She looked at him quickly, tears remaining upon her cheeks, and then away.
‘One of the best,’ Mark said. ‘A fellow who never told a lie or did a dishonourable thing in his life. Let him down easy, there’s a good girl. You ought to, you know.’
The girl, her face turned away, said:
‘I’d lay down my life for him!’
Mark said:
‘I know you would. I know a good woman when I see one. And think! He probably considers that he is … offering his life, you know, for you. And me, too, of course! It’s a different way of looking at things.’ He gripped her awkwardly but irresistibly by the upper arm. It was very thin under her blue cloth coat. He said to himself:
‘By Jove! Christopher likes them skinny. It’s the athletic sort that attracts him. This girl is as clean run as …’ He couldn’t think of anything as clean run as Miss Wannop, but he felt a warm satisfaction at having achieved an intimacy with her and his brother. He said:
‘You aren’t going away? Not without a kinder word to him. You think! He might be killed… . Besides, probably he’s never killed a German. He was a liaison officer. Since then he’s been in charge of a dump where they sift army dustbins. To see how they can give the men less to eat. That means that the civilians get more. You don’t object to his giving civilians more meat? … It isn’t even helping to kill Germans… .’
He felt her arm press his hand against her warm side.
‘What’s he going to do now?’ she asked. Her voice wavered.
‘That’s what I’m here about,’ Mark said. ‘I’m going in to see old Hogarth. You don’t know Hogarth? Old General Hogarth? I think I can get him to give Christopher a job with the transport. A safe job. Safeish! No beastly glory business about it. No killing beastly Germans either… . I beg your pardon, if you like Germans.’
She drew her arm from his hand in order to look him in the face.
‘Oh!’ she said, ‘you don’t want him to have any beastly military glory!’ The colour came back into her face: she looked at him open-eyed.
He said:
‘No! Why the devil should he?’ He said to himself: ‘She’s got enormous eyes; a good neck; good shoulders; good breasts; clean hips; small hands. She isn’t knock-kneed; neat ankles. She stands well on her feet. Feet not too large! Five foot four, say! A real good filly!’ He went on aloud: ‘Why in the world should he want to be a beastly soldier? He’s the heir to Groby. That ought to be enough for one man.’
Having stood still sufficiently long for what she knew to be his critical inspection, she put her hand in turn, precipitately, under his arm and moved him towards the entrance steps.
‘Let’s be quick then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get him into your transport at once. Before he goes to-morrow. Then we’ll know he’s safe.’
He was puzzled by her dress. It was very business-like, dark blue and very short. A white blouse with a black silk, man’s tie. A wide-awake, with, on the front of the band, a cipher.
‘You’re in uniform yourself,’ he said. ‘Does your conscience let you do war work?’
She said:
‘No. We’re hard up. I’m taking the gym classes in a great big school to turn an honest penny… . Do be quick!’
Her pressure on his elbow flattered him. He resisted it a little, hanging back, to make her more insistent. He liked being pleaded with by a pretty woman; Christopher’s girl at that.
He said:
‘Oh, it’s not a matter of minutes. They keep ’em weeks at the base before they send ’em up… . We’ll fix him up all right, I’ve no doubt. We’ll wait in the hall till he comes down.’
He told the benevolent commissionaire, one of two in a pulpit in the crowded grim hall, that he was going up to see General Hogarth in a minute or two. But not to send a bell-boy. He might be some time yet.
He sat himself beside Miss Wannop, clumsily on a wooden bench, humanity surging over their toes as if they had been on a beach. She moved a little to make room for him and that, too, made him feel good. He said:
‘You said just now: “we” are hard up. Does “we” mean you and Christopher?’
She said:
‘I and Mr. Tietjens. Oh, no! I and mother! The paper she used to write for stopped. When your father died, I believe. He found money for it, I think. And mother isn’t suited to free-lancing. She’s worked too hard in her life.’
He looked at her, his round eyes protruding.
‘I don’t know what that is, free-lancing,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to be comfortable. How much do you and your mother need to keep you comfortable? And put in a bit more so that Christopher could have a mutton-chop now and then!’
She hadn’t really been listening. He said with some insistence: ‘Look here! I’m here on business. Not like an elderly admirer forcing himself on you. Though, by God, I do admire you too… . But my father wanted your mother to be comfortable… .’
Her face, turned to him, became rigid.
‘You don’t mean …’ she began. He said:
‘You won’t get it any quicker by interrupting. I have to tell my stories in my own way. My father wanted your mother to be comfortable. He said so that she could write books, not papers. I don’t know what the difference is: that’s what he said. He wants you to be comfortable too… . You’ve not got any encumbrances? Not … oh, say a business! a hat shop that doesn’t pay? Some girls have… .’
