‘Ah!’ she said, ‘if I had been a loose woman, with flaccid breasts and a soft body. All perfumed!’ … But neither Sylvia Tietjens nor Ethel Duchemin were soft. They might be scented on occasion! But they could not contemplate with equanimity doing a twelve-mile walk to save a few pence and dancing all night on top of it! She could! And perhaps the price she paid was just that; she was in such hard condition she hadn’t moved him to … She perhaps exhaled such an aura of sobriety, chastity, and abstinence as to suggest to him that … that a decent fellow didn’t get his girl into trouble before going to be killed… . Yet if he were such a town bull! … She wondered how she knew such phrases… .
The sordid and aligned houses seemed to rush past her in the mean August sunshine. That was because if you thought hard time went quicker; or because after you noticed the paper shop at this corner you would be up to the boxes of onions outside the shop of the next corner before you noticed anything else.
She was in Kensington Gardens, on the north side; she had left the poor shops behind… . In sham country, with sham lawns, sham avenues, sham streams. Sham people pursuing their ways across the sham grass. Or no! Not sham! In a vacuum! No! ‘Pasteurised’ was the word! Like dead milk. Robbed of their vitamins… .
If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a larger pile to put into the leering – or compassionate – taxi-cabman’s hand after he had helped her support her brother into the dog-kennel door. Edward would be dead drunk. She had fifteen shillings for the taxi… . If she gave a few coppers more it seemed generous… . What a day to look forward to still! Some days were lifetimes!
She would rather die than let Tietjens pay for the cab!
Why? Once a taximan had refused payment for driving her and Edward all the way to Chiswick, and she hadn’t felt insulted. She had paid him; but she hadn’t felt insulted! A sentimental fellow; touched at the heart by the pretty sister – or perhaps he didn’t really believe it was a sister – and her incapable bluejacket brother! Tietjens was a sentimental fellow too… . What was the difference? … And then! The mother a dead, heavy sleeper; the brother dead drunk. One in the morning! He couldn’t refuse her! Blackness, cushions! She had arranged the cushions, she remembered. Arranged them subconsciously! Blackness! Heavy sleep; dead drunkenness! … Horrible! … A disgusting affair! An affair of Ealing… . It shall make her one with all the stuff to fill graveyards… . Well, what else was she, Valentine Wannop; daughter of her father? And of her mother? Yes! But she herself … Just a little nobody!
They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty… . But her brother was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking treason. At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas couldn’t for the moment concern him… . That ’bus touched her skirt as she ran for the island… . It might have been better… . But one hadn’t the courage!
She was looking at patterned deaths under a little green roof, such as they put over bird shelters. Her heart stopped! Before, she had been breathless! She was going mad. She was dying… . All these deaths! And not merely the deaths… . The waiting for the approach of death; the contemplation of the parting from life! This minute you were; that, and you weren’t! What was it like? Oh heaven, she knew… . She stood there contemplating parting from … One minute you were; the next … Her breath fluttered in her chest… . Perhaps he wouldn’t come …
He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him and said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and his like responsible! … He had apparently a brother, a responsible one too! Browner complexioned! … But he! He! He! He! Completely calm; with direct eyes… . It wasn’t possible. ‘Holde Lippen: klaare Augen: heller Sinn… .’ Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn’t look at you so, unless …
She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he belonged – more than to any browner, mere civilian, brother! – to her! She was going to ask him! If he answered: ‘Yes! I am such a man!’ she was going to say: ‘Then you must take me too! If them, why not me? I must have a child. I too!’ She desired a child. She would overwhelm these hateful lodestones with a flood of argument; she imagined – she felt – the words going between her lips… . She imagined her fainting mind; her consenting limbs… .
His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings. Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word from him. Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists. He might as well have recited the names of railway stations. His eyes, his unconcerned face, his tranquil shoulders; they were what acquitted him. The greatest love speech he had ever and could ever make her was when, harshly and angrily, he said something like:
‘Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better’ – brushing her aside as if she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to her!
She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said ‘Pink! pink!’ The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed… . It was just a problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him… . Good for him was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like water that goes off the boil… . ‘Waters stilled at even.’ Nonsense. It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save his brother… . Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm feeling settled down upon her; this was her brother; the next to the best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, never so grateful as to the other – who had done nothing!
Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the blessed word Transport! ‘They,’ so Mark said: he and she – the family feeling again – were going to get Christopher into the Transport… . By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. ‘Hooray!’ he had written to his mother, ‘I’ve been off my feed; recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they’re putting me senior N.C.O. of First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally front-line caboodle!’ Valentine had had to read this letter in the scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But charity begins surely with the char. She had had to. Now she could thank God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. ‘Why,’ one sentence ran, ‘our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b—y hell to the man who walks across it!’ There the O.C. practised casting with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. ‘That’ll show you what a soft job it is!’ the sergeant had finished triumphantly.
So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall; downright, healthy middle-class – or perhaps upper middle-class – for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible, moccasined shoes the tide of humanity flowed before her hard bench. There were two commissionaires, the one always benevolent, the other perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of her; on the other, a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a knob. She could not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to conciliate her; but she knew she would know in a minute.
For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost mathematically symmetrical. Now she was an English middle-class girl – whose mother had a sufficient income – in blue cloth, a wideawake hat, a black silk tie;
without a thought in her head that she shouldn’t have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five minutes ago, she had been … She could not even remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town … No, she could not think the words… . A raging stallion then! If now he should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the table, she would retreat.
It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick… . When the old man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman came out … It was exactly like that! She hadn’t time to work out the analogy. But it was like that… . In rainy weather the whole world altered. Darkened! … The catgut that turned them slackened … slackened… . But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the stick!
Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance:
‘We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother… .’
It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr. Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years ago. Her mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting, Mr. Tietjens alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it up to her. He was making it up. In no princely fashion but adequately, as a gentleman.
Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bell-boy came up to him and said: ‘Mr. Riccardo!’ Mark Tietjens said: ‘No! He’s gone!’ He continued:
‘Your brother… . Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a practice, a good practice! When he’s a full-fledged sawbones.’ He stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his umbrella handle; he was extremely nervous.
‘Now you!’ he said. ‘Two or three hundred. A year of course! The capital absolutely your own… .’ He paused: ‘But I warn you! Christopher won’t like it. He’s got his knife into me. I wouldn’t grudge you … oh, any sum!’ He waved his hand to indicate an amount boundless in its figures. ‘I know you keep Christopher straight,’ he said. ‘The only person that could!’ He added: ‘Poor devil!’
She said:
‘He’s got his knife into you? Why?’
He answered vaguely:
‘Oh, there’s been all this talk… . Untrue, of course.’
She said:
‘People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps because there’s been delay in settling the estate.’
He said:
‘Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!’
‘Then they have been saying,’ she exclaimed, ‘things against … against me. And him!’
He exclaimed in anguish:
‘Oh, but I ask you to believe … I beg you to believe that I believe … you! Miss Wannop!’ He added grotesquely: ‘As pure as dew that lies within Aurora’s sun-tipped …’ His eyes stuck out like those of a suffocating fish. He said: ‘I beg you not on that account to hand the giddy mitten to …’ He writhed in his tight double collar. ‘His wife!’ he said … ‘She’s no good to … for him! … She’s soppily in love with him. But no good …’ He very nearly sobbed. ‘You’re the only …’ he said, ‘I know …’
It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Five-pence! But what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year… . Two hundred and forty times five… .
Mark said brightly:
‘If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred… . You say that’s ample to give Christopher his chop… . And settled on her three … four … I like to be exact … hundred a year… . The capital of it; with remainder to you …’ His interrogative face beamed.
She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood Mrs. Duchemin’s:
‘You couldn’t expect us, with our official position … to connive …’ Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She couldn’t be expected… . She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! You can’t ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! … It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said – to Mark:
‘It’s as if the whole world had conspired … like a carpenter’s vice – to force us …’ she was going to say ‘together… .’ But he burst in, astonishingly:
‘He must have his buttered toast … and his mutton chop … and Rhum St. James!’ He said: ‘Damn it all… . You were made for him… . You can’t blame people for coupling you… . They’re forced to it… . If you hadn’t existed they’d have had to invent you … Like Dante for … who was it? … Beatrice? There are couples like that.’
She said:
‘Like a carpenter’s vice… . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven’t we resisted?’
His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:
‘You won’t … because of my ox’s hoof … desert… .’
She said: – she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.
‘I ask you to believe that I will never … abandon …’
It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. Micawber!
Christopher Tietjens – in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his best uniform – spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had approached her from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she had been turned towards Mark on his bench:
‘Come along! Let’s get out of this!’ He was, she asked herself, getting out of this! Towards what?
Like mutes from a funeral – or as if she had been, between the brothers, a prisoner under escort – they walked down steps, half righted towards the exit arch, one and a half righted to face Whitehall. The brothers grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over her head. They crossed, by the islands, Whitehall, where the ’bus had brushed her skirt. Under an archway –
In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other. Mark said:
‘I suppose you won’t shake hands!’
Christopher said:
‘No! Why should I?’ She herself had cried out to Christopher:
‘Oh, do!’ (The wireless squares overhead no longer concerned her. Her brother was, no doubt, getting drunk in a bar in Piccadilly… . A surface coarseness!)
Mark said:
‘Hadn’t you better? You might get killed! A fellow just getting killed would not like to think he had refused to shake his brother by the hand!’
Christopher had said: ‘Oh … well!’
During her happiness over this hyperborean sentimentality he had gripped her thin upper arm. He had led her past swans – or possibly huts; she never remembered which – to a seat that had over it, or near it, a weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish:
‘Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo.’
She had answered:
‘Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve… . I have to see my brother home… . He will be drunk… .’ She meant to say: ‘Oh, my darling, I have wanted you so much… .’
She said instead:
‘I have arranged the cushions… .’
She said to herself:
‘Now whatever made me say that? It’s as if I had said: “You’ll find the ham in the larder under a plate… .” No tenderness about it… .’
She went away, up a cockle-shelled path, between ankle-high railings, crying bitterly. An old tramp, with red weeping eyes and a thin white beard, regarded her curiously from where he lay on the grass. He imagined himself the monarch of that landscape.
‘That’s women!’ he said with the apparently imbecile enigmaticality of the old and the hardened. ‘Some do!’ He spat into the grass; said: ‘Ah!’ then added: ‘Some do not!’
VI
HE LET HIMSELF in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind him, in the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious whisperings up the
great stone stairs. These sounds irritated him. If you shut a heavy door on an enclosed space it will push air in front of it and there will be whisperings; the atmosphere of mystery was absurd. He was just a man, returning after a night out… . Two-thirds, say, of a night out! It must be half-past three. But what the night had lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects… .
He laid his cane down on the invisible oak chest and, through the tangible and velvety darkness that had always in it the chill of the stone of walls and stairs, he felt for the handle of the breakfast-room door.
Three long parallelograms existed: pale glimmerings above, cut two-thirds of the way down by the serrations of chimney pot and roof-shadows! Nine full paces across the heavy piled carpet; then he ought to reach his round-backed chair, by the left-hand window. He reached his round-backed chair, by the left-hand window. He sank into it; it fitted exactly his back. He imagined that no man had ever been so tired and that no man had ever been so alone! A small, alive sound existed at the other end of the room; in front of him existed one and a half pale parallelograms. They were the reflection of the windows in the mirror; the sound was no doubt Calton, the cat. Something alive, at any rate! Possibly Sylvia at the other end of the room, waiting for him, to see what he looked like. Most likely! It didn’t matter!
His mind stopped! Sheer weariness!
When it went on again it was saying:
‘Naked shingles and surges drear …’ and, ‘On these debatable borders of the world!’ He said sharply: ‘Nonsense!’ The one was either Calais beach or Dover sands of the whiskered man: Arnold… . He would be seeing them both within the twenty-four hours… . But no! He was going from Waterloo. Southampton, Havre, therefore! … The other was by that detestable fellow: ‘the subject of our little monograph!’ … What a long time ago! … He saw a pile of shining despatch cases: the inscription ‘This rack is reserved for …’; a coloured – pink and blue! – photograph of Boulogne sands and the held-up squares, the proofs of ‘our little …’. What a long time ago! He heard his own voice saying in the new railway carriage, proudly, clearly, and with male hardness: