But then Tietjens must have abandoned Mrs. Duchemin; and, if he had abandoned Mrs. Duchemin, he must be available for her, Valentine Wannop! The feeling, she considered, made her ignoble; but it came from depths of her being that she could not control and, existing, it soothed her. Then, with the coming of the war, the whole problem died out, and between the opening of hostilities and what she had known to be the inevitable departure of her lover, she had surrendered herself to what she thought to be the pure physical desire for him. Amongst the terrible, crashing anguishes of that time, there had been nothing for it but surrender! With the unceasing – the never-ceasing – thought of suffering; with the never-ceasing idea that her lover, too, must soon be so suffering, there was in the world no other refuge. No other!
She surrendered. She waited for him to speak the word, or look the look that should unite them. She was finished. Chastity: napoo finny! Like everything else!
Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in which she was; or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it was thus love worked upon the body – and that it would stop for ever at that!
But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides.
Once before, for a fraction of a second, after the long, warm night of their drive, she had felt that impulsion. Now, years after, she was to know it all the time, waking or half-waking; and it would drive her from her bed. She would stand all night at the open window till the stars paled above a world turned grey. It could convulse her with joy; it could shake her with sobs and cut through her breast like a knife.
The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago; he had been going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what a love scene was. It passed without any mention of the word ‘love’; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart.
Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world – ‘To no other soul in the world,’ he had said! – his doubts, his misgivings, and his fears; it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered the word ‘Come’, she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, ‘There is no hope’, she would have known the finality of despair. Having said neither, she knew: ‘This is our condition; so we must continue!’ And she knew, too, that he was telling her that he, like her, was … oh, say on the side of the angels. She was then, she knew, so nicely balanced that, had he said, ‘Will you to-night be my mistress?’ she would have said ‘Yes’; for it was as if they had been, really, at the end of the world.
But his abstention not only strengthened her in her predilection for chastity; it restored to her her image of the world as a place of virtues and endeavours. For a time at least she again hummed beneath her breath upon occasion, for it seemed as if her heart sang within her. And there was restored to her her image of her lover as a beautiful spirit. She had been able to look at him across the tea-table of their dog kennel in Bedford Park, during the last months, almost as she had looked across the more shining table of the cottage near the rectory. The deterioration that she knew Mrs. Duchemin to have worked in her mind was assuaged. It could even occur to her that Mrs. Duchemin’s madness had been no more than a scare to be followed by no necessary crime. Valentine Wannop had re-become her confident self in a world of, at least, straight problems.
But Mrs. Duchemin’s outbreak of a week ago had driven the old phantoms across her mind. For Mrs. Duchemin she had still had a great respect. She could not regard her Edith Ethel as merely a hypocrite or, indeed, as a hypocrite at all. There was her great achievement of making something like a man of that miserable little creature – as there had been her other great achievement of keeping her unfortunate husband for so long out of a lunatic asylum. That had been no mean feat; neither feat had been mean. And Valentine knew that Edith Ethel really loved beauty, circumspection, urbanity. It was no hypocrisy that made her advocate the Atalanta race of chastity. But, also, as Valentine Wannop saw it, humanity has these doublings of strong natures; just as the urbane and grave Spanish nation must find its outlet in the shrieking lusts of the bull-ring or the circumspect, laborious and admirable city typist must find her derivative in the cruder lusts of certain novelists, so Edith Ethel must break down into physical sexualities – and into shrieked coarseness of fishwives. How else, indeed, do we have saints? Surely, alone, by the ultimate victory of the one tendency over the other!
But now after her farewell scene with Edith Ethel a simple rearrangement of the pattern had brought many of the old doubts, at least temporarily, back. Valentine said to herself that, just because of the very strength of her character, Edith Ethel couldn’t have been brought down to uttering her fantastic denunciation of Tietjens, the merely mad charges of debauchery and excesses and finally the sexually lunatic charge against herself, except under the sting of some such passion as jealousy. She, Valentine, couldn’t arrive at any other conclusion. And, viewing the matter as she believed she now did, more composedly, she considered with seriousness that, men being what they are, her lover respecting, or despairing of, herself had relieved the grosser necessities of his being – at the expense of Mrs. Duchemin, who had, no doubt, been only too ready.
And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards the Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going from her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the long, hard thing that life is. And on the Thursday two minor, or major, worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced himself as coming home for several days’ leave, and she had the trouble of thinking that she would have forced upon her a companionship and a point of view that would be coarsely and uproariously opposed to anything that Tietjens stood for – or for which he was ready to sacrifice himself. Moreover she would have to accompany her brother to a number of riotous festivities whilst all the time she would have to think of Tietjens as getting hour by hour nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in contact with enemy forces. In addition her mother had received an enviably-paid-for commission from one of the more excitable Sunday papers to write a series of articles on extravagant matters connected with the hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully – more particularly as Edward was coming home – that Valentine Wannop had conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her mother… . It would have meant very little waste of time, and the £60 that it would have brought in would have made all the difference to them for months and months.
But Tietjens, whom Mrs. Wannop had come to rely on as her right-hand man in these matters, had, it appeared, shown an unexpected recalcitrancy. He had, Mrs. Wannop said, hardly seemed himself and had gibed at the two first subjects proposed – th
at of ‘war babies’ and the fact that the Germans were reduced to eating their own corpses – as being below the treatment of any decent pen. The illegitimacy rate, he had said, had shown very little increase; the French-derived German word ‘Kadaver’ meant bodies of horses or cattle; Leichnam being the German for the word ‘corpse’. He had practically refused to have anything to do with the affair.
As to the Kadaver business Valentine agreed with him; as to the ‘war babies’ she kept a more open mind. If there weren’t any war babies it couldn’t, as far as she could see, matter whether one wrote about them; it couldn’t certainly matter as much as to write about them, supposing the poor little things to exist. She was aware that this was immoral, but her mother needed the money desperately and her mother came first.
There was nothing for it, therefore, but to plead with Tietjens, for Valentine knew that without so much of moral support from him as would be implied by a good-natured, or an enforced sanction of the article, Mrs. Wannop would drop the matter and so would lose her connection with the excitable paper which paid well. It happened that on the Friday morning Mrs. Wannop received a request that she would write for a Swiss review a propaganda article about some historical matter connected with the peace after Waterloo. The pay would be practically nothing, but the employment was at least relatively dignified, and Mrs. Wannop – which was quite in the ordinary course of things! – told Valentine to ring Tietjens up and ask him for some details about the Congress of Vienna at which, before and after Waterloo, the peace terms had been wrangled out.
Valentine rang up – as she had done hundreds of times; it was to her a great satisfaction that she was going to hear Tietjens speak once more at least. The telephone was answered from the other end, and Valentine gave her two messages, the one as to the Congress of Vienna, the other as to war babies. The appalling speech came back:
‘Young woman! You’d better keep off the grass. Mrs. Duchemin is already my husband’s mistress. You keep off.’ There was about the voice no human quality; it was if from an immense darkness the immense machine had spoken words that dealt blows. She answered; and it was as if a substratum of her mind of which she knew nothing must have been prepared for that very speech; so that it was not her own ‘she’ that answered levelly and coolly:
‘You have probably mistaken the person you are speaking to. Perhaps you will ask Mr. Tietjens to ring up Mrs. Wannop when he is at liberty.’
The voice said:
‘My husband will be at the War Office at 4.15. He will speak to you there – about your war babies. But I’d keep off the grass if I were you!’ The receiver at the other end was hung up.
She went about her daily duties. She had heard of a kind of pine kernel that was very cheap and very nourishing, or at least very filling. They had come to it that it was a matter of pennies balanced against the feeling of satiety, and she visited several shops in search of this food. When she had found it she returned to the dog kennel; her brother Edward had arrived. He was rather subdued. He brought with him a piece of meat which was part of his leave ration. He occupied himself with polishing up his sailor’s uniform for a rag-time party to which they were to go that evening. They were to meet plenty of conchies, he said. Valentine put the meat – it was a God-send, though very stringy! – on to stew with a number of chopped vegetables. She went up to her room to do some typing for her mother.
The nature of Tietjens’ wife occupied her mind. Before, she had barely thought about her: she had seemed unreal; so mysterious as to be a myth! Radiant and high-stepping, like a great stag! But she must be cruel! She must be vindictively cruel to Tietjens himself, or she could not have revealed his private affairs! Just broadcast; for she could not, bluff it how she might, have been certain of to whom she was speaking! A thing that wasn’t done! But she had delivered her cheek to Mrs. Wannop; a thing, too, that wasn’t done! Yet so kindly! The telephone bell rang several times during the morning. She let her mother answer it.
She had to get the dinner, which took three-quarters of an hour. It was a pleasure to see her mother eat so well; a good stew, rich and heavy with haricot beans. She herself couldn’t eat, but no one noticed, which was a good thing. Her mother said that Tietjens had not yet telephoned, which was very inconsiderate. Edward said: ‘What! The Huns haven’t killed old Feather Bolster yet? But of course he’s been found a safe job.’ The telephone on the sideboard became a terror to Valentine; at any moment his voice might … Edward went on telling anecdotes of how they bamboozled petty officers on minesweepers. Mrs. Wannop listened to him with the courteous, distant interest of the great listening to commercial travellers. Edward desired draught ale and produced a two-shilling piece. He seemed very much coarsened; it was, no doubt, only on the surface. In these days everyone was very much coarsened on the surface.
She went with a quart jug to the jug and bottle department of the nearest public-house – a thing she had never done before. Even at Ealing the mistress hadn’t allowed her to be sent to a public-house; the cook had had to fetch her dinner beer herself or have it sent in. Perhaps the Ealing mistress had exercised more surveillance than Valentine had believed; a kind woman, but an invalid. Nearly all day in bed. Blind passion overcame Valentine at the thought of Edith Ethel in Tietjens’ arms. Hadn’t she got her own eunuch? Mrs. Tietjens had said: ‘Mrs. Duchemin is his mistress!’ Is! Then he might be there now!
In the contemplation of that image she missed the thrills of buying beer in a bottle and jug department. Apparently it was like buying anything else, except for the smell of beer on the sawdust. You said: ‘A quart of the best bitter!’ and a fat, quite polite man, with an oily head and a white apron, took your money and filled your jug… . But Edith Ethel had abused Tietjens so foully! The more foully the more certain it made it! … Draught beer in a jug had little marblings of burst foam on its brown surface. It mustn’t be spilt at the kerbs of crossings! – the more certain it made it! Some women did so abuse their lovers after sleeping with them, and the more violent the transports the more frantic the abuse. It was the ‘post-dash-tristis’ of the Rev. Duchemin! Poor devil! Tristis! Tristis!
Terra tribus scopulis vastum … Not longum!
Brother Edward began communing with himself, long and unintelligibly as to where he should meet his sister at 19.30 and give her a blow-out! The names of restaurants fell from his lips into her panic. He decided hilariously and not quite steadily – a quart is a lot to a fellow from a mine-sweeper carrying no booze at all! – on meeting her at 7.20 at High Street and going to a pub he knew; they would go on to the dance afterwards. In a studio. ‘Oh, God!’ her heart said, ‘if Tietjens should want her then!’ To be his; on his last night. He might! Everybody was coarsened then; on the surface. Her brother rolled out of the house, slamming the door so that every tile on the jerry-built dog kennel rose and sat down again.
She went upstairs and began to look over her frocks. She couldn’t tell what frocks she looked over; they lay like aligned rags on the bed, the telephone bell ringing madly. She heard her mother’s voice, suddenly assuaged: ‘Oh! oh! … It’s you!’ She shut her door and began to pull open and to close drawer after drawer. As soon as she ceased that exercise her mother’s voice became half audible; quite audible when she raised it to ask a question. She heard her say: ‘Not get her into trouble … Of course!’ then it died away into mere high sounds.
She heard her mother calling:
‘Valentine! Valentine! Come down… . Don’t you want to speak to Christopher? … Valentine! Valentine! …’ And then another burst: ‘Valentine … Valentine … Valentine …’ As if she had been a puppy dog! Mrs. Wannop, thank God, was on the lowest step of the creaky stairs. She had left the telephone. She called up:
‘Come down. I want to tell you! The dear boy has saved me! He always saves me! What shall I do now he’s gone?’
‘He saved others: himself he could not save!’ Valentine quoted bitterly. She caught up her wideawake. She wasn’t going to prink herself for
him. He must take her as she was… . Himself he could not save! But he did himself proud! With women! … Coarsened! But perhaps only on the surface! She herself! … She was running downstairs!
Her mother had retreated into the little parlour: nine feet by nine; in consequence, at ten feet it was too tall for its size. But there was in it a sofa with cushions… . With her head upon those cushions, perhaps… . If he came home with her! Late! …
Her mother was saying: He’s a splendid fellow… . A root idea for a war-baby article… . If a Tommy was a decent fellow he abstained because he didn’t want to leave his girl in trouble… . If he wasn’t he chanced it because it might be his last chance… .
‘A message to me!’ Valentine said to herself. ‘But which sentence… .’ She moved, absently, all the cushions to one end of the sofa. Her mother exclaimed:
‘He sent his love! His mother was lucky to have such a son!’ and turned into her tiny hole of a study.
Valentine ran down over the broken tiles of the garden path, pulling her wideawake firmly on. She had looked at her wrist-watch; it was two and twelve: 14.45. If she was to walk to the War Office by 4.15 – 16.15 – a sensible innovation! – she must step out. Five miles to Whitehall. God knows what, then! Five miles back! Two and a half, diagonally, to High Street Station by half-past 19! Twelve and a half miles in five hours or less. And three hours dancing on the top of it. And to dress! … She needed to be fit … And, with violent bitterness, she said:
‘Well! I’m fit… .’ She had an image of the aligned hundred of girls in blue jumpers and men’s ties keeping whom fit had kept her super-fit. She wondered how many of them would be men’s mistresses before the year was out. It was August then. But perhaps none! Because she had kept them fit… .