She said: ‘No. I just teach … oh, do be quick… .’
For the first time in his life he dislocated the course of his thoughts to satisfy a longing in someone else.
‘You may take it to go on with,’ he said, ‘as if my father had left your mother a nice little plum.’ He cast about to find his scattered thoughts.
‘He has! He has! After all!’ the girl said. ‘Oh, thank God!’
‘There’ll be a bit for you, if you like,’ Mark said, ‘or perhaps Christopher won’t let you. He’s ratty with me. And something for your brother to buy a doctor’s business with.’ He asked: ‘You haven’t fainted, have you?’ She said:
‘No. I don’t faint. I cry.’
‘That’ll be all right,’ he answered. He went on: ‘That’s your side of it. Now for mine. I want Christopher to have a place where he’ll be sure of a mutton-chop and an arm-chair by the fire. And someone to be good for him. You’re good for him. I can see that. I know women!’
The girl was crying, softly and continuously. It was the first moment of the lifting of strain that she had known since the day before the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier, near a place called Gemmenich.
It had begun with the return of Mrs. Duchemin from Scotland. She had sent at once for Miss Wannop to the rectory, late at night. By the light of candles in tall silver sticks, against oak panelling she had seemed like a mad block of marble, with staring, dark eyes and mad hair. She had exclaimed in a voice as hard as a machine’s:
‘How do you get rid of a baby? You’ve been a servant. You ought to know!’
That had been the great shock, the turning-point, of Valentine Wannop’s life. Her last years before that had been of great tranquillity, tinged, of course, with melancholy because she loved Christopher Tietjens. But she had early learned to do without, and the world as she saw it was a place of renunciations, of high endeavour and sacrifice. Tietjens had to be a man who came to see her mother and talked wonderfully. She had been happy when he had been in the house – she in the housemaid’s pantry, getting the tea-things. She had, besides, been very hard-worked for her mother; the weather had been, on the whole, good, the corner of the country in which they lived had continued to seem fresh and agreeable. She had had excellent health, got an occasional ride on the quitamer with which Tietjens had replaced Joel’s rig; and her brother had done admirably at Eton, taking such a number of exhibitions and things that, once at Magdalen, he had been nearly off his mother’s hands. An admirable, gay boy, not unlikely to run for, as well as being a credit to, his university, if he didn’t g
et sent down for his political extravagances. He was a Communist!
And at the rectory there had been the Duchemins, or rather Mrs. Duchemin and, during most week-ends, Macmaster somewhere about.
The passion of Macmaster for Edith Ethel and of Edith Ethel for Macmaster had seemed to her one of the beautiful things of life. They seemed to swim in a sea of renunciations, of beautiful quotations, and of steadfast waiting. Macmaster did not interest her personally much, but she took him on trust because of Edith Ethel’s romantic passion and because he was Christopher Tietjens’ friend. She had never heard him say anything original; when he used quotations they would be apt rather than striking. But she took it for granted that he was the right man – much as you take it for granted the engine of an express train in which you are is reliable. The right people have chosen it for you… .
With Mrs. Duchemin, mad before her, she had the first intimation that her idolised friend, in whom she had believed as she had believed in the firmness of the great, sunny earth, had been the mistress of her lover – almost since the first day she had seen him… . And that Mrs. Duchemin had, stored somewhere, a character of an extreme harshness and great vulgarity of language. She raged up and down in the candlelight, before the dark oak panelling, screaming coarse phrases of the deepest hatred for her lover. Didn’t the oaf know his business better than to …? The dirty little Port of Leith fish-handler… .
What, then, were tall candles in silver sticks for? And polished panelling in galleries?
Valentine Wannop couldn’t have been a little ashcat in worn cotton dresses, sleeping under the stairs, in an Ealing household with a drunken cook, an invalid mistress and three over-fed men, without acquiring a considerable knowledge of the sexual necessities and excesses of humanity. But, as all the poorer helots of great cities hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance, and suave wealth, she had always considered that, far from the world of Ealing and its county councillors who over-ate and neighed like stallions, there were bright colonies of beings, chaste, beautiful in thought, altruist and circumspect.
And, till that moment, she had imagined herself on the skirts of such a colony. She presupposed a society of beautiful intellects centring in London round her friends. Ealing she just put out of her mind. She considered: she had, indeed, once heard Tietjens say that humanity was made up of exact and constructive intellects on the one hand and on the other of stuff to fill graveyards… . Now, what had become of the exact and constructive intellects?
