box--of chased, very thin gold with a small

blue stone, like a forget-me-not in the centre of the concentric

engravings. . . . Drake--the possible father of Michael--had given it to

her. . . . The first thing he had ever given her. She had brought it down

to-night out of defiance. She imagined that Tietjens disliked it. . . .

She said breathlessly to herself: "Perhaps the damn thing is an ill

omen. . . ." Drake had been the first man who had ever . . . A

hot-breathed brute! . . . In the little glass her features were

chalk-white. . . . She looked like . . . she looked like . . . She had a

dress of golden tissue. . . . The breath was short between her white set

teeth. . . . Her face was as white as her teeth. . . . And . . . Yes!

Nearly! Her lips. . . . What was her face like? . . . In the chapel of

the convent of Birkenhead there was a tomb all of alabaster. . . . She

said to herself:

"He was near fainting. . . . I'm near fainting. . . . What's this

beastly thing that's between us? . . . If I let myself faint. . . . But

it would not make that beast's face any less wooden! . . ."

She leaned across the table and patted the ex-sergeant-major's

black-haired hand:

"I'm sure," she said, "you're a very good man. . . ." She did not try to

keep the tears out of her eyes, remembering his words: "Up in the cold

camp," . . . "I'm glad the captain, as you call him, did not leave you

in the cold camp. . . . You're devoted to him, aren't you? . . . There

are others he does leave . . . up in . . . the cold camp. . . . For

punishment, you know. . . ."

The ex-sergeant-major, the tears in his eyes too, said:

"Well, there _is_ men you 'as to give the C.B. to. . . . C.B. means

confined to barracks. . . ."

"Oh, there are!" she exclaimed. "There are! . . . And women, too. . . .

Surely there are women, too? . . ."

The sergeant-major said:

"Wacks, per'aps. . . . I don't know. . . . They say women's discipline

is much like ours. . . . Founded on hours!"

She said:

"Do you know what they used to say of the captain? . . ." She said to

herself: "I pray to God the stiff, fatuous beast likes sitting here

listening to this stuff. . . . Blessed Virgin, mother of God, make him

take me. . . . Before midnight. Before eleven. ... As soon as we get rid

of this . . . No, he's a decent little man. . . . Blessed Virgin!" . . .

"Do you know what they used to say of the captain? ... I heard the

warmest banker in England say it of him. . . ."

The sergeant-major, his eyes enormously opened, said:

"Did you know the warmest banker in England? . . . But there, we always

knew the captain was well connected. . . ." She went on:

"They said of him. . . . He was always helping people." . . . "Holy

Mary, mother of God! . . . He's my _husband_. . . . It's not a sin. . . .

Before midnight . . . Oh, give me a sign. . . . Or before . . . the

termination of hostilities. . . . If you give me a sign I could

wait." . . . "He helped virtuous Scotch students, and broken-down

gentry. . . . And women taken in adultery. . . . All of them. . . .

Like . . . You know Who. . . . That is his model. . . ." She said to

herself: "Curse him! . . . I hope he likes it. . . . You'd think the only

thing he thinks about is the beastly duck he's wolfing down." . . . And

then aloud: "They used to say: 'He saved others; himself he could not

save. . . .'"

The ex-sergeant-major looked at her gravely:

"Ma'am," he said, "we couldn't say exactly that of the captain. . . .

For I fancy it was said of our Redeemer. . . . But we _'ave_ said that

if ever there was a poor bloke the captain could 'elp, 'elp 'im 'e

would. . . . Yet the unit was always getting 'ellish strafe from

headquarters. . . ."

Suddenly Sylvia began to laugh. . . . As she began to laugh she had

remembered . . . The alabaster image in the nun's chapel at Birkenhead

the vision of which had just presented itself to her, had been the

recumbent tomb of an honourable Mrs. Tremayne-Warlock. . . . She was

said to have sinned in her youth . . . And her husband had never

forgiven her. . . . That was what the nuns said. . . . She said aloud:

"A sign. . . ." Then to herself: "Blessed Mary! . . . You've given it me

in the neck. . . . Yet you could not name a father for your child, and I

can name two'. . . . I'm going mad. . . . Both I and he are going to go

mad. . . ."

She thought of dashing an enormous patch of red upon either cheek. Then

she thought it would be rather melodramatic. . . .

She made in the smoking-room, whilst she was waiting for both Tietjens

and Cowley to come back from the telephone, another pact. . . . This

time with Father Consett in heaven! She was fairly sure that Father

Consett--and quite possibly other of the heavenly powers--wanted

Christopher not to be worried, so that he could get on with the war--or

because he was a good sort of dullish man such as the heavenly

authorities are apt to like. . . . Something like that. . . .

She was by that time fairly calm again. You cannot keep up fits of

emotion by the hour: at any rate, with her, the fits of emotion were

periodical and unexpected, though her colder passion remained always the

same. . . . Thus, when Christopher had come into Lady Sachse's that

afternoon, she had been perfectly calm. He had mooned through a number

of officers, both French and English, in a great octagonal, bluish salon

where Lady Sachse gave her teas, and had come to her side with just a

nod--the merest inflexion of the head! . . . Perowne had melted away

somewhere behind the disagreeable duchess. The general, very splendid

and white-headed and scarlet-tipped and gilt, had also borne down upon

her at that. . . . At the sight of Perowne with her he had been sniffing

and snorting whilst he talked to the young nobleman--a dark fellow in

blue with a new belt who seemed just a shade too theatrical, he being

chauffeur to a marshal of France and first cousin and nearest relative,

except for parents and grandparents, of the prospective bride. . . .