The general had told her that he was running the show pretty strong on

purpose because he thought it might do something to cement the Entente

Cordiale. But it did not seem to be doing it. The French--officers,

soldiers and women--kept pretty well all on the one side of the

room--the English on the other. The French were as a rule more gloomy

than men and women are expected to be. A marquis of sorts--she

understood that these were all Bonapartist nobility--having been

introduced to her had distinguished himself no more than by saying that,

for his part, he thought the duchess was right, and by saying that to

Perowne who, knowing no French, had choked exactly as if his tongue had

suddenly got too big for his mouth. . . .

She had not heard what the duchess--a very disagreeable duchess who sat

on a sofa and appeared savagely careworn--had been saying, so that she

had inclined herself, in the courtly manner that at school she had been

taught to reserve for the French legitimist nobility, but that she

thought she might expend upon a rather state function even for the

Bonapartists, and had replied that without the least doubt the duchess

had the right of the matter. . . . The marquis had given her from dark

eyes one long glance, and she had returned it with a long cold glance

that certainly told him she was meat for his masters. It extinguished

him. . . .

Tietjens had staged his meeting with herself remarkably well. It was the

sort of lymphatic thing he _could_ do, so that, for the fifth of a

minute, she wondered if he had any feelings or emotions at all. But she

knew that he had. . . . The general, at any rate, bearing down upon them

with satisfaction, had remarked:

"Ah, I see you've seen each other before to-day. . . . I thought perhaps

you wouldn't have found time before, Tietjens. . . . Your draft must be

a great nuisance. . . ."

Tietjens said without expression:

"Yes, we have seen each other before. . . . I made time to call at

Sylvia's hotel, sir."

It was at Tietjens' terrifying expressionlessness, at that completely

being up to a situation, that the first wave of emotion had come over

her. . . . For, till that very moment, she had been merely sardonically

making the constatation that there was not a single presentable man in the

room. . . . There was not even one that you could call a gentleman . . .

for you cannot size up the French . . . ever! . . . But, suddenly,

she was despairing! . . . How, she said to herself, could she ever move,

put emotion into, this lump! It was like trying to move an immense

mattress filled with feathers. You pulled at one end, but the whole mass

sagged down and remained immobile until you seemed to have no strength

at all. . . . Until virtue went out from you. . . .

It was as if he had the evil eye: or some special protector. He was so

appallingly competent, so appallingly always in the centre of his own

picture:

The general said, rather joyfully:

"Then you can spare a minute, Tietjens, to talk to the duchess! About

coal! . . . For goodness' sake, man, save the situation! I'm worn

out. . . ."

Sylvia bit the inside of her lower lip--she never bit her lip

itself!--to keep herself from exclaiming aloud. It was just exactly what

should not happen to Tietjens at that juncture. . . . She heard the

general explaining to her in his courtly manner, that the duchess was

holding up the whole ceremony because of the price of coal. The general

loved her desperately. Her, Sylvia! In quite a proper manner for an

elderly general. . . . But he would go to no small extremes in her

interests! So would his sister!

She looked hard at the room to get her senses into order again. She

said:

"It's like a Hogarth picture. . . ."

The undissolvable air of the eighteenth century that the French contrive

to retain in all their effects kept the scene singularly together. On a

sofa sat the duchess, relatives leaning over her. She was a duchess with

one of those impossible names: Beauchain-Radigutz or something like it.

The bluish room was octagonal and vaulted, up to a rosette in the centre

of the ceiling. English officers and V.A.D.'s of some evident presence

opened out to the left, French military and very black-clothed women of

all ages, but all apparently widows, opened out to the right, as if the

duchess shone down a sea at sunset. Beside her on the sofa you did not

see Lady Sachse; leaning over her you did not see the prospective bride.

This stoutish, unpresentable, coldly venomous woman, in black clothes so

shabby that they might have been grey tweed, extinguished other

personalities as the sun conceals planets. A fattish, brilliantined

personality, in mufti, with a scarlet rosette, stood sideways to the

duchess's right, his hands extended forward as if in an invitation to a

dance; an extremely squat lady, also apparently a widow, extended, on

the left of the duchess, both her black-gloved hands, as if she too were

giving an invitation to the dance. . . .

The general, with Sylvia beside him, stood glorious in the centre of the

clearing that led to the open doorway of a much smaller room. Through

the doorway you could see a table with a white damask cloth; a

silver-gilt inkpot, fretted, like a porcupine with pens, a fat, flat

leather case for the transportation of documents and two notaires: one

in black, fat, and bald-headed; one in blue uniform, with a shining

monocle, and a brown moustache that he continued to twirl. . . .

Looking round that scene Sylvia's humour calmed her and she heard the

general say:

"She's supposed to walk on my arm to that table and sign the

settlement. . . . We're supposed to be the first to sign it together. . . .

But she won't. Because of the price of coal. It appears that she has

hothouses in miles. And she thinks the English have put up the price of

coal as if . . . damn it you'd think we did it just to keep her hothouse

stoves out."

The duchess had delivered, apparently, a vindictive, cold, calm and

uninterruptible oration on the wickedness of her country's allies as

people who should have allowed France to be devastated, and the flower

of her youth slain in order that they might put up the price of a

comestible that was absolutely needed in her life. There was no arguing

with her. There was no British soul there who both knew anything about

economics and spoke French. And there she sat, apparently immovable. She

did not refuse to sign the marriage contract. She just made no motion to

go to it and, apparently, the resulting marriage would be illegal if

that document were brought to her! . . .

The general said:

"Now, what the deuce will Christopher find to say to her? He'll find

something because he could talk the hind legs off anything. But what the

deuce will it be? . . ."

It almost broke Sylvia's heart to see how exactly Christopher did the

right thing. He walked up that path to the sun and made in front of the

duchess a little awkward nick with his head and shoulders that was

rather more like a curtsy than a bow. It appeared that he knew the

duchess quite well . . . as he knew everybody in the world quite well.

He smiled at her and then became just suitably grave. Then he began to

speak an admirable, very old-fashioned French with an atrocious English

accent Sylvia had no idea that he knew a word of the language--that she

herself knew very well indeed. She said to herself that upon her word it

was like hearing Chateaubriand talk--if Chateaubriand had been brought

up in an English hunting country. . . . Of course Christopher _would_

cultivate an English accent: to show that he was an English county

gentleman. And he would speak correctly--to show that an English Tory

can do anything in the world if he wants to. . . .

The British faces in the room looked blank: the French faces turned

electrically upon him. Sylvia said:

"Who would have thought . . .?" The duchess jumped to her feet and took

Christopher's arm. She sailed with him imperiously past the general and

past Sylvia. She was saying that was just what she would have

expected of a _milor Anglais_ . . . _Avec un spleen tel que vous

l'avez_!

Christopher, in short, had told the duchess that as his family owned

almost the largest stretch of hot-house coal-burning land in England and

her family the largest stretch of hothouses in the sister-country of

France, what could they do better than make an alliance? He would

instruct his brother's manager to see that the duchess was supplied for

the duration of hostilities and as long after as she pleased with all

the coal needed for her glass at the pit-head prices of the

Middlesbrough-Cleveland district as the prices were on the 3rd of

August, nineteen fourteen. . . . He repeated: "The pit-head price . . .

_livrable au prix de l'houille-maigre dans l'enceinte des puits de ma

campagne_." . . . Much to the satisfaction of the duchess, who knew all

about prices.

. . . A triumph for Christopher was at that moment so exactly what

Sylvia thought she did not want that, she decided to tell the general

that Christopher was a Socialist. That might well take him down a peg or

two in the general's esteem . . . for the general's arm-patting

admiration for Tietjens, the man who did not argue but acted over the

price of coal, was as much as she could bear. . . . But, thinking it

over in the smoking-room after dinner, by which time she was a good deal

more aware of what she did want, she was not so certain that she _had_

done what she wanted. . . . Indeed, even in the octagonal room during

the economical festivities that followed the signatures, she had been

far from certain that she had not done almost, exactly what she did not

want. . . .

It had begun with the general's exclaiming to her:

"You know your man's the most unaccountable fellow. . . . He wears the

damn-shabbiest uniform of any officer I ever have to talk to. He's said

to be unholily hard up. . . . I even heard he had a cheque sent back to

the club. . . . Then he goes and makes a princely gift like that--just

to get Levin out of ten minutes' awkwardness. . . . I wish to goodness I

could understand the fellow. . . . He's got a positive genius for

getting all sorts of things out of the most beastly muddles. . . . Why

he's even been useful to me. . . . And then he's got a positive genius

for getting into the most disgusting messes. . . . You're too young to

have heard of Dreyfus. . . . But I always say that Christopher is a

regular Dreyfus. . . . I shouldn't be astonished if he didn't end by

being drummed out of the army . . . which heaven forfend!"

It had been then that Sylvia had said:

"Hasn't it ever occurred to you that Christopher was a Socialist?"

For the first time in her life Sylvia saw her husband's godfather look

grotesque. . . . His jaw dropped down, his white hair became disarrayed

and he dropped his pretty cap with all the gold oakleaves and the

scarlet. When he rose from picking it up his thin old face was purple

and distorted. She wished she hadn't said it: she wished she hadn't said

it. He exclaimed:

"Christopher! . . . A So . . ." He gasped as if he could not pronounce

the word. He said: "Damn it all! . . . I've loved that boy. . . . He's

my only godson. . . . His father was my best friend. . . . I've watched

over him. . . . I'd have married his mother if she would have had me. . . .

Damn it all, he's down in my will as residuary legatee after a few

small things left to my sister and my collection of horns to the

regiment I commanded. . . ."

Sylvia--they were sitting on the sofa the duchess had left--patted him

on the forearm and said:

"But general . . . godfather. . . ."

"It explains everything," he said with a mortification that was painful.

His white moustache drooped and trembled. "And what makes it all the

worse--he's never had the courage to tell me his opinions." He stopped,

snorted and exclaimed: "By God, I _will_ have him drummed out of the

service. . . . By God, I will. I can do that much. . . ."

His grief so shut him in on himself that she could say nothing to

him. . . .

"You tell me he seduced the little Wannop girl. . . . The last person in

the world he should have seduced. . . . Ain't there millions of other

women? . . . He got you sold up, didn't he? . . . Along with keeping a

girl in a tobacco-shop. . . . By jove, I almost lent him . . . offered

to lend him money on that occasion. . . . You can forgive a young man

for going wrong with women. . . . We all do. . . . We've all set up

girls in tobacco-shops in our time. . . . But, damn it all, if the

fellow's a Socialist it puts a different complexion. . . . I could

forgive him even for the little Wannop girl, if he wasn't . . . But . . .

Good God, isn't it just the thing that a dirty-minded Socialist would

do? . . . To seduce the daughter of his father's oldest friend, next to

me. . . . Or perhaps Wannop was an older friend than me. . . ."

He had calmed himself a little--and he was not such a fool. He looked at

her now with a certain keenness in his blue eyes that showed no sign of

age. He said:

"See here, Sylvia. . . . You aren't on terms with Christopher for all

the good game you put up here this afternoon. . . . I shall have to go

into this. It's a serious charge to bring against one of His Majesty's

officers. . . . Women do say things against their husbands when they are

not on good terms with them. . . ." He went on to say that he did not

say she wasn't justified. If Christopher had seduced the little Wannop

girl it was enough to make her wish to harm him. He had always found her

the soul of honour, straight as a die, straight as she rode to hounds.

And if she wished to nag against her husband, even if in little things

it wasn't quite the truth, she was perhaps within her rights as a woman.

She had said, for instance, that Tietjens had taken two pair of her best

sheets. Well, his own sister, her friend, raised Cain if he took

anything out of the house they lived in. She had made an atrocious row

because he had taken his own shaving-glass out of his own bedroom at

Mountsby. Women liked to have sets of things. Perhaps, she, Sylvia had

sets of pairs of sheets. His sister had linen sheets with the date of

the battle of Waterloo on them. . . . Naturally you would not want a set

spoiled. . . . But this was another matter. He ended up very seriously:

"I have not got time to go into this now. . . . I ought not to be

another minute away from my office. These are very serious days. . . ."

He broke off to utter against the Prime Minister and the Cabinet at home

a series of violent imprecations. He went on:

"But this will have to be gone into. . . . It's heartbreaking that my

time should be taken up by matters like this in my own family. . . . But

these fellows aim at sapping the heart of the army. . . . They say they

distribute thousands of pamphlets recommending the rank and file to

shoot their officers and go over to the Germans. . . . Do you seriously

mean that Christopher belongs to an organization? What is it you are

going on? What evidence have you? . . ."

She said:

"Only that he is heir to one of the biggest fortunes in England, for a

commoner, and he refuses to touch a penny. . . . His brother Mark tells

me Christopher could have . . . Oh, a fabulous sum a year. . . . But he

has made over Groby to me. . . ."

The general nodded his head as if he were ticking off ideas.

"Of course, refusing property is a sign of being one of these fellows.

By Jove, I must go. . . . But as for his not going to live at Groby: If

he is setting up house with Miss Wannop. . . . Well, he could not flaunt

her in the face of the county. . . . And, of course, those sheets! . . .

As you put it looked as if he'd beggared himself with his

dissipations. . . . But of course, if he is refusing money from Mark,

it's another matter. . . . Mark would make up a couple of hundred dozen

pairs of sheets without turning a hair. . . . Of course there are the

extraordinary things Christopher says. . . . I've often heard you

complain of the immoral way he looks at the serious affairs of life. . . .

You said he once talked of lethal-chambering unfit children."

He exclaimed:

"I must go. There's Thurston looking at me. . . . But what then is it

that Christopher has said? . . . Hang it all: what _is_ at the bottom of

that fellow's mind? . . ."

"He desires," Sylvia said, and she had no idea when she said it, "to

model himself upon our Lord. . . ."

The general leant back in the sofa. He said almost indulgently:

"Who's that . . . our _Lord_?"

Sylvia said:

"Upon our Lord Jesus Christ. . . ."

He sprang to his feet as if she had stabbed him with a hatpin.

"Our . . ." he exclaimed. "Good God! . . . I always knew he had a screw

loose. . . . But . . ." He said briskly: "Give all his goods to the

poor! . . . But He wasn't a . . . Not a Socialist! What was it He said:

Render under Cæsar . . . It wouldn't be necessary to drum Him out of

the army . . ." He said: "Good Lord! . . . Good Lord! . . . Of course

his poor dear mother was a little . . . But, hang it! . . . The Wannop

girl! . . ." Extreme discomfort overcame him. . . . Tietjens was

half-way across from the inner room, coming towards them.

He said:

"Major Thurston is looking for you, sir. Very urgently. . . ." The

general regarded him as if he had been the unicorn of the royal arms,

come alive. He exclaimed:

"Major Thurston! . . . Yes! Yes! . . ." and, Tietjens saying to him:

"I wanted to ask you, sir . . ." He pushed Tietjens away as if he

dreaded an assault and went off with short, agitated steps.

So sitting there, in the smoking-lounge of the hotel which was cram-jam

full of officers, and no doubt perfectly respectable, but over-giggling

women--the sort of place and environment which she had certainly never

expected to be called upon to sit in; and waiting for the return of

Tietjens and the ex-sergeant-major--who again was certainly not the sort

of person that she had ever expected to be asked to wait for, though for

long years she had put up with Tietjens' protégé, the odious Sir

Vincent Macmaster, at all sorts of meals and all sorts of places . . .

but of course that was only Christopher's rights . . . to have in his

own house, which, in the circumstances, wasn't morally hers, any

snuffling, nervous, walrus-moustached or orientally obsequious protégé

that he chose to patronize. . . . And she quite believed that Tietjens,

when he had invited the sergeant-major to celebrate his commission with

himself at dinner, hadn't expected to dine with her. . . . It was the

sort of obtuseness of which he was disconcertingly capable, though at

other times he was much more disconcertingly capable of reading your

thoughts to the last hairsbreadth. . . . And, as a matter of fact, she

objected much less to dining with the absolute lower classes than with

merely snuffly little official critics like Macmaster, and the

sergeant-major had served her turn very well when it had come to flaying

the hide off Christopher. . . . So, sitting there, she made a new pact,

this time with Father Consett in heaven. . . .

Father Consett was very much in her mind, for she was very much in the

midst of the British military authorities who had hung him. . . . She

had never seemed before to be so in the midst of these negligible,

odious, unpresentable, horse-laughing schoolboys. It antagonized her,

and it was a weight upon her, for hitherto she had completely ignored

them: in this place they seemed to have a coherence, a mass . . . almost

a life. . . . They rushed in and out of rooms occupied, as

incomprehensibly, as unpresentably, with things like boots, washing,

vaccination certificates. . . . Even with old tins! . . . A man with

prematurely white hair and a pasty face, with a tunic that bulged both

above and below his belt, would walk into the drawing-room of a lady who

superintended all the acid-drop and cigarette stalls of that city and

remark to a thin-haired, deaf man with an amazingly red nose--a nose

that had a perfectly definite purple and scarlet diagonal demarcation

running from the bridge to the upper side of the nostrils--that he had

got his old tins off his hands at last. He would have to repeat it in a

shout because the red-nosed man, his head hanging down, would have heard

nothing at all. The deaf man would say Humph! Humph! Snuffle. The woman

giving the tea--a Mrs. Hemmerdine, of Tarbolton, whom you might have met

at home, would be saying that at last she had got twelve reams of

notepaper with forget-me-nots in the top corners when the deaf-faced man

would begin, gruffly and uninterruptedly, a monologue on his urgent need

for twenty thousand tons of sawdust for the new slow-burning stoves in

the men's huts. . . .

It was undeniably like something moving. . . . All these things going in

one direction. . . . A disagreeable force set in motion by gawky

schoolboys--but schoolboys of the Sixth Form, sinister, hobbledehoy,

waiting in the corners of playgrounds to torture someone, weak and

unfortunate. . . . In one or other corner of their world-wide playground

they had come upon Father Consett and hanged him. No doubt they tortured

him first. And, if he made an offering of his sufferings, then and there

to Heaven, no doubt he was already in paradise. . . . Or, if he was not

yet in heaven, certain of the souls in purgatory were yet listened to in

the midst of their torments. . . .

So she said:

"Blessed and martyred father, I know that you loved Christopher and wish

to save him from trouble I will make this pact with you. Since I have

been in this room I have kept my eyes in the boat--almost in my lap. I

will agree to leave off torturing Christopher and I will go into retreat

in a convent of Ursuline Dames Nobles--for I can't stand the nuns of

that other convent--for the rest of my life. . . . And I know that will

please you, too, for you were always anxious for the good of my soul. . .

She was going to do that if when she raised her eyes and really looked

round the room she saw in it one man that looked presentable. She did

not ask that he should more than look presentable, for she wanted

nothing to do with the creature. He was to be a sign: not a prey!

She explained to the dead priest that she could not go all the world

over to see if it contained a presentable man, but she could not bear to

be in a convent for ever, and have the thought that there wasn't, for

other women, one presentable man in the world. . . . For Christopher

would be no good to them. He would be mooning for ever over the Wannop

girl. Or her memory. That was all one . . . He was content with love. . . .

If he knew that the Wannop girl was loving him in Bedford Park, and

he in the Khyber States with the Himalayas between them, he would be

quite content. . . . That would be correct in its way, but not very

helpful for other women. . . . Besides, if he were the only presentable

man in the world, half the women would be in love with him. . . . And

that would be disastrous, because he was no more responsive than a

bullock in a fatting pen.

"So, father," she said, "work a miracle. . . . It's not very much of a

little miracle. . . . Even if a presentable man doesn't exist you could

put him there. . . . I'll give you ten minutes before I look. . . ."

She thought it was pretty sporting of her, for, she said to herself, she

was perfectly in earnest. If in that long, dim, green-lamp-shaded, and

of course be-palm-leaved, badly-proportioned, glazed, ignoble public

room, there appeared one decentish man, as decentish men went before

this beanfeast began, she would go into retreat for the rest of her

life. . . .

She fell into a sort of dim trance after she had looked at her watch.

Often she went into these dim trances . . . ever since she had been a

girl at school with Father Consett for her spiritual adviser! . . . She

seemed to be aware of the father moving about the room, lifting up a

book and putting it down. . . . Her ghostly friend! . . . Goodness, he

was unpresentable enough, with his broad, open face that always looked

dirtyish, his great dark eyes, and his great mouth. . . . But a saint

and a martyr. . . . She felt him there. . . . What had they murdered him

for? Hung at the word of a half-mad, half-drunk subaltern, because he

had heard the confession of some of the rebels the night before they

were taken. . . . He was over in the far corner of the room. . . . She

heard him say: they had not understood, the men that had hanged him.

That is what you would say, father . . . Have mercy on them, for they

know not what they do. . . .

Then have mercy on me, for half the time I don't know what I'm doing! . . .

It was like a spell you put on me. At Lobscheid. Where my mother

was, when I came back from that place without my clothes. . . . You

said, didn't you, to mother, but she told me afterwards: The real hell

for that poor boy, meaning Christopher, will come when he falls in love

with some young girl--as, mark me, he will. . . . For she, meaning me,

will tear the world down to get at him. . . . And when mother said she

was certain I would never do anything vulgar you obstinately did not

agree. . . . You knew me. . . .

She tried to rouse herself and said: He _knew_ me. . . . Damn it, he

knew me! . . . What's vulgarity to me, Sylvia Tietjens, born

Satterthwaite? I do what I want and that's good enough for any one.

Except a priest. Vulgarity! I wonder mother could be so obtuse. If I am

vulgar I'm vulgar with a purpose. Then it's not vulgarity. It may be

vice. Or viciousness. . . . But if you commit a mortal sin with your

eyes open it's not vulgarity. . . . You chance hell fire for ever. . . .

Good enough!

The weariness sank over her again and the sense of the father's

presence. . . . She was back again in Lobscheid, thirty-six hours free

of Perowne with the father and her mother in the dim sitting-room, all

antlers, candle-lit, with the father's shadow waving over the pitchpine

walls and ceilings. . . . It was a bewitched place, in the deep forests

of Germany. The father himself said it was the last place in Europe to

be Christianized. Or perhaps it was never Christianized. . . . That was

perhaps why those people, the Germans, coming from those deep,

devil-infested woods, did all these wickednesses. Or maybe they were not

wicked. . . . One would never know properly. . . . But maybe the father

had put a spell on her. . . . His words had never been out of her mind,

much. ... At the back of her brain, as the saying was. . . .

Some man drifted near her and said:

"How do you do, Mrs. Tietjens? Who would have thought of seeing you

here?"

She answered:

"I have to look after Christopher now and then." He remained hanging

over her with a schoolboy grin for a minute, then he drifted away as an

object sinks into deep water. . . . Father Consett again hovered near

her. She exclaimed:

"But the real point is, father. . . . Is it sporting? . . . Sporting or

whatever it is?" And Father Consett breathed: "Ah! . . ." with his

terrible power of arousing doubts. . . . She said:

"When I saw Christopher . . . Last night? . . . Yes, it _was_ last

night . . . Turning back to go up that hill. . . . And I had been talking

about him to a lot of grinning private soldiers. . . . To _madden_

him. . . . You _mustn't_ make scenes before the servants. . . . A heavy

man, tired . . . come down the hill and lumbering up again. . . . There was

a searchlight turned on him just as he turned. . . . I remembered the

white bulldog I thrashed on the night before it died. . . . A tired,

silent beast . . . with a fat white behind. . . . Tired out. . . . You

couldn't see its tail because it was turned down, the stump. . . . A

great, silent beast. . . . The vet said it had been poisoned with red

lead by burglars. . . . It's beastly to die of red lead. ... It eats up

the liver. . . . And you think you're getting better for a fortnight.

And you're always cold . . . freezing in the blood-vessels. . . . And

the poor beast had left its kennel to try and be let into the fire. . . .

And I found it at the door when I came in from a dance without

Christopher. . . . And got the rhinoceros whip and lashed into it. . . .

There's a pleasure in lashing into a naked white beast. . . . Obese and

silent . . . Like Christopher. . . . I thought Christopher might. . . .

That night. . . . It went through my head. . . . It hung down its

head. . . . A great head, room for a whole British encyclopædia of

misinformation, as Christopher used to put it. . . . It said: 'What a

hope!' ... As I hope to be saved, though I never shall be, the dog said:

'What a hope!' . . . Snow-white in quite black bushes. . . . And it went

under a bush. . . . They found it dead there in the morning. . . . You

can't imagine what it looked like, with its head over its shoulder, as

it looked back and said: What a hope! to me. . . . Under a dark bush. An

eu . . . eu . . . euonymus, isn't it? . . . In thirty degrees of frost

with all the blood-vessels exposed on the naked surface of the skin. . . .

It's the seventh circle of hell, isn't it? the frozen one . . . The

last stud-white bulldog of that breed. . . . As Christopher is the last

stud-white hope of the Groby Tory breed. . . . Modelling himself on our

Lord. . . . But our Lord was never married. He never touched on topics

of sex. Good for Him. . . ."

She said: "The ten minutes is up, father . . ." and looked at the round,

starred surface between the diamonds of her wrist watch. She said: "Good

God! . . . Only one minute. . . . I've thought all that in only one

minute. . . . I understand how hell can be an eternity. . . ."

Christopher, very weary, and ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, very talkative by

now, loomed down between palms. Cowley was saying: "It's infamous! . . .

It's past bearing. . . . To re-order the draft at eleven. . . ." They

sank into chairs. . . . Sylvia extended towards Tietjens a small packet

of letters. She said: "You had better look at these. . . . I had your

letters sent to me from the flat as there was so much uncertainty about

your movements. . . ." She found that she did not dare, under Father

Consett's eyes, to look at Tietjens as she said that. She said to

Cowley: "We might be quiet for a minute or two while the captain reads

his letters. . . . Have another liqueur? . . ."

She then observed that Tietjens just bent open the top of the letter

from Mrs. Wannop and then opened that from his brother Mark:

"Curse it," she said, "I've given him what he wants! . . . He knows. . . .

He's seen the address . . . that they're still in Bedford Park. . . .

He can think of the Wannop girl as there. . . . He has not been able to

know, till now, where she is. . . . He'll be imagining himself in bed

with her there. . . ."

Father Consett, his broad, unmodelled dark face full of intelligence and

with the blissful unction of the saint and martyr, was leaning over

Tietjens' shoulder. . . . He must be breathing down Christopher's back

as, her mother said, he always did when she held a hand at auction and

he could not play because it was between midnight and his celebrating

the holy mass. . . .

She said:

"No, I am not going mad. . . . This is an effect of fatigue on the

optic nerves. . . . Christopher has explained that to me . . . He

says that when his eyes have been very tired with making one of

his senior wrangler's calculations he has often seen a woman in a

eighteenth-century dress looking into a drawer in his bureau. . . .

Thank God, I've had Christopher to explain things to me. . . . I'll

never let him go. . . . Never, never, let him go. . . ."

It was not, however, until several hours later that the significance of

the father's apparition came to her and those intervening hours were

extraordinarily occupied--with emotions, and even with action. To begin

with, before he had read the fewest possible words of his brother's

letter, Tietjens looked up over it and said:

"Of course you will occupy Groby. . . . With Michael. . . . Naturally

the proper business arrangements will be made. . . ." He went on reading

the letter, sunk in his chair under the green shade of a lamp. . . .

The letter, Sylvia knew, began with the words: "Your ---- of a wife has

been to see me with the idea of getting any allowance I might be minded

to make you transferred to herself. Of course she can have Groby, for I

shan't let it, and could not be bothered with it myself. On the other

hand, you may want to live at Groby with that girl and chance the

racket. I should if I were you. You would probably find the place worth

the . . . what is it? ostracism, if there was any. . . . But I'm

forgetting that the girl is not your mistress unless anything has

happened since I saw you. . . . And you probably would want Michael to

be brought up at Groby, in which case you couldn't keep the girl there,

even if you camouflaged her as governess. At least I think that kind of

arrangement always turns out badly: there's bound to be a stink, though

Crosby of Ulick did it and nobody much minded. . . . But it was mucky

for the Crosby children. Of course if you want your wife to have Groby

she must have enough to run it with credit, and expenses are rising

damnably. Still, our incomings rise not a little, too, which is not the

case with some. The only thing I insist on is that you make plain to

that baggage that whatever I allow her, even if it's no end of a hot

income, not one penny of it comes out of what I wish you would allow me

to allow you. I mean I want you to make plain to that rouged piece--or

perhaps it's really natural, my eyes are not what they were--that what

you have is absolutely independent of what she sucks up as the mother of

our father's heir and to keep our father's heir in the state of life

that is his due. . . . I hope you feel satisfied that the boy is your

son, for it's more than I should be, looking at the party. . . . But

even if he is not he is our father's heir all right and must be so

treated. . . .

"But be plain about that, for the trollop came to me, if you please,

with the proposal that I should dock you of any income I might propose

to allow you--and to which of course you are absolutely entitled under

our father's will, though it is no good reminding you of that!--as a

token from me that I disapproved of your behaviour when, damn it, there

is not an action of yours that I would not be proud to have to my

credit. At any rate in this affair, for I cannot help thinking that you

could be of more service to the country if you were anywhere else but

where you are. But you know what your conscience demands of you better

than I, and I dare say these hell-cats have so mauled you that you are

glad to be able to get away into any hole. But don't let yourself die in

your hole. Groby will have to be looked after, and even if you do not

live there you can keep a strong hand on Sanders, or whoever you elect

to have as manager. That monstrosity you honour with your name--which is

also mine, thank you!--suggested that if I consented to let her live at

Groby she would have her mother to live with her, in which case her

mother would be good to look after the estate. I dare say she would,

though she has had to let her own place. But then almost every one else

has. She seems anyhow a notable woman, with her head screwed on the

right way. I did not tell the discreditable daughter that she--her

mother--had come to see me at breakfast immediately after seeing you

off, she was so upset. And she _keawert ho down i' th' ingle and had a

gradely pow_. You remember how Gobbles the gardener used to say that. A

good chap, though he came from Lancasheere! . . . The mother has no

illusions about the daughter and is heart and soul for you. She was

dreadfully upset at your going, the more so as she believes that it's

her offspring has driven you out of the country and that you purpose . . .

isn't stopping one the phrase? Don't do that.

"I saw your girl yesterday. . . . She looked peaky. But of course I have

seen her several times, and she always looks peaky. I do not understand

why you do not write to them. The mother is clamorous because you have

not answered several letters and have not sent her military information

she wants for some article she is writing for a Swiss magazine. . . ."

Sylvia knew the letter almost by heart as far as that because in the

unbearable white room of the convent near Birkenhead she had twice begun

to copy it out, with the idea of keeping the copies for use in some sort

of publicity. But, at that point, she had twice been overcome by the

idea that it was not a very sporting thing to do, if you really think

about it. Besides, the letter after that--she _had_ glanced through

it--occupied itself almost entirely with the affairs of Mrs. Wannop.

Mark, in his naïve way, was concerned that the old lady, although now

enjoying the income from the legacy left her by their father, had not

immediately settled down to write a deathless novel; although, as he

added, he knew nothing about novels. . . .

Christopher was reading away at his letters beneath the green-shaded

lamp; the ex-quartermaster had begun several sentences and dropped into

demonstrative silence at the reminder that Tietjens was reading.

Christopher's face was completely without expression; he might have been

reading a return from the office of statistics in the old days at

breakfast. She wondered, vaguely, if he would see fit to apologize for

the epithets that his brother had applied to her. Probably he would not.

He would consider that she having opened the letter must take the

responsibility of the contents. Something like that. Thumps and rumbles

began to exist in the relative silence. Cowley said: "They're coming

again then!" Several couples passed them on the way out of the room.

Amongst them there was certainly no presentable man; they were all

either too old or too hobbledehoy, with disproportionate noses and

vacant, half-opened mouths.

Accompanying Christopher's mind, as it were, whilst he read his letter

had induced in her a rather different mood. The pictures in her own mind

were rather of Mark's dingy breakfast-room in which she had had her

interview with him--and of the outside of the dingy house in which the

Wannops lived, at Bedford Park. . . . But she was still conscious of her

pact with the father and, looking at her wrist watch, saw that by now

six minutes had passed. . . . It was astonishing that Mark, who was a

millionaire at least, and probably a good deal more, should live in such

a dingy apartment--it had for its chief decoration the hoofs of several

deceased race-winners, mounted as ink-stands, as pen-racks, as

paper-weights--and afford himself only such a lugubrious breakfast of

fat slabs of ham over which bled pallid eggs. . . . For she too, like

her mother, had looked in on Mark at breakfast-time--her mother because

she had just seen Christopher off to France, and she because, after a

sleepless night--the third of a series--she had been walking about St.

James's Park and, passing under Mark's windows, it had occurred to her

that she might do Christopher some damage by putting his brother wise

about the entanglement with Miss Wannop. So, on the spur of the moment,

she had invented a desire to live at Groby with the accompanying

necessity for additional means. For, although she was a pretty wealthy

woman, she was not wealthy enough to live at Groby and keep it up. The

immense old place was not so immense because of its room-space, though,

as far as she could remember, there must be anything between forty and

sixty rooms, but because of the vast old grounds, the warren of

stabling, wells, rose-walks and fencing. . . . A man's place, really,

the furniture very grim and the corridors on the ground floor all

slabbed with great stones. So she had looked in on Mark, reading his

correspondence with his copy of _The Times_ airing on a chair-back

before the fire--for he was just the man to retain the eighteen-forty

idea that you can catch cold by reading a damp newspaper. His grim,

tight, brown-wooden features that might have been carved out of an old

chair, had expressed no emotion at all during the interview. He had

offered to have up some more ham and eggs for her and had asked one or

two questions as to how she meant to live at Groby if she went there.

Otherwise he had said nothing about the information she had given him as

to the Wannop girl having had a baby by Christopher--for purposes of

conversation she had adhered to that old story, at any rate till that

interview. He had said nothing at all. Not one word. . . . At the end of

the interview, when he had risen and produced from an adjoining room a

bowler hat and an umbrella, saying that he must now go to his office, he

had put to her without any expression pretty well what stood in the

letter, as far as business was concerned. He said that she could have

Groby, but she must understand that, his father being now dead and he a

public official, without children and occupied in London with work that

suited him, Groby was practically Christopher's property to do what he

liked with as long as--which he certainly would--he kept it in proper

style. So that, if she wished to live there, she must produce

Christopher's authorization to that effect. And he added, with an

equableness so masking the proposition that it was not until she was

well out of the house and down the street that its true amazingness took

her breath away:

"Of course, Christopher, if what you say is true, might want to live at

Groby with Miss Wannop. In that case he would have to." And he had

offered her an expressionless hand and shepherded her, rather fussily,

through his dingy and awkward front passages that were lit only from

ground-glass windows giving apparently on to his bathroom. . . .

It wasn't until that moment, really, that, at once with exhilaration and

also with a sinking at the heart, she realized what she was up against

in the way of a combination. For, when she had gone to Mark's, she had

been more than half-maddened by the news that Christopher at Rouen was

in hospital and, although the hospital authorities had assured her, at

first by telegram and then by letter, that it was nothing more than his

chest, she had not had any knowledge of to what extent Red Cross

authorities did or did not mislead the relatives of casualties.

So it had seemed natural that she should want to inflict on him all the

injuries that she could at the moment, the thought that he was probably

in pain making her wish to add all she could to that pain. . . .

Otherwise, of course, she would not have gone to Mark's. . . . For it

was a mistake in strategy. But then she said to herself: "Confound it!. . .

What strategy was it a mistake in? What do I care about strategy?

What am I out for? . . ." She did what she wanted to, on the spur of the

moment! . . .

Now she certainly realized. How Christopher had got round Mark she did

not know or much care, but there Christopher certainly was, although his

father had certainly died of a broken heart at the rumours that were

going round about his son--rumours she, almost as efficiently as the man

called Ruggles and more irresponsible gossips, had set going about

Christopher. They had been meant to smash Christopher: they had smashed

his father instead. . . . But Christopher had got round Mark, whom he

had not seen for ten years. . . . Well, he probably would. Christopher

was perfectly immaculate, that was a fact, and Mark, though he appeared

half-witted in a North Country way, was no fool. He could not be a fool.

He was a really august public official. And, although as a rule Sylvia

gave nothing at all for any public official, if a man like Mark had the

position by birth amongst presentable men that he certainly ought to

have and was also the head of a department and reputed absolutely

indispensable--you could not ignore him. . . . He said, indeed, in the

later, more gossipy parts of his letter that he had been offered a

baronetcy, but he wanted Christopher to agree with his refusing it.

Christopher would not want the beastly title after his death, and for

himself he would be rather struck with the pip than let that

harlot--meaning herself--become Lady T. by any means of his. He had

added, with his queer solicitude, "Of course if you thought of

divorcing--which I wish to God you would, though I agree that you are

right not to--and the title would go to the girl after my decease I'd

take it gladly, for a title is a bit of a help after a divorce. But as

it is I propose to refuse it and ask for a knighthood, if it won't too

sicken you to have me a Sir. . . . For I hold no man ought to refuse an

honour in times like these, as has been done by certain sickening

intellectuals because it is like slapping the sovereign in the face and

bound to hearten the other side, which no doubt was what was meant by

those fellows."

There was no doubt that Mark--with the possible addition of the

Wannops--made a very strong backing for Christopher if she decided to

make a public scandal about him. . . . As for the Wannops . . . the girl

was negligible. Or possibly not, if she turned nasty and twisted

Christopher round her fingers. But the old mother was a formidable

figure--with a bad tongue, and viewed with a certain respect in places

where people talked . . . both on account of her late husband's position

and of the solid sort of articles she wrote. . . . She, Sylvia, had gone

to take a look at the place where these people lived . . . a dreary

street in an outer suburb, the houses--she knew enough about estates to

know--what is called tile-healed, the upper parts of tile, the lower

flimsy brick and the tiles in bad condition. Oldish houses really, in

spite of their sham artistic aspect, and very much shadowed by old trees

that must have been left to add to the picturesqueness. . . . The rooms

poky, and they must be very dark. . . . The residence of extreme

indigence, or of absolute poverty. . . . She understood that the old

lady's income had so fallen off during the war that they had nothing to

live on but what the girl made as a school-teacher, or a teacher of

athletics in a girls' school. . . . She had walked two or three times up

and down the street with the idea that the girl might come out: then it

had struck her that was rather an ignoble proceeding, really. . . .

It was, for the matter of that, ignoble that she should have a rival who

starved in an ashbin. . . . But that was what men were like: she might

think herself lucky that the girl did not inhabit a sweetshop. . . . And

the man, Macmaster, said that the girl had a good head and talked well,

though the woman Macmaster said that she was a shallow ignoramus. . . .

That last probably was not true; at any rate the girl had been the

Macmaster woman's most intimate friend for many years--as long as they

were sponging on Christopher and until, lower middle-class snobs as they

were, they began to think they could get into Society by carneying to

herself. . . . Still, the girl probably was a good talker and, if

little, yet physically uncommonly fit. . . . A good homespun article. . . .

She wished her no ill!

What was incredible was that Christopher should let her go on starving

in such a poverty-stricken place when he had something like the wealth

of the Indies at his disposal. . . . But the Tietjens were hard people!

You could see that in Mark's rooms . . . and Christopher would lie on

the floor as lief as in a goose-feather bed. And probably the girl would

not take his money. She was quite right. That was the way to keep

him. . . . She herself had no want of comprehension of the stimulation to

be got out of parsimonious living. . . . In retreat at her convent she lay

as hard and as cold as any anchorite, and rose to the nuns' matins at

four.

It was not, in fact, their fittings or food that she objected to--it was

that the lay-sisters, and some of the nuns, were altogether too much of

the lower classes for her to like to have always about her. . . . That

was why it was to the Dames Nobles that she would go, if she had to go

into retreat for the rest of her life, according to contract. . . .

A gun manned by exhilarated anti-aircraft fellows, and so close that it

must have been in the hotel garden, shook her physically at almost the

same moment as an immense maroon popped off on the quay at the bottom of

the street in which the hotel was. She was filled with annoyance at

these schoolboy exercises. A tall, purple-faced, white-moustached

general of the more odious type, appeared in the doorway and said that

all the lights but two must be extinguished and, if they took his

advice, they would go somewhere else. There were good cellars in the

hotel. He loafed about the room extinguishing the lights, couples and

groups passing him on the way to the door. . . . Tietjens looked up from

his letter--he was now reading one of Mrs. Wannop's--but seeing that

Sylvia made no motion he remained sunk in his chair. . . .

The old general said:

"Don't get up, Tietjens. ... Sit down, lieutenant. . . . Mrs. Tietjens,

I presume. . . . But of course I know you are Mrs. Tietjens. . . .

There's a portrait of you in this week's . . . I forget the name. . . ."

He sat down on the arm of a great leather chair and told her of all the

trouble her escapade to that city had caused him. . . . He had been

awakened immediately after a good lunch by some young officer on his

staff who was scared to death by her having arrived without papers. His

digestion had been deranged ever since. . . . Sylvia said she was very

sorry. He should drink hot water and no alcohol with his lunch. She had

had very important business to discuss with Tietjens, and she had really

not understood that they wanted papers of grown-up people. The general

began to expatiate on the importance of his office and the number of

enemy agents his perspicacity caused to be arrested every day in that

city and the lines of communication. . . .

Sylvia was overwhelmed at the ingenuity of Father Consett. She looked at

her watch. The ten minutes were up, but there did not appear to be a

soul in the dim place. . . . The father had--and no doubt as a Sign that

there could be no mistaking!--completely emptied that room. It was like

his humour!

To make certain, she stood up. At the far end of the room, in the

dimness of the one other reading lamp that the general had not

extinguished, two figures were rather indistinguishable. She walked

towards them, the general at her side extending civilities all over her.

He said that she need not be under any apprehension there. He adopted

that device of clearing the room in order to get rid of the beastly

young subalterns who would use the place to spoon in when the lights

were turned down. She said she was only going to get a timetable from

the far end of the room. . . .

The stab of hope that she had that one of the two figures would turn out

to be the presentable man died. . . . They were a young mournful

subaltern, with an incipient moustache and practically tears in his

eyes, and an elderly, violently indignant baldheaded man in evening

civilian clothes that must have been made by a country tailor. He was

smacking his hands together to emphasize what, with great agitation, he

was saying.

The general said that it was one of the young cubs on his own staff

getting a dressing down from his dad for spending too much money. The

young devils would get amongst the girls--and the old ones too. There

was no stopping it. The place was a hotbed of . . . He left the sentence

unfinished. She would not believe the trouble it gave him. . . . That

hotel itself. . . . The scandals. . . .

He said she would excuse him if he took a little nap in one of the

arm-chairs too far away to interfere with their business talk. He would

have to be up half the night. He seemed to Sylvia a blazingly

contemptible personage--too contemptible really for Father Consett to

employ as an agent, in clearing the room. . . . But the omen was given.

She had to consider her position. It meant--or did it?--that she had to

be at war with the heavenly powers! . . . She clenched her hands. . . .

In passing by Tietjens in his chair the general boomed out the words:

"I got your chit of this morning, Tietjens. . . . I must say . . ."

Tietjens lumbered out of his chair and stood at attention, his

leg-of-mutton hands stiffly on the seams of his breeches.

"It's pretty strong," the general said, "marking a charge-sheet sent

down from _my_ department: _Case explained_. We don't lay charges without

due thought. And Lance-Corporal Berry is a particularly reliable N.C.O. I

have difficulty enough to get them. Particularly after the late riots.

It takes courage, I can tell you."

"If," Tietjens said, "you would see fit, sir, to instruct the G.M.P. not

to call Colonial troops damned conscripts, the trouble would be over. . . .

We're instructed to use special discretion, as officers, in dealing

with troops from the Dominions. They are said to be very susceptible of

insult. . . ."

The general suddenly became a boiling pot from which fragments of

sentences came away: _damned_ insolence; court of inquiry; damned

conscripts they were too. He calmed enough to say:

"They _are_ conscripts, your men, aren't they? They give me more

trouble . . . I should have thought you would have wanted . . ."

Tietjens said:

"No, sir. I have not a man in my unit, as far as it's Canadian or

British Columbian, that is not voluntarily enlisted. . . ."

The general exploded to the effect that he was bringing the whole matter

before the G.O.C.I.C.'s department. Campion could deal with it how he

wished: it was beyond himself. He began to bluster away from them;

stopped; directed a frigid bow to Sylvia who was not looking at him;

shrugged his shoulders and stormed off.

It was difficult for Sylvia to get hold again of her thoughts in the

smoking-room, for the evening was entirely pervaded with military

effects that seemed to her the pranks of schoolboys. Indeed, after

Cowley, who had by now quite a good skinful of liquor, had said to

Tietjens:

"By Jove, I would not like to be you and a little bit on if old Blazes

caught sight of you to-night," she said to Tietjens with real wonder:

"You don't mean to say that a gaga old fool like that could have any

possible influence over you . . . _You_!"

Tietjens said:

"Well, it's a troublesome business, all this. . . ."

She said that it so appeared to be, for before he could finish his

sentence an orderly was at his elbow extending, along with a pencil, a

number of dilapidated papers. Tietjens looked rapidly through them,

signing one after the other and saying intermittently:

"It's a trying time." "We're massing troops up the line as fast as we

can go." "And with an endlessly changing personnel. . . ." He gave a

snort of exasperation and said to Cowley: "That horrible little Pitkins

has got a job as bombing instructor. He can't march the draft. . . . Who

the deuce am I to detail? Who the deuce is there? . . . You know all the

little . . ." He stopped because the orderly could hear. A smart boy.

Almost the only smart boy left him.

Cowley barged out of his seat and said he would telephone to the mess to

see who was there. . . . Tietjens said to the boy:

"Sergeant-Major Morgan made out these returns of religions in the

draft?"

The boy answered: "No sir, I did. They're all right." He pulled a slip

of paper out of his tunic pocket and said shyly:

"If you would not mind signing this, sir . . . I can get a lift on an

A.S.C. trolley that's going to Boulogne to-morrow at six. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"No, you can't have leave. I can't spare you. What's it for?"

The boy said almost inaudibly that he wanted to get married.

Tietjens, still signing, said: "Don't. . . . Ask your married pals what

it's like!"

The boy, scarlet in his khaki, rubbed the sole of one foot on the instep

of the other. He said that saving madam's presence it was urgent. It was

expected any day now. She was a real good gel. Tietjens signed the boy's

slip and handed it to him without looking up. The boy stood with his

eyes on the ground. A diversion came from the telephone, which was at

the far end of the room. Cowley had not been able to get on to the camp

because an urgent message with regard to German espionage was coming

through to the sleeping general.

Cowley began to shout: "For goodness' sake hold the line. . . . For

goodness' sake hold the line. . . . I'm not the general. . . . I'm _not_

the general. . . ." Tietjens told the orderly to awaken the sleeping

warrior. A violent scene at the mouth of the quiescent instrument took

place. The general roared to know who was the officer speaking. . . .

Captain Bubbleyjocks. . . . Captain Cuddlestocks . . . what in hell's

name! And who was he speaking for? . . . Who? Himself? . . . Urgent was

it? . . . Didn't he know the proper procedure was by writing? . . .

Urgent damnation! . . . Did he not know where he was? . . . In the First

Army by the Cassell Canal. . . . Well then . . . But the spy was in L.

of C. territory, across the canal. . . . The French civilian authorities

were very concerned. . . . They were, damn them! . . . And damn the

officer. And damn the French _maire_. And damn the horse the supposed

spy rode upon. . . . And when the officer was damned let him write to

First Army Headquarters about it and attach the horse and the bandoliers

as an exhibit. . . .

There was a great deal more of it. Tietjens reading his papers

still, intermittently explained the story as it came in fragments over

the telephone in the general's repetitions. . . . Apparently the French

civilian authorities of a place called Warendonck had been alarmed by a

solitary horseman in English uniform who had been wandering desultorily

about their neighbourhood for several days, seeming to want to cross the

canal bridges, but finding them guarded. . . . There was an immense

artillery dump in the neighbourhood, said to be the largest in the

world, and the Germans dropped bombs as thick as peas all over those

parts in the hopes of hitting it. . . . Apparently the officer speaking

was in charge of the canal bridgehead guards: but, as he was in First

Army country, it was obviously an act of the utmost impropriety to

awaken a general in charge of the spy-catching apparatus on the other

side of the canal. . . . The general, returning past them to an

arm-chair farther from the telephone, emphasized this point of view with

great vigour.

The orderly had returned; Cowley went once more to the telephone, having

consumed another liqueur brandy. Tietjens finished his papers and went

through them rapidly again. He said to the boy: "Got anything saved up?"

The boy said: "A fiver and a few bob." Tietjens said: "How many bob?"

The boy: "Seven, sir." Tietjens, fumbling clumsily in an inner pocket

and a little pocket beneath his belt, held out one leg-of-mutton fist

and said: "There! That will double it. Ten pounds fourteen! But it's

very improvident of you. See that you save up a deuced lot more against

the next one. Accouchements are confoundedly expensive things, as you'll

learn, and ring money doesn't stretch for ever! . . ." He called out to

the retreating boy: "Here, orderly, come back. . . ." He added: "Don't

let it get all over camp. . . . I can't afford to subsidize all the

seven-months children in the battalion. . . . I'll recommend you for

paid lance-corporal when you return from leave if you go on as well as

you have done." He called the boy back again to ask him why Captain

McKechnie had not signed the papers. The boy stuttered and stammered

that Captain McKechnie was . . . He was . . .

Tietjens muttered: "Good God!" beneath his breath. He said:

"The captain has had another nervous breakdown. . . ." The orderly

accepted the phrase with gratitude. That was it. A nervous breakdown.

They say he had been very queer at mess. About divorce. Or the captain's

uncle. A barrow-night! Tietjens said: "Yes, yes!" He half rose in his

chair and looked at Sylvia. She exclaimed painfully:

"You can't go. I insist that you can't go." He sank down again and

muttered wearily that it was very worrying. He had been put in charge of

this officer by General Campion. He ought not to have left the camp at

all perhaps. But McKechnie had seemed better. A great deal of the

calmness of her insolence had left her. She had expected to have the

whole night in which luxuriously to torment the lump opposite her. To

torment him and to allure him. She said:

"You have settlements to come to now and here that will affect your

whole life. Our whole lives! You propose to abandon them because a

miserable little nephew of your miserable little friend. . . ." She

added in French: "Even as it is you cannot pay any attention to these

serious matters, because of these childish preoccupations of yours. That

is to be intolerably insulting to me!" She was breathless.

Tietjens asked the orderly where Captain McKechnie was now. The orderly

said he had left the camp. The colonel of the depot had sent a couple of

officers as a search-party. Tietjens told the orderly to go and find a

taxi. He could have a ride himself up to camp. The orderly said taxis

would not be running on account of the air-raid. Could he order the

G.M.P. to requisition one on urgent military service? The exhilarated

air-gun pooped off thereupon three times from the garden. For the next

hour it went off every two or three minutes. Tietjens said: "Yes! Yes!"

to the orderly. The noises of the air-raid became more formidable. A

blue express letter of French civilian make was handed to Tietjens. It

was from the duchess to inform him that coal for the use of greenhouses

was forbidden by the French Government. She did not need to say that she

relied on his honour to ensure her receiving her coal through the

British military authority, and she asked for an immediate reply.

Tietjens expressed real annoyance while he read this. Distracted by the

noise, Sylvia cried out that the letter must be from Valentine Wannop in

Rouen. Did not the girl intend to let him have an hour in which to

settle the whole business of his life? Tietjens moved to the chair next

to hers. He handed her the duchess's letter.

He began a long, slow, serious explanation with a long, slow, serious

apology. He said he regretted very much that when she should have taken

the trouble to come so far in order to do him the honour to consult him

about a matter which she would have been perfectly at liberty to settle

for herself, the extremely serious military position should render him

so liable to interruption. As far as he was concerned Groby was entirely

at her disposal with all that it contained. And of course a sufficient

income for the upkeep.

She exclaimed in an access of sudden and complete despair:

"That means that you do not intend to live there." He said that

must settle itself later. The war would no doubt last a good deal

longer. While it lasted there could be no question of his coming back.

She said that meant that he intended to get killed. She warned him

that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the

south-west corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal

drawing-room and the bed-rooms above it . . . He winced: he certainly

winced at that. She regretted that she had said it. It was along other

lines that she desired to make him wince.

He said that, apart from his having no intention of getting himself

killed, the matter was absolutely out of his hands. He had to go where

he was ordered to go and do what he was told to do.

She exclaimed:

"You! _You_! Isn't it ignoble. That you should be at the beck and call of

these ignoramuses. You!"

He went on explaining seriously that he was in no great danger--in no

danger at all unless he was sent back to his battalion. And he was not

likely to be sent back to his battalion unless he disgraced himself or

showed himself negligent where he was. That was unlikely. Besides his

category was so low that he was not eligible for his battalion, which,

of course, was in the line. She ought to understand that every one that

she saw employed there was physically unfit for the line. She said:

"That's why they're such an awful lot. . . . It is not to this place

that one should come to look for a presentable man. . . . Diogenes with

his lantern was nothing to it."

He said:

"There's that way of looking at it. . . . It is quite true that most

of . . . let's say _your_ friends . . . were killed off during the early

days, or if they're still going they're in more active employments."

What she called presentableness was very largely a matter of physical

fitness. . . . The horse, for instance, that he rode was rather a

crock. . . . But though it was German and not thoroughbred it contrived to

be up to his weight. . . . Her friends, more or less, of before the war

were professional soldiers or of the type. Well, they were gone: dead or

snowed under. But on the other hand, this vast town full of crocks did

keep the thing going, if it could be made to go. It was not they that

hindered the show: if it was hindered, that was done by her much less

presentable friends, the ministry who, if they were professionals at all

were professional boodlers.

She exclaimed with bitterness:

"Then why didn't you stay at home to check them, if they _are_

boodlers." She added that the only people at home who kept social

matters going at all with any life were precisely the more successful

political professionals. When you were with them you would not know

there was any war. And wasn't that what was wanted? Was the _whole_ of

life to be given up to ignoble horseplay? . . . She spoke with increased

rancour because of the increasing thump and rumble of the air-raid. . . .

Of course the politicians were ignoble beings that, before the war,

you would not have thought of having in your house. . . . But whose

fault was that, if not that of the better classes, who had gone away

leaving England a dreary wilderness of fellows without consciences or

traditions or manners? And she added some details of the habits at a

country house of a member of the Government whom she disliked. "And,"

she finished up, "it's your fault. Why aren't _you_ Lord Chancellor, or

Chancellor of the Exchequer, instead of whoever is, for I am sure I

don't know? You could have been, with your abilities and your interests.

Then things would have been efficiently and honestly conducted. If your

brother Mark, with not a tithe of your abilities can be a permanent head

of a department, what could you not have risen to with your gifts, and

your influence . . . and your integrity?" And she ended up: "Oh,

Christopher!" on almost a sob.

Ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, who had come back from the telephone, and

during an interval in the thunderings, had heard some of Sylvia's light

cast on the habits of members of the home Government, so that his jaw

had really hung down, now, in another interval, exclaimed:

"Hear, hear! Madam! . . . There is nothing the captain might not have

risen to. . . . He is doing the work of a brigadier now on the pay of an

acting captain. . . . And the treatment he gets is scandalous. . . .

Well, the treatment we all get is scandalous, tricked and defrauded as

we are all at every turn. . . . And look at this new start with the

draft. . . ." They had ordered the draft to be ready and countermanded

it, and ordered it to be ready and countermanded it, until no one knew

whether he stood on is 'ed or is 'eels. . . . It was to have gone off

last night: when they'd 'ad it marched down to the station they 'ad it

marched back and told them all it would not be wanted for six weeks. . . .

Now it was to be got ready to go before daylight to-morrow morning in

motor-lorries to the rail Ondekoeter way, the rail here 'aving been

sabotaged! . . . Before daylight so that the enemy aeroplanes should not

see it on the road. . . . Wasn't that a thing to break the 'arts of men

_and_ horderly rooms? It was outrageous. Did they suppose the 'Uns did

things like that?

He broke off to say with husky enthusiasm of affection to Tietjens:

"Look 'ere old . . . I mean, sir . . . There's _no_ way of getting hold

of an officer to march the draft. Them as are eligible gets to 'ear of

what drafts is going and they've all bolted into their burries. Not a

man of 'em will be back in camp before five to-morrow morning. Not when

they 'ears there's a draft to go at four of mornings like this. . . .

Now . . ." His voice became husky with emotion as he offered to take the

draft hisself to oblige Captain Tietjens. And the captain knew he could

get a draft off pretty near as good as himself: or very near. As for the

draft-conducting major he lived in that hotel and he, Cowley, 'ad seen

'im. No four in the morning for 'im. He was going to motor to Ondekoeter

Station about seven. So there was no sense in getting the draft off

before five, and it was still dark then: too dark for the 'Un planes to

see what was moving. He'd be glad if the captain would be up at the camp

by five to take a final look and to sign any papers that only the

commanding officer could sign. But he knew the captain had had no sleep

the night before because of his, Cowley's, infirmity, mostly, so he

couldn't do less than give up a day and a half of his leave to taking

the draft. Besides, he was going home for the duration and he would not

mind getting a look at the old places they'd seen in 'fourteen, for the

last time as a Cook's tourist. . . .

Tietjens, who was looking noticeably white, said:

"Do you remember O Nine Morgan at Noircourt?"

Cowley said:

"No. . . . Was 'e there? In your company, I suppose? . . . The man you

mean that was killed yesterday. Died in your arms owing to my oversight.

I ought to have been there." He said to Sylvia with the gloating idea

N.C.O.'s had that wives liked to hear of their husband's near escapes:

"Killed within a foot of the captain, 'e was. An 'orrible shock it must

'ave been for the captain." A horrible mess. . . . The captain held him

in his arms while he died. ... As if he'd been a baby. Wonderful tender,

the captain was! Well, you're apt to be when it's one of your own

men. . . . No rank then! "Do you know the only time the King must salute a

private soldier and the private takes no notice? . . . When 'e's

dead. . . ." Both Sylvia and Tietjens were silent--and silvery white in the

greenish light from the lamp. Tietjens indeed had shut his eyes. The old

N.C.O. went on rejoicing to have the floor to himself. He had got on his

feet preparatory to going up to camp, and he swayed a little. . . .

"No," he said and he waved his cigar gloriously, "I don't remember O

Nine Morgan at Noircourt. . . . But I remember . . ."

Tietjens, with his eyes still shut, said:

"I only thought he might have been a man. . . ."

"No," the old fellow went on imperiously, "I don't remember 'im. . . .

But, Lord, I remember what happened to _you_!" He looked down gloriously

upon Sylvia: "The captain caught 'is foot in. . . . You'd never believe

what 'e caught 'is foot in! Never! . . . A pretty quiet affair it was,

with a bit of moonlight. . . . Nothing much in the way of artillery. . . .

Perhaps we surprised the 'Uns proper, perhaps they were wanting to

give up their front-line trenches for a purpose. . . . There was next to

no one in 'em. . . . I know it made me nervous. . . . My heart was fair

in my boots, because there was so little doing! . . . It was when there

was little doing that the 'Uns could be expected to do their worst. ...

Of course there was some machine-gunning. . . . There was one in

particular away to the right of us. . . . And the moon, it was shining

in the early morning. Wonderful peaceful. And a little mist. . . . And

frozen hard. . . . Hard as you wouldn't believe. . . . Enough to make

the shells dangerous."

Sylvia said:

"It's not always mud, then?" and Tietjens, to her: "He'll stop if you

don't like it." She said monotonously: "No . . . I want to hear."

Cowley drew himself for his considerable effect:

"Mud!" he said. "Not then. . . . Not by half. . . . I tell you, ma'am,

we trod on the frozen faces of dead Germans as we doubled. . . . A

terrible lot of Germans we'd killed a day or so before. . . . That was

no doubt the reason they give up the trenches so easy: difficult to

attack from, they was. . . . Anyhow, they left the dead for us to bury,

knowing probably they were going, with a better 'eart! . . . But it fair

put the wind up me anyhow to think of what their counter-attack was

going to be. . . . The counter-attack is always ten times as bad as the

preliminary resistance. They 'as you with the rear of their

trenches--the parades, we call it--as your front to boot. So I was precious

glad when the moppers-up and supports come and went through us. . . .

Laughing, they was. . . . Wiltshires. . . . My missus comes from

that county. . . . Mrs. Cowley, I mean. . . . So I'd seen the captain go

down earlier on and I'd said: 'There's another of the best stopped

one. . . .'" He dropped his voice a little: he was one of the noted yarners

of the regiment: "Caught 'is foot, 'e 'ad, between two 'ands. . . .

Sticking up out of the frozen ground. . . . As it might be in prayer. . . .

Like this!" He elevated his two hands, the cigar between the

fingers, the wrists close together and the fingers slightly curled

inwards: "Sticking up in the moonlight. . . . Poor devil!"

Tietjens said:

"I thought perhaps it was O Nine Morgan I saw that night. . . .

Naturally I looked dead. . . . I hadn't a breath in my body. . . . And I

saw a Tommy put his rifle to his pal's upper arm and fire. . . . As I

lay on the ground. . . ."

Cowley said:

"Ah, you saw that . . . I heard the men talking of it. . . . But they

naturally did not say who and where!"

Tietjens said with a negligence that did not ring true:

"The wounded man's name was Stilicho. . . . A queer name. . . . I

suppose it's Cornish. . . . It was B Company in front of us."