Worst of all, what became of her beautiful inclination towards Tietjens, for she couldn’t regard it as anything more? Couldn’t her heart sing any more whilst she was in the housemaid’s pantry and he in her mother’s study? And what became, still more, of what she knew to be Tietjens’ beautiful inclination towards her? She asked herself the eternal question – and she knew it to be the eternal question – whether no man and woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. And, looking at Mrs. Duchemin, rushing backwards and forwards in the light of candles, blue-white of face and her hair flying, Valentine Wannop said: ‘No! no! The tiger lying in the reeds will always raise its head!’ But tiger … it was more like a peacock.
Tietjens, raising his head from the other side of the tea-table and looking at her with his long, meditative glance from beside her mother; ought he then, instead of blue and protruding, to have eyes divided longitudinally in the blacks of them – that should divide, closing or dilating, on a yellow ground, with green glowings of furtive light?
She was aware that Edith Ethel had done her an irreparable wrong, for you cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same. Or not for years. Nevertheless she stayed with Mrs. Duchemin until far into the small hours, when that lady fell, a mere parcel of bones in a peacock-blue wrapper, into a deep chair and refused to move or speak; nor did she afterwards slacken in her faithful waiting on her friend… .
On the next day came the war. That was a nightmare of pure suffering, with never a let-up, day or night. It began on the morning of the fourth with the arrival of her brother from some sort of Oxford Communist Summer School on the Broads. He was wearing a German corps student’s cap and was very drunk. He had been seeing German friends off from Harwich. It was the first time she had ever seen a drunken man, so that was a good present to her.
Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his father, he had his mother’s hooked nose and was always a little unbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn’t hitherto mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper; her brother, when he had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption. But her mother had only chuckled.
The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood and to torture; neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as if – so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived with her – in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture, and flay off all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling, and vitriolic, one hand clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom Edward Wannop affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being ducked in a horse-pond, shot or otherwise martyrised. That made it obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war. If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled and terrorised millions would have thrown down their arms!
Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother, who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs. Wannop had said:
‘What does your wife think about it?’
Tietjens had answered:
‘Oh, Mrs. Tietjens is a pro-German… . Or no, that isn’t exact! She has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war. She can’t bear the thought of physical suffering. I can’t blame her.’
Mrs. Wannop was no longer listening; her daughter was.
For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man and far less of an inclination – the war and Mrs. Duchemin between them. He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on. She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him.
One Friday afternoon at Macmaster’s she had had a long talk with him, the first she had had since the drive and the accident.
Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons – and that had been some time before the war – Valentine Wannop had accompanied Mrs. Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the rectory. Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs. Duchemin drifting about the large book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists.
On this occasion – a November day, very chilly, wet – there had been next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually full. Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin had taken a Mr. Spong, an architect, into the dining-room to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi’s Views of Rome that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster. A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting close together in the far window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr. Jegg used the word ‘inhibition’. Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat
side by side on the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire warming their backs. He said:
‘Well, Miss Wannop. What have you been doing?’ and they drifted into talking of the war. You couldn’t not. She was astonished not to find him so loathsome as she had expected, for, just at that time, with the facts that were always being driven into her mind by the pacifist friends of her brother and with continual brooding over the morals of Mrs. Duchemin, she had an automatic feeling that all manly men were lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of sadism. She knew that this view of Tietjens was wrong, but she cherished it.
She found him – as subconsciously she knew he was – astonishingly mild. She had too often watched him whilst he listened to her mother’s tirades against the Kaiser, not to know that. He did not raise his voice, he showed no emotion. He said at last:
‘You and I are like two people …’ He paused and began again more quickly: ‘Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read “Monkey’s Soap”; if you look back when you’ve passed it’s “Needs no Rinsing.” … You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet a third… . But I hope we respect each other. We’re both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect you and I hope you respect me.’
She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr. Jegg, across the room, said: ‘The failure to co-ordinate …’ and then dropped his voice.
Tietjens looked at her attentively.
‘You don’t respect me?’ he asked. She kept obstinately silent.
‘I’d have liked you to have said it,’ he repeated.
‘Oh,’ she cried out, ‘how can I respect you when there is all this suffering? So much pain! Such torture … I can’t sleep … never … I haven’t slept a whole night since … Think of the immense spaces, stretching out under the night … I believe pain and fear must be worse at night… .’ She knew she was crying out like that because her dread had come true. When he had said: ‘I’d have liked you to have said it,’ using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, too, was going.