‘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 heart-breaking 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 country… . And, of course, those sheets! … As you put it 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 pair 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 patronise. 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 hair’s breadth… . 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 antagonised 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 worldwide 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, h
alf 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 anyone. 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 pitch-pine 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 Christianised. Or perhaps it was never Christianised… . 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 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 a 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 an 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 extraordinaril
y 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.