"You didn't bring 'em to a court martial?" Cowley asked. Tietjens said:

No. He could not be quite certain. Though he _was_ certain. But he had

been worrying about a private matter. He had been worrying about it

while he lay on the ground and that rather obscured his sense of what he

saw. Besides, he said faintly, an officer must use his judgment. He had

judged it better in this case not to have seen the . . . His voice had

nearly faded away: it was clear to Sylvia that he was coming to a climax

of some mental torture. Suddenly he exclaimed to Cowley:

"Supposing I let him off one life to get him killed two years after. My

God! That would be too beastly!"

Cowley snuffled in Tietjens' ear something that Sylvia did not

catch--consolatory and affectionate. That intimacy was more than she

could bear. She adopted her most negligent tone to ask:

"I suppose the one man had been trifling with the other's girl. Or

wife!"

Cowley exploded: "God bless you, no! They'd agreed upon it between them.

To get one of them sent 'ome and the other, at any rate, out of _that_

'ell, leading him back to the dressing-station." She said:

"You mean to say that a man would do _that_, to get out of it? . . ."

Cowley said:

"God bless you, ma'am, with the _'ell_ the Tommies 'as of it. . . . For

it's in the line that the difference between the Other Ranks' life and

the officers' comes in. . . . I tell you, ma'am, old soldier as I am,

and I've been in seven wars one with another . . . there were times in

this war when I could have shrieked, holding my right hand down. . . ."

He paused and said: "It was my idea. . . . And it's been a good many

others,' that if I 'eld my 'and up over the parapet with perhaps my hat

on it, in two minutes there would be a German sharpshooter's bullet

through it. And then me for Blighty, as the soldiers say. . . . And if

that could happen to me, a regimental sergeant-major, with twenty-three

years in the service . . ."

The bright orderly came in, said he had found a taxi, and melted into

the dimness.

"A man," the sergeant-major said, "would take the risk of being shot for

wounding his pal. . . . They get to love their pals, passing the love of

women. . . ." Sylvia exclaimed: "Oh!" as if at a pang of toothache. "They

do, ma'am," he said, "it's downright touching. . . ."

He was by now very unsteady as he stood, but his voice was quite clear.

That was the way it took him. He said to Tietjens:

"It's queer, what you say about home worries taking up your mind. ... I

remember in the Afghan campaign, when we were in the devil of a hot

corner, I got a letter from my wife, Mrs. Cowley, to say that our Winnie

had the measles. . . . And there was only one difference between me and

Mrs. Cowley: I said that a child must have flannel next its skin, and

she said flannelette was good enough. Wiltshire doesn't hold by wool as

Lincolnshire does. Long fleeces the Lincolnshire sheep have. . . . And

dodging the Afghan bullets all day among the boulders as we was, all I

could think of. . . . For you know, ma'am, being a mother yourself, that

the great thing with measles is to keep a child warm. . . . I kep'

saying to myself--'arf crying I was--'If she only keeps wool next

Winnie's skin! If she only keeps wool next Winnie's skin!' . . . But you

know that, being a mother yourself. I've seen your son's photo on the

captain's dressing-table. Michael, 'is name is. . . . So you see, the

captain doesn't forget you and 'im."

Sylvia said in a clear voice:

"Perhaps you would not go on!"

Distracted as she was by the anti-air-gun in the garden, though it was

on the other side of the hotel and permitted you to get in a sentence or

two before splitting your head with a couple of irregular explosions,

she was still more distracted by a sudden vision--a remembrance of

Christopher's face when their boy had had a temperature of 105° with

the measles, up at his sister's house in Yorkshire. He had taken the

responsibility, which the village doctor would not face, of himself

placing the child in a bath full of split ice. . . . She saw him

bending, expressionless in the strong lamp-light, with the child in his

clumsy arms over the glittering, rubbled surface of the bath. . . . He

was just as expressionless then as now. . . . He reminded her now of how

he had been then: some strain in the lines of the face perhaps that she

could not analyse. . . . Rather as if he had a cold in the head--a

little suffocating, with suppressing his emotions, of course: his eyes

looking at nothing. You would not have said that he even saw the

child--heir to Groby and all that! . . . Something had said to her, just

in between two crashes of the gun "It's his own child. He went as you

might say down to hell to bring it back to life. . . ." She knew it was

Father Consett saying that. She knew it was true: Christopher had been

down to hell to bring the child back. . . . Fancy facing its pain in

that dreadful bath! . . . The thermometer had dropped, running down

under their eyes. . . . Christopher had said: "A good heart, he's got!

A good plucked one!" and then held his breath, watching the thin

filament of bright mercury drop to normal. . . . She said now, between

her teeth: "The child is his property as much as the damned estate. . . .

Well, I've got them both. . . ."

But it wasn't at this juncture that she wanted him tortured over that.

So, when the second gun had done its crash, she had said to the bibulous

old man:

"I wish you would not go on!" And Christopher had been prompt to the

rescue of the _convenances_ with:

"Mrs. Tietjens does not see eye to eye with us in some matters!"

She said to herself: "Eye to eye! My God! . . ." The whole of this

affair, the more she saw of it, overwhelmed her with a sense of

hatred. . . . And of depression! . . . She saw Christopher buried in this

welter of fools, playing a schoolboy's game of make-believe. But of a

make-believe that was infinitely formidable and infinitely sinister. . . .

The crashings of the gun and of all the instruments for making noise

seemed to her so atrocious and odious because they were, for her, the

silly pomp of a schoolboy-man's game. . . . Campion, or some similar

schoolboy, said: "Hullo! Some German airplanes about . . . That lets us

out on the air-gun! Let's have some pops!" . . . As they fire guns in

the park on the King's birthday. It was sheer insolence to have a gun in

the garden of an hotel where people of quality might be sleeping or

wishing to converse!

At home she had been able to sustain the conviction that it was such a

game. . . . Anywhere: at the house of a minister of the Crown, at

dinner, she had only to say: "Do let us leave off talking of these

odious things. . . ." And immediately there would be ten or a dozen

voices, the minister's included, to agree with Mrs. Tietjens of Groby

that they had altogether too much of it. . . .

But here! . . . She seemed to be in the very belly of the ugly

affair. . . . It moved and moved, under your eyes dissolving, yet always

there. As if you should try to follow one diamond of pattern in the coil of

an immense snake that was in irrevocable motion. . . . It gave her a sense

of despair: the engrossment of Tietjens, in common with the engrossment

of this disreputable toper. She had never seen Tietjens put his head

together with any soul before: he was the lonely buffalo. . . . Now!

Anyone: any fatuous staff-officer, whom at home he would never so much

as have spoken to: any trustworthy beer-sodden sergeant, any street

urchin dressed up as orderly. . . . They had only to appear and all his

mind went into a close-headed conference over some ignoble point in the

child's game: The laundry, the chiropody, the religions, the bastards . . .

of millions of the indistinguishable. . . . Or their deaths as well!

But, in heaven's name what hypocrisy, or what inconceivable

chicken-heartedness was this? They promoted this beanfeast of carnage

for their own ends: they caused the deaths of men in inconceivable

holocausts of pain and terror. Then they had crises of agony over the

death of one single man. For it was plain to her that Tietjens was in

the middle of a full nervous breakdown. Over one man's death! She had

never seen him so suffer; she had never seen him so appeal for sympathy:

him, a cold fiend of reticence! Yet he was now in an agony! _Now_! . . .

And she began to have a sense of the infinitely spreading welter of

pain, going away to an eternal horizon of night. . . . 'Ell for the

Other Ranks! Apparently it was hell for the officers as well.

The real compassion in the voice of that snuffling, half-drunken old man

had given her a sense of that enormous wickedness. . . . These horrors,

these infinities of pain, this atrocious condition of the world had been

brought about in order that men should indulge themselves in orgies of

promiscuity. . . . That in the end was at the bottom of male honour, of

male virtue, observance of treaties, upholding of the flag. . . . An

immense warlock's carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties. . . . And

once set in motion there was no stopping it. . . . This state of things

would never cease. . . . Because once they had tasted of the joy--the

blood--of this game, who would let it end? . . . These men talked of

these things that occupied them there with the lust of men telling dirty

stories in smoking-rooms. . . . That was the only parallel!

There was no stopping it, any more than there was any stopping the by

now all but intoxicated ex-sergeant-major. He was off! With, as might be

expected, advice to a young couple with differences of opinion! The wine

had made him bold!

In the depth of her pictures of these horrors, snatches of his wisdom

penetrated to her intelligence. . . . Queer snatches. . . . She was

getting it certainly in the neck! . . . Someone, to add to the noise,

had started some mechanical musical instrument in an adjacent hall.

"Corn an' lasses

Served by Ras'us!"

a throaty voice proclaimed,

"I'd be tickled to death to know that I could go

And stay right there . . ."

The ex-sergeant-major was adding to her knowledge the odd detail that

when he, Sergeant-Major Cowley, went to the wars--seven of them--his

missus, Mrs. Cowley, spent the first three days and nights unpicking and

re-hemstitching every sheet and pillow-slip in the 'ouse. To keep

'erself f'm thinking. . . . This was apparently meant as a reproof or an

exhortation to her, Sylvia Tietjens. . . . Well, he was all right! Of

the same class as Father Consett, and with the same sort of wisdom.

The gramophone howled: a new note of rumbling added itself to the

exterior tumult and continued through six mitigated thumps of the gun in

the garden. . . . In the next interval, Cowley was in the midst of a

valedictory address to her. He was asking her to remember that the

captain had had a sleepless night the night before.

There occurred to her irreverent mind a sentence of one of the Duchess

of Marlborough's letters to Queen Anne. The duchess had visited the

general during one of his campaigns in Flanders. "My Lord," she wrote,

"did me the honour three times in his boots!" . . . The sort of thing

she would remember. . . . She would--she _would_--have tried it on the

sergeant-major, just to see Tietjens' face, for the sergeant-major would

not have understood. . . . And who cared if he did! . . . He was

bibulously skirting round the same idea. . . .

But the tumult increased to an incredible volume: even the thrillings of

the near-by gramophone of two hundred horse-power, or whatever it was,

became mere shimmerings of a gold thread in a drab fabric of sound. She

screamed blasphemies that she was hardly aware of knowing. She had to

scream against the noise: she was no more responsible for the blasphemy

than if she had lost her identity under an anæsthetic. She _had_ lost

her identity. . . . She was one of this crowd!

The general woke in his chair and gazed malevolently at their group as

if they alone were responsible for the noise. It dropped. Dead! You only

knew it, because you caught the tail end of a belated woman's scream

from the hall and the general shouting: "For God's sake don't start that

damned gramophone again!" In the blessed silence, after preliminary

wheezings and guitar noises an astonishing voice burst out:

"Less than the dust . . .

Before thy char . . ."

And then, stopping after a murmur of voices, began:

"Pale hands I loved . . ."

The general sprang from his chair and rushed to the hall. . . . He came

back crestfallenly.

"It's some damned civilian big-wig. . . . A novelist, they say. . . . I

can't stop _him_. . . ." He added with disgust: "The hall's full of

young beasts and harlots. . . . _Dancing_!". . . The melody had indeed,

after a buzz, changed to a languorous and interrupted variation of a

waltz. "Dancing in the dark!" the general said with enhanced disgust. . . .

"And the Germans may be here at any moment. ... If they knew what I

know! . . ."

Sylvia called across to him:

"Wouldn't it be fun to see the blue uniform with the silver buttons

again and some decently set-up men? . . ."

The general shouted:

"_I'd_ be glad to see them. . . . I'm sick to death of these. . . ."

Tietjens took up something he had been saying to Cowley: what it was

Sylvia did not hear, but Cowley answered, still droning on with an idea

Sylvia thought they had got past:

"I remember when I was sergeant in Quetta, I detailed a man--called

Herring--for watering the company horses, after he begged off it because

he had a fear of horses. . . . A horse got him down in the river and

drowned 'im. . . . Fell with him and put its foot on his face. . . . A

fair sight he was. . . . It wasn't any good my saying anything about

military exigencies. . . . Fair put me off my feed, it did. . . . Cost

me a fortune in Epsom salts. . . ."

Sylvia was about to scream out that if Tietjens did not like men being

killed it ought to sober him in his war-lust, but Cowley continued

meditatively:

"Epsom salts they say is the cure for it. . . . For seeing your dead. . . .

And of course you should keep off women for a fortnight. . . . I

know I did. Kept seeing Herring's face with the hoof-mark. And . . .

there was a piece: a decent bit of goods in what we called the

Government Compound. . . ."

He suddenly exclaimed:

"Saving your . . . Ma'am, I'm . . ." He stuck the stump of the cigar

into his teeth and began assuring Tietjens that he could be trusted with

the draft next morning, if only Tietjens would put him into the taxi.

