She sat up so suddenly in her chair that beside her, too, Major Perowne nearly jumped out of his wickerwork, and asked if he had come back… . She explained:
‘No, I’d be damned if I would… . I’d be damned, I’d be damned, I’d be damned if I would… . Never. Never. By the living God!’
She asked fiercely of the agitated major:
‘Has Christopher got a girl in this town? … You’d better tell me the truth!’
The major mumbled:
‘He … no, he’s too much of a stick… . He never even goes to Suzette’s… . Except once to fetch out some miserable little squit of a subaltern who was smashing up Mother Hardelot’s furniture… .’
He grumbled:
‘But you shouldn’t give a man the jumps like that! … Be conciliatory, you said… .’ He went on to grumble that her manners had not improved since she had been at Yssingueux-les-Pervenches, and then went on to tell her that in French the words yeux des pervenches meant eyes of periwinkle blue. And that was the only French he knew, because a Frenchman he had met in the train had told him so and he had always thought that if her eyes had been periwinkle blue … ‘But you’re not listening… . Hardly polite, I call it,’ he had mumbled to a conclusion… .
She was sitting forward in her chair still clenching her hand under her chin at the thought that perhaps Christopher had Valentine Wannop in that town. That was perhaps why he elected to remain there. She asked:
‘Why does Christopher stay on in this God-forsaken hole? … The inglorious base, they call it… .’
‘Because he’s jolly well got to… .’ Major Perowne said. ‘He’s got to do what he’s told… .’
She said: ‘Christopher! … You mean to say they’d keep a man like Christopher anywhere he didn’t want to be… .’
‘They’d jolly well knock spots off him if he went away,’ Major Perowne exclaimed… . ‘What the deuce do you think your blessed fellow is? … The King of England? …’ He added with a sudden sombre ferocity: ‘They’d shoot him like anybody else if he bolted… . What do you think?’
She said: ‘But all that wouldn’t prevent his having a girl in this town?’
‘Well, he hasn’t got one,’ Perowne said. ‘He sticks up in that blessed old camp of his like a blessed she-chicken sitting on addled eggs… . That’s what they say of him. I don’t know anything about the fellow… .’
Listening vindictively and indolently, she thought she caught in his droning tones a touch of the homicidal lunacy that had used to underlie his voice in the bedroom at Yssingueux. The fellow had undoubtedly about him a touch of the dull, mad murderer of the police-courts. With a sudden animation she thought:
‘Suppose he tried to murder Christopher… .’ And she imagined her husband breaking the fellow’s back across his knee, the idea going across her mind as fire traverses the opal. Then, with a dry throat, she said to herself:
‘I’ve got to find out whether he has that girl in Rouen… .’ Men stuck together. The fellow Perowne might well be protecting Tietjens. It would be unthinkable that any rules of the service could keep Christopher in that place. They could not shut up the upper classes. If Perowne had any sense he would know that to shield Tietjens was the way not to get her… . But he had no sense… . Besides, sexual solidarity was a terribly strong thing. She knew that she herself would not give a woman’s secrets away in order to get her man. Then … how was she to ascertain whether the girl was not in that town? How? … She imagined Tietjens going home every night to her… . But he was going to spend that night with herself… . She knew that… . Under that roof… . Fresh from the other… .
She imagined him there, now… . In the parlour of one of the little villas you see from the tram on the top of the town. They were undoubtedly, now, discussing her… . Her whole body writhed, muscle on muscle, in her chair. She must discover… . But how do you discover? Against a universal conspiracy… . This whole war was an Agapemone… . You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for… . All these men, crowded in this narrow space… . She stood up:
‘I’m going,’ she said, ‘to put on a little powder for Lady Sachse’s feast… . You needn’t stay if you don’t want to… .’ She was going to watch every face she saw until it gave up the secret of where in that town Christopher had the Wannop girl hidden… . She imagined her freckled, snubnosed face pressed – squashed was the word – against his cheek… . She was going to investigate… .
II
SHE FOUND AN early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf… . A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin… . He was saying to her:
‘If, ma’am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd… .’
And she had exclaimed:
‘You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails… . And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes… .’
‘I told him,’ her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, ‘that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes… . Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer… .’
‘It sounds,’ she said with a little shudder, ‘as if you were all schoolboys playing a game… . And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things… .’
Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years – a splendid bit of leather, that! – answered nevertheless stoutly:
‘Madam! If the brains of an army aren’t, the life of an army is … in its feet… . And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its teeth… . Your husband, ma’am, is an admirable officer… . He says that no draft he turns out shall …’
She said:
‘He spent three hours in … You say, foot and kit inspection… .’
Second-Lieutenant Cowley said:
‘Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit … but he looked at every foot himself… .’
She said:
‘That took him from two till five… . Then he had tea, I suppose… . And went to … What is it? … The papers of the draft… .’
Second-Lieutenant Cowley said, muffledly through his moustache:
‘If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters … I have heard… . You might, madam … I’m a married man myself … with a daughter… . And the army is not very good at writing letters… . You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy, ma’am… .’
She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she said handsomely:
‘Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much obliged… . Of course my husband would not have time to write very full letters… . He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run after …’
He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter:
‘The captain run after skirts… . Why, I can number on my hands the times he’s been out of my sight since he’s had the battalion!’
A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia.
‘Why,’ Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, ‘if we had a laugh against him it was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting on addled eggs… . For it’s only a rag-time army, as the saying is, when you’ve said the best for it that you can… . And look at the other commanding of
ficers we’ve had before we had him… . There was Major Brooks… . Never up before noon, if then, and out of camp by two-thirty. Get your returns ready for signing before then or never get ’em signed… . And Colonel Potter … Bless my soul … ’e wouldn’t sign any blessed papers at all… . He lived down here in this hotel, and we never saw him up at the camp at all… . But the captain … We always say that if ’e was a Chelsea adjutant getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams …’
With her indolent and gracious beauty – Sylvia knew that she was displaying indolent and gracious beauty – Sylvia leaned over the table-cloth listening for items in the terrible indictment that, presently, she was going to bring against Tietjens… . For the morality of these matters is this: If you have an incomparably beautiful woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her… . Nature exacts that of you … until you are unfaithful to her with a snubnosed girl with freckles; that, of course, being a reaction, is still in a way occupying yourself with your woman! … But to betray her with a battalion … That is against decency, against Nature… . And for him, Christopher Tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here! …
Tietjens, mooning down the room between tables, had more than his usually aloof air since he had just come out of a telephone box. He slipped, a weary mass, into the polished chair between her and the lieutenant. He said:
‘I’ve got the washing arranged for …’ and Sylvia gave to herself a little hiss between the teeth, of vindictive pleasure! This was indeed betrayal to a battalion. He added: ‘I shall have to be up in camp before four-thirty to-morrow morning… .’
Sylvia could not resist saying:
‘Isn’t there a poem … “Ah me, the dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon!” … said of course by lovers in bed? … Who was the poet?’
Cowley went visibly red to the roots of his hair and evidently beyond. Tietjens finished his speech to Cowley, who had remonstrated against his going up to the camp so early by saying that he had not been able to get hold of an officer to march the draft. He then said in his leisurely way:
‘There were a great many poems with that refrain in the Middle Ages… . You are probably thinking of an aubade by Arnaut Daniel, which someone translated lately… . An aubade was a song to be sung at dawn when, presumably, no one but lovers would be likely to sing… .’
‘Will there,’ Sylvia asked, ‘be anyone but you singing up in your camp to-morrow at four?’
She could not help it… . She knew that Tietjens had adopted his slow pomposity in order to give the grotesque object at the table with them time to recover from his confusion. She hated him for it. What right had he to make himself appear a pompous ass in order to shield the confusion of anybody?
The second-lieutenant came out of his confusion to exclaim, actually slapping his thigh:
‘There you are, madam… . Trust the captain to know everything! … I don’t believe there’s a question under the sun you could ask him that he couldn’t answer… . They say up at the camp …’ He went on with long stories of all the questions Tietjens had answered up at the camp… .
Emotion was going all over Sylvia … at the proximity of Tietjens. She said to herself: ‘Is this to go on for ever?’ Her hands were ice-cold. She touched the back of her left hand with the fingers of her right. It was ice-cold. She looked at her hands. They were bloodless… . She said to herself: ‘It’s pure sexual passion … it’s pure sexual passion … God! Can’t I get over this? Father! … You used to be fond of Christopher… . Get our Lady to get me over this… . It’s the ruin of him and the ruin of me. But, oh damn, don’t! … For it’s all I have to live for… . When he came mooning back from the telephone I thought it was all right… . I thought what a heavy wooden-horse he looked… . For two minutes… . Then it’s all over me again… . I want to swallow my saliva and I can’t. My throat won’t work… .’
She leaned one of her white bare arms on the tablecloth towards the walrus-moustache that was still snuffling gloriously:
‘They used to call him Old Sol at school,’ she said. ‘But there’s one question of Solomon’s he could not answer… . The one about the way of a man with … Oh, a maid! … Ask him what happened before the dawn ninety-six – no, ninety-eight days ago… .’
She said to herself: ‘I can’t help it… . Oh, I can’t help it… .’