He went away, leaning on Tietjens' arm, his legs at an angle of sixty

degrees with the carpet. . . .

"He can't . . ." Sylvia said to herself, "he can't, not . . . If he's a

gentleman. . . . After all that old fellow's hints. . . . He'd be a damn

coward if he kept off. . . . For a fortnight. . . . And who else is

there not a public . . ." She said: "O God! . . ."

The old general, lying in his chair, turned his face aside to say:

"I wouldn't, madam, not if I were you, talk about the blue uniform with

silver buttons here. . . . _We_, of course, understand. . . ."

She said: "You see . . . even that extinct volcano . . . He's undressing

me with his eyes full of blood veins. . . . Then why can't _he_? . . ."

She said aloud:

"Oh, but even you, general, said you were sick of your companions!"

She said to herself:

"Hang it! . . . I will have the courage of my convictions. . . . No man

shall say I am a coward. . . ."

She said:

"Isn't it saying the same thing as you, general, to say that I'd rather

be made love to by a well-set-up man in blue and silver--or anything

else!--than by most of the people one sees here! . . ."

The general said:

"Of course, if you put it that way, madam. . . ."

She said:

"What other way should a woman put it?" . . . She reached to the table

and filled herself a lot of brandy. The old general was leering towards

her:

"Bless me," he said, "a lady who takes liquor like that . . ."

She said:

"You're a Papist, aren't you? With the name of O'Hara and the touch of

the brogue you have . . . And the devil you no doubt are with. . . . You

know what. . . . Well, then . . . It's with a special intention! . . .

As you say your Hail, Maries. . . ."

With the liquor burning inside her she saw Tietjens loom in the dim

light.

The general, to her bitter amusement, said to him:

"Your friend was more than a bit on. . . . Not the Society surely for

madam!"

Tietjens said:

"I never expected to have the pleasure of dining with Mrs. Tietjens

to-night . . . That officer was celebrating his commission and I could

not put him off. . . ." The general said: "Oh, ah! . . . Of course

not. . . . I dare say . . ." and settled himself again in his chair. . . .

Tietjens was overwhelming her with his great bulk. She had still lost

her breath. ... He stooped over and said: It was the luck of the

half-drunk; he said:

"They're dancing in the lounge. . . ."

She coiled herself passionately into her wickerwork. It had dull blue

cushions. She said:

"Not with anyone else. . . . I don't want any introductions. . . ."

Fiercely! . . . He said:

"There's no one there that I could introduce you to. . . ."

She said:

"Not if it's a charity!"

He said:

"I thought it might be rather dull. . . . It's six months since I

danced. . . ." She felt beauty flowing over all her limbs. She had a

gown of gold tissue. Her matchless hair was coiled over her ears. . .

She was humming Venusberg music: she knew music if she knew nothing

else. . . .

She said: "You call the compounds where you keep the W.A.A.C.'s

Venusberg's, don't you? Isn't it queer that Venus should be your own? . . .

Think of poor Elisabeth!"

The room where they were dancing was very dark. . . . It was queer to be

in his arms. . . . She had known better dancers. . . . He had looked

ill. . . . Perhaps he was. . . . Oh, poor Valentine-Elisabeth. . . . What

a funny position! . . . The good gramophone played. . . . _Destiny_! . . .

You see, father! . . . In his arms! . . . Of course, dancing is

not really. . . . But so near the real thing! So near! . . . "Good luck

to the special intention! . . ." She had almost kissed him on the

lips. . . . All but! . . . _Effleurer_, the French call it. . . . But she

was not as humble. . . . He had pressed her tighter. . . . All these months

without . . . My lord did me honour . . . Good for Malbrouck _s'en

va-t-en guerre_. . . . He _knew_ she had almost kissed him on the

lips. . . . And that his lips had almost responded. . . . The civilian, the

novelist, had turned out the last light. . . . Tietjens said, "Hadn't we

better talk? . . ." She said: "In my room, then! I'm dog-tired. . . . I

haven't slept for six nights. . . . In spite of drugs. . . ." He said:

"Yes. Of course! Where else? . . ." Astonishingly. . . . Her gown of

gold tissue was like the colobium sidonis the King wore at the

coronation. . . . As they mounted the stairs she thought what a fat

tenor Tannhauser always was! . . . The Venusberg music was dinning in

her ears. . . . She said: "Sixty-six inexpressibles! I'm as sober as a

judge . . . I need to be!"

PART III

CHAPTER I

A shadow--the shadow of the General Officer Commanding in Chief--falling

across the bar of light that the sunlight threw in at his open door

seemed providentially to awaken Christopher Tietjens, who would have

thought it extremely disagreeable to be found asleep by that officer.

Very thin, graceful and gay with his scarlet gilt oak-leaves, and

ribbons, of which he had many, the general was stepping attractively

over the sill of the door, talking backwards over his shoulder, to

someone outside. So, in the old days, Gods had descended! It was, no

doubt, really the voices from without that had awakened Tietjens, but he

preferred to think the matter a slight intervention of Providence,

because he felt in need of a sign of some sort! Immediately upon

awakening he was not perfectly certain of where he was, but he had sense

enough to answer with coherence the first question that the general put

to him and to stand stiffly on his legs. The general had said:

"Will you be good enough to inform me, Captain Tietjens, why you have no

fire-extinguishers in your unit? You are aware of the extremely

disastrous consequences that would follow a conflagration in your

lines?"

Tietjens said stiffly:

"It seems impossible to obtain them, sir."

The general said:

"How is this? You have indented for them in the proper quarter. Perhaps

you do not know what the proper quarter is?"

Tietjens said:

"If this were a British unit, sir, the proper quarter would be the Royal

Engineers." When he had sent his indent in for them to the Royal

Engineers they informed him that this being a unit of troops from the

Dominions, the quarter to which to apply was the Ordnance. On applying

to the Ordnance, he was informed that no provision was made of

fire-extinguishers for troops from the Dominions under Imperial

officers, and that the proper course was to obtain them from a civilian

firm in Great Britain, charging them against barrack damages. . . . He

had applied to several firms of manufacturers, who all replied that they

were forbidden to sell these articles to anyone but to the War Office

direct. . . . "I am still applying to civilian firms," he finished.

The officer accompanying the general was Colonel Levin, to whom, over

his shoulder, the general said: "Make a note of that, Levin, will you?

and get the matter looked into." He said again to Tietjens:

"In walking across your parade-ground I noticed that your officer in

charge of your physical training knew conspicuously nothing about it.

You had better put him on to cleaning out your drains. He was

unreasonably dirty."

Tietjens said:

"The sergeant-instructor, sir, is quite competent. The officer is an

R.A.S.C. officer. I have at the moment hardly any infantry officers in

the unit. But officers have to be on these parades--by A.C.I. They give

no orders."

The general said dryly:

"I was aware from the officer's uniform of what arm he belonged to. I am

not saying you do not do your best with the material at your command."

From Campion on parade this was an extraordinary graciousness. Behind

the general's back Levin was making signs with his eyes which he

meaningly closed and opened. The general, however, remained

extraordinarily dry in manner, his face having its perfectly

expressionless air of studied politeness which allowed no muscle of its

polished-cherry surface to move. The extreme politeness of the extremely

great to the supremely unimportant!

He glanced round the hut markedly. It was Tietjens' own office and

contained nothing but the blanket-covered tables and, hanging from a

strut, an immense calendar on which days were roughly crossed out in red

ink and blue pencil. He said:

"Go and get your belt. You will go round your cook-houses with me in a

quarter of an hour. You can tell your sergeant-cook. What sort of

cooking arrangements have you?"

Tietjens said:

"Very good cook-houses, sir."

The general said:

"You're extremely lucky, then. Extremely lucky! . . . Half the units

like yours in this camp haven't anything but company cookers and field

ovens in the open. . . ." He pointed with his crop at the open door. He

repeated with extreme distinctness "Go and get your belt!" Tietjens

wavered a very little on his feet. He said:

"You are aware, sir, that I am under arrest."

Campion imported a threat into his voice:

"I gave you," he said, "an order. To perform a duty!"

The terrific force of the command from above to below took Tietjens

staggering through the door. He heard the general's voice say: "I'm

perfectly aware he's not drunk." When he had gone four paces, Colonel

Levin was beside him.

Levin was supporting him by the elbow. He whispered:

"The general wishes me to go with you if you are feeling unwell. You

understand you are released from arrest!" He exclaimed with a sort of

rapture: "You're doing splendidly. . . . It's amazing. Everything I've

ever told him about you. . . . Yours is the only draft that got off this

morning. . . ."

Tietjens grunted:

"Of course I understand that if I'm given an order to perform a duty, it

means I am released from arrest." He had next to no voice. He managed to

say that he would prefer to go alone. He said: ". . . He's forced my

hand. . . . The last thing I want is to be released from arrest. . . ."

Levin said breathlessly:

"You _can't_ refuse. . . . You can't upset him. . . . Why, you

_can't_. . . . Besides, an officer cannot demand a court martial."

"You look," Tietjens said, "like a slightly faded bunch of

wallflowers. . . . I'm sure I beg your pardon. . . . It came into my head!"

The colonel drooped intangibly, his moustache a little ragged, his eyes a

little rimmed, his shaving a little ridged. He exclaimed:

"Damn it! . . . Do you suppose I don't _care_ what happens to you? . . .

O'Hara came storming into my quarters at half-past three. . . . I'm not

going to tell you what he said. . . ." Tietjens said gruffly:

"No, don't! I've all I can stand for the moment. . . ."

Levin exclaimed desperately:

"I want you to understand. . . . It's impossible to believe anything

against . . ."

Tietjens faced him, his teeth showing like a badger's. He said:

"Whom? . . . Against whom? Curse you!"

Levin said pallidly:

"Against . . . Against . . . either of you. . . ."

"Then leave it at that!" Tietjens said. He staggered a little until he

reached the main lines. Then he marched. It was purgatory. They peeped

at him from the corners of huts and withdrew. . . . But they always did

peep at him from the corners of huts and withdraw! That is the habit of

the Other Ranks on perceiving officers. The fellow called McKechnie also

looked out of a hut door. He too withdrew. . . . There was no mistaking

that! He had the news. . . . On the other hand, McKechnie too was under

a cloud. It might be his, Tietjens', duty, to strafe McKechnie to hell

for having left camp last night. So he might be avoiding him. . . .

There was no knowing. . . . He lurched infinitesimally to the right. The

road was rough. His legs felt like detached and swollen objects that he

dragged after him. He must master his legs. He mastered his legs. A

batman carrying a cup of tea ran against him. Tietjens said: "Put that

down and fetch me the sergeant-cook at the double. Tell him the

general's going round the cook-houses in a quarter of an hour." The

batman ran, spilling the tea in the sunlight.

In his hut, which was dim and profusely decorated with the doctor's

ideals of female beauty in every known form of pictorial reproduction,

so that it might have been lined with peach-blossom, Tietjens had the

greatest difficulty in getting into his belt. He had at first forgotten

to remove his hat, then he put his head through the wrong opening; his

fingers on the buckles operated like sausages. He inspected himself in

the doctor's cracked shaving-glass: he was exceptionally well shaved.

He had shaved that morning at six-thirty: five minutes after the draft

had got off. Naturally, the lorries had been an hour late. It was

providential that he had shaved with extra care. An insolently calm man

was looking at him, the face divided in two by the crack in the glass: a

naturally white-complexioned double-half of a face: a patch of high

colour on each cheekbone; the pepper-and-salt hair ruffled, the white

streaks extremely silver. He had gone very silver lately. But he swore

he did not look worn. Not careworn. McKechnie said from behind his back:

"By Jove, what's this all about. The general's been strafing me to hell

for not having my table tidy!"

Tietjens, still looking in the glass, said:

"You should keep your table tidy. It's the only strafe the battalion's

had."

The general, then, must have been in the orderly room of which he had

put McKechnie in charge. McKechnie went on, breathlessly:

"They say you knocked the general. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Don't you know enough to discount what they say in this town?" He said

to himself: "That was all right!" He had spoken with a cool edge on a

contemptuous voice.

He said to the sergeant-cook who was panting--another heavy,

grey-moustached, very senior N.C.O.:

"The general's going round the cook-houses. . . . You be damn certain

there's no dirty cook's clothing in the lockers!" He was fairly sure

that otherwise his cook-houses would be all right. He had gone round

them himself the morning of the day before yesterday. Or was it

yesterday? . . .

It was the day after he had been up all night because the draft had been

countermanded. . . . It didn't matter. He said:

"I wouldn't serve out white clothing to the cooks. . . . I bet you've

got some hidden away, though it's against orders."

The sergeant looked away into the distance, smiled all-knowingly over

his walrus moustache.

"The general likes to see 'em in white," he said, "and he won't know the

white clothing has been countermanded."

Tietjens said:

"The snag is that the beastly cooks always will tuck some piece of

beastly dirty clothing away in a locker rather than take the trouble to

take it round to their quarters when they've changed."

Levin said with great distinctness:

"The general has sent me to you with this, Tietjens. Take a sniff of it

if you're feeling dicky. You've been up all night on end two nights

running." He extended in the palm of his hand a bottle of smelling-salts

in a silver section of tubing. He said the general suffered from vertigo

now and then. Really he himself carried that restorative for the benefit

of Miss de Bailly.

Tietjens asked himself why the devil the sight of that smelling-salts

container reminded him of the brass handle of the bedroom door moving

almost imperceptibly . . . and incredibly. It was, of course, because

Sylvia had on her illuminated dressing-table, reflected by the glass,

just such another smooth, silver segment of tubing. . . . Was everything

he saw going to remind him of the minute movement of that handle?

"You can do what you please," the sergeant-cook said, "but there will

always be one piece of clothing in a locker for a G.O.C.I.C.'s

inspection. And the general always walks straight up to that locker and

has it opened. I've seen General Campion do it three times."

"If there's any found this time, the man it belongs to goes for a

D.C.M.," Tietjens said. "See that there's a clean diet-sheet on the

messing board."

"The generals really like to find dirty clothing," the sergeant-cook

said; "it gives them something to talk about if they don't know anything

else about cook-houses. . . . I'll put up my own diet-sheet, sir. . . .

I suppose you can keep the general back for twenty minutes or so? It's

all I ask."

Levin said towards his rolling, departing back:

"That's a damn smart man. Fancy being as confident as that about an

inspection. . . . Ugh! . . ." and Levin shuddered in remembrance of

inspections through which in his time he had passed.

"He's a damn smart man!" Tietjens said. He added to McKechnie:

"You might take a look at dinners in case the general takes it into his

head to go round them."

McKechnie said darkly:

"Look here, Tietjens, are you in command of this unit or am I?"

Levin exclaimed sharply, for him:

"What's that? What the . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Captain McKechnie complains that he is the senior officer and should

command this unit."

Levin ejaculated:

"Of all the . . ." He addressed McKechnie with vigour: "My man, the

command of these units is an appointment at disposition of headquarters.

Don't let there be any mistake about that!"

McKechnie said doggedly:

"Captain Tietjens asked me to take the battalion this morning. I

understood he was under . . ."

"You," Levin said, "are attached to this unit for discipline and

rations. You damn well understand that if some uncle or other of yours

were not, to the general's knowledge, a protégé of Captain Tietjens',

you'd be in a lunatic asylum at this moment. . . ."

McKechnie's face worked convulsively, he swallowed as men are said to

swallow who suffer from hydrophobia. He lifted his fist and cried out:

"My un . . ."

Levin said:

"If you say another word you go under medical care the moment it's said.

I've the order in my pocket. Now, fall out. At the double!"

McKechnie wavered on the way to the door. Levin added:

"You can take your choice of going up the line to-night. Or a court of

inquiry for obtaining divorce leave and then not getting a divorce. Or

the other thing. And you can thank Captain Tietjens for the clemency the

general has shown you!"

The hut now reeling a little, Tietjens put the opened smelling bottle to

his nostrils. At the sharp pang of the odour the hut came to attention.

He said:

"We can't keep the general waiting."

"He told me," Levin said, "to give you ten minutes. He's sitting in your

hut. He's tired. This affair has worried him dreadfully. O'Hara is the

first C.O. he ever served under. A useful man, too, at his job."

Tietjens leaned against his dressing-table of meat-cases.

"You told that fellow McKechnie off, all right," he said. "I did not

know you had it in you. . . ."

"Oh," Levin said, "it's just being with _him_. . . . I get his manner

and it does all right. . . . Of course I don't often hear him have to

strafe anybody in that manner. There's nobody really to stand up to him.

Naturally. . . . But just this morning I was in his cabinet doing

private secretary, and he was talking to Pe . . . Talking while he

shaved. And he said exactly that: You can take your choice of going up

the line to-night or a court martial! . . . So naturally I said as near

the same as I could to your little friend. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"We'd better go now."

In the winter sunlight Levin tucked his arm under Tietjens', leaning

towards him gaily and not hurrying. The display was insufferable to

Tietjens, but he recognized that it was indispensable. The bright day

seemed full of things with hard edges--a rather cruel definiteness. . . .

Liver! . . .

The little depot adjutant passed them going very fast, as if before a

wind. Levin just waved his hand in acknowledgment of his salute and went

on, being enraptured in Tietjens' conversation. He said:

"You and . . . and Mrs. Tietjens are dining at the general's to-night.

To meet the G.O.C.I.C. Western Division. And General O'Hara. . . . We

understand that you have definitely separated from Mrs. Tietjens. . . ."

Tietjens forced his left arm to violence to restrain it from tearing

itself from the colonel's grasp.

His mind had become a coffin-headed, leather-jawed charger, like

Schomburg. Sitting on his mind was like sitting on Schomburg at a dull

water-jump. His lips said: "Bub-bub-bub-bub!" He could not feel his

hands. He said:

"I recognize the necessity. If the general sees it in that way. I saw it

in another way myself." His voice was intensely weary. "No doubt," he

said, "the general knows best!"

Levin's face exhibited real enthusiasm. He said:

"You decent fellow! You awfully decent fellow! We're all in the same

boat. . . . Now, will you tell me? For _him_. Was O'Hara drunk last

night or wasn't he?"

Tietjens said:

"I think he was not drunk when he burst into the room with Major

Perowne. . . . I've been thinking about it! I think he became drunk. . . .

When I first requested and then ordered him to leave the room he leant

against the doorpost. ... He was certainly then--in disorder! . . . I

then told him that I should order him under arrest, if he didn't go. . . ."

Levin said:

"Mm! Mm! Mm!"

Tietjens said:

"It was my obvious duty. . . . I assure you that I was perfectly

collected. . . . I beg to assure you that I was perfectly collected. . . ."

Levin said: "I am not questioning the correctness. . . . But . . . we

are all one family. . . . I admit the atrocious . . . the unbearable

nature. . . . But you understand that O'Hara had the right to enter your

room. . . . As P.M.! . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I am not questioning that it was his right. I was assuring you that I

was perfectly collected because the general had honoured me by asking my

opinion on the condition of General O'Hara. . . ."

They had by now walked far beyond the line leading to Tietjens' office

and, close together, were looking down upon the great tapestry of the

French landscape.

"_He_," Levin said, "is anxious for your opinion. It really amounts to

as to whether O'Hara drinks too much to continue in his job! . . . And

he says he will take your word. . . . You could not have a greater

testimonial. . . ."

"He could not," Tietjens said studiedly, "do anything less. Knowing me."

Levin said:

"Good heavens, old man, you rub it in!" He added quickly: "He wishes me

to dispose of this side of the matter. He will take my word and yours.

You will forgive . . ."

The mind of Tietjens had completely failed: the Seine below looked

like an S on fire in an opal. He said: "Eh?" And then: "Oh, yes! I

forgive. . . . It's painful. . . . You probably don't know what you are

doing."

He broke off suddenly:

"By God! . . . Were the Canadian Railway Service to go with my draft?

They were detailed to mend the line here to-day. Also to go . . . I kept

them back. . . . Both orders were dated the same day and hour. I could

not get on to headquarters either from the hotel or from here. . . ."

Levin said:

"Yes, that's all right. He'll be immensely pleased. He's going to speak

to you about _that_!" Tietjens gave an immense sigh of relief.

"I remembered that my orders were conflicting just before. . . . It was

a terrible shock to remember. . . . If I sent them up in the lorries,

the repairs to the railway might be delayed. . . . If I didn't, you

might get strafed to hell. . . . It was an intolerable worry. . . ."

Levin said:

"You remember it just as you saw the handle of your door moving. . . ."

Tietjens said from a sort of a mist:

"Yes. You know how beastly it is when you suddenly remember you have

forgotten something in orders. As if the pit of your stomach had . . ."

Levin said:

"All I ever thought about if I'd forgotten anything was what would be a

good excuse to put up to the adjutant . . . When I was a regimental

officer . . ."

Suddenly Tietjens said insistently:

"How did you know that? . . . About the door handle? Sylvia could not

have seen it. . . ." He added: "And she could not have known what I was

thinking. . . . She had her back to the door. . . . And to me. . . .

Looking at me in the glass. . . . She was not even aware of what had

happened. . . . So she could not have seen the handle move!"

Levin hesitated:

"I . . ." he said. "Perhaps I ought not to have said that. . . . You've

told us. . . . That is to say, you've told . . ." He was pale in the

sunlight. He said: "Old man . . . Perhaps you don't know. . . . Didn't

you perhaps ever, in your childhood? . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Well . . . what is it?"

"That you talk . . . when you're sleeping!" Levin said.

Astonishingly, Tietjens said:

"What of that? . . . It's nothing to write home about! With the overwork

I've had and the sleeplessness. . . ."

Levin said, with a pathetic appeal to Tietjens' omniscience:

"But doesn't it mean . . . We used to say when we were boys . . . that

if you talk in your sleep . . . you're . . . in fact a bit dotty?"

Tietjens said without passion:

"Not necessarily. It means that one has been under mental pressure, but

all mental pressure does not drive you over the edge. Not by any

means. . . . Besides, what does it matter?"

Levin said:

"You mean you don't care. . . . Good God!" He remained looking at the

view, drooping, in intense dejection. He said: "This _beastly_ war! This

_beastly_ war! . . . Look at all that view. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"It's an encouraging spectacle, really. The beastliness of human nature

is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in

imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In

peace and in war! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies

of men. . . . If you got a still more extended range of view over this

whole front you'd have still more enormous bodies of men. . . . Seven to

ten million. . . . All moving towards places towards which they

desperately don't want to go. Desperately! Every one of them is

desperately afraid. But they go on. An immense blind will forces them in

the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its

credit in the whole of recorded history. The one we are engaged in. That

effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives. . . . But

the _other_ lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable

little affairs. . . . Like yours. . . . Like mine. . . ."

Levin exclaimed:

"Just heavens! _What_ a pessimist you are!"

Tietjens said: "Can't you see that is optimism?"

"But," Levin said, "we're being beaten out of the field. . . . You don't

know how desperate things are."

Tietjens said:

"Oh, I know pretty well. As soon as this weather really breaks we're

probably done."

"We can't," Levin said, "possibly hold them. Not possibly."

"But success or failure," Tietjens said, "have nothing to do with the

credit of a story. And a consideration of the virtues of humanity does

not omit the other side. If we lose they win. If success is necessary to

your idea of virtue--_virtus_--they then provide the success instead of

ourselves. But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your

character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your

head. . . . That, thank God, we're doing. . . ."

Levin said:

"I don't know. ... If you knew what is going on at home . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Oh, I know. . . . I know that ground as I know the palm of my hand. I

could invent that life if I knew nothing at all about the facts."

Levin said:

"I believe you could." He added: "Of course you could. . . . And yet the

only use we can make of you is to martyrize you because two drunken

brutes break into your wife's bedroom. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"You betray your non-Anglo-Saxon origin by being so vocal. . . . And by

your illuminative exaggerations!"

Levin suddenly exclaimed:

"What the devil were we talking about?"

Tietjens said grimly:

"I am here at the disposal of the competent military

authority--You!--that is inquiring into my antecedents. I am ready to go

on belching platitudes till you stop me."

Levin answered:

"For goodness' sake help me. This is horribly painful. _He_--the

general--has given me the job of finding out what happened last night.

He won't face it himself. He's attached to you both."

Tietjens said:

"It's asking too much to ask me to help you. . . . What did I say in my

sleep? What has Mrs. Tietjens told the general?"

"The general," Levin said, "has not seen Mrs. Tietjens. He could not

trust himself. He knew she would twist him round her little finger."

Tietjens said:

"He's beginning to learn. He was sixty last July, but he's beginning."

"So that," Levin said, "what we do know we learnt in the way I have told

you. And from O'Hara of course. The general would not let Pe . . ., the

other fellow, speak a word, while he was shaving. He just said: 'I won't

hear you. I won't hear you. You can take your choice of going up the

line as soon as there are trains running or being broke on my personal

application to the King in Council."