The ex-sergeant-major was exclaiming happily:
‘Oh, no one ever said the captain was one of these thought-readers… . It’s real solid knowledge of men and things he has… . Wonderful how he knows the men considering he was not born in the service… . But there, your born gentleman mixes with men all his days and knows them. Down to the ground and inside their puttees… .’
Tietjens was looking straight in front of him, his face perfectly expressionless.
‘But I bet I got him,’ she said to herself and then to the sergeant-major:
‘I suppose now an army officer – one of your born gentlemen – when a back-from-leave train goes out from any of the great stations – Paddington, say – to the front… . He knows how all the men are feeling… . But not what the married women think … or the … the girl… .’
She said to herself: ‘Damn it, how clumsy I am getting! … I used to be able to take his hide off with a word. Now I take sentences at a time… .’
She went on with her uninterrupted sentence to Cowley:
‘Of course he may never be going to see his only son again, so it makes him sensitive… . The officer at Paddington, I mean… .’
She said to herself: ‘By God, if that beast does not give in to me tonight he never shall see Michael again… . Ah, but I got him… .’ Tietjens had his eyes closed, round each of his high-coloured nostrils a crescent of whiteness was beginning. And increasing… . She felt a sudden alarm and held the edge of the table with her extended arm to steady herself… . Men went white at the nose like that when they were going to faint… . She did not want him to faint… . But he had noticed the word Paddington… . Ninety-eight days before… . She had counted every day since… . She had got that much information… . She had said Paddington outside the house at dawn and he had taken it as a farewell. He had … He had imagined himself free to do what he liked with the girl… . Well, he wasn’t… . That was why he was white about the gills… .
Cowley exclaimed loudly:
‘Paddington! … It isn’t from there that back-from-leave trains go. Not for the front: the B.E.F… . Not from Paddington… . The Glamorganshires go from there to the depot… . And the Liverpools … They’ve got a depot at Birkenhead… . Or is that the Cheshires? …’ He asked of Tietjens: ‘Is it the Liverpools or the Cheshires that have a depot at Birkenhead, sir? … You remember we recruited a draft from there when we were at Penhally… . At any rate, you go to Birkenhead from Paddington… . I was never there myself… . They say it’s a nice place… .’
Sylvia said – she did not want to say it:
‘It’s quite a nice place … but I should not think of staying there for ever… .’
Tietjens said:
‘The Cheshires have a training camp – not a depot – near Birkenhead. And of course there are R.G.A.s there. …’ She had been looking away from him… . Cowley exclaimed:
‘You were nearly off, sir,’ hilariously. ‘You had your peepers shut… .’ Lifting a champagne glass, he inclined himself towards her. ‘You must excuse the captain, ma’am,’ he said. ‘He had no sleep last night… . Largely owing to my fault… . Which is what makes it so kind of him… . I tell you, ma’am, there are few things I would not do for the captain… .’ He drank his champagne and began an explanation: ‘You may not know, ma’am, this is a great day for me… . And you and the captain are making it the greatest day of my life… .’ Why, at four this morning there hadn’t been a wretcheder man in Ruin town. And now … He must tell her that he suffered from an unfortunate – a miserable – complaint… . One that makes one have to be careful of celebrations… . And today was a day
that he had to celebrate… . But he dare not have done it where Sergeant-Major Ledoux is along with a lot of their old mates… . ‘I dare not … I dussn’t!’ he finished. ‘So I might have been sitting, now, at this very moment, up in the cold camp… . But for you and the captain… . Up in the cold camp … You’ll excuse me, ma’am… .’
Sylvia felt that her lids were suddenly wavering:
‘I might have been myself,’ she said, ‘in a cold camp, too … if I hadn’t thrown myself on the captain’s mercy! … At Birkenhead, you know… . I happened to be there till three weeks ago… . It’s strange that you mentioned it… . There are things like signs … but you’re not a Catholic! They could hardly be coincidences… .’
She was trembling… . She looked, fumblingly opening it, into the little mirror of her powder-box – of chased, very thin gold with a small blue stone, like a forget-me-not in the centre of the concentric engravings… . Drake – the possible father of Michael – had given it to her… . The first thing he had ever given her. She had brought it down to-night out of defiance. She imagined that Tietjens disliked it. She said breathlessly to herself: ‘Perhaps the damn thing is an ill omen… .’ Drake had been the first man who had ever … A hot-breathed brute! … In the little glass her features were chalk-white… . She looked like … she looked like … She had a dress of golden tissue… . The breath was short between her white set teeth. … Her face was as white as her teeth… . And … Yes! Nearly! Her lips… . What was her face like? … In the chapel of the convent of Birkenhead there was a tomb all of alabaster… . She said to herself: