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 wideawake,
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
serging 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 some one 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 stocks, 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 _qui-tamer_
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 get 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 that 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 ash-cat 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
imbalanced: 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 of 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.

And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she
confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would
say farewell to her: like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just
occasionally, using the word "we"--and perhaps without intention--he had
let her know that he loved her.

Mr. Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs. Haviland was already at
the door.

"We'll leave you to have your war talk out," Mr. Jegg said. He added:
"For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of
things that's preservable. I can't help saying that."

She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:

"Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He _must_!" The deepest of
her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly
known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils
the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple,
but very faint. "You must! You _must_!" she said to herself. There came
back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the
moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog
into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body
towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden
lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall. . . . She saw the white
disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm
night. . . .

Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing
on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they
had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for
its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great
dining-room at the Duchemins. He got down from the fire-seat with a
weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a
little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue:

"Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the
office. That, too, won't be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor
Vinnie thinks matters." He added: "It's queer, dear . . ." In the tumult
of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said "dear." . . .
"Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have
just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep
at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at
night. . . . And she, too, said that she could not respect me. . . ."

She sprang up.

"Oh," she said, "she didn't mean it. _I_ didn't mean it. Almost every
man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don't you see it's a
desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can
we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?" She
added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned:
"Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from
your point of view? You're more useful--you know you're more useful to
your country here than . . ."

He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great
gentleness and concern.

"I can't reconcile it with my conscience," he said. "In this affair
there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don't
mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on. We
ought. But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul."

The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of
the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were
speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as
soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit
heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil
resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his
conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again.

That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing
straightforward: for him or for any man. One could have fought with a
clean heart for a civilisation: if you like for the eighteenth century
against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against
the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at
once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a
catspaw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was
nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was
just bearable. One could keep at one's job--which was faking statistics
against the other fellow--until you were sick and tired of faking and
your brain reeled. And then some!

It was probably impolitic to fake--to overstate!--a case against enemy
nations. The chickens would come home to roost in one way or another,
probably. Perhaps they wouldn't. That was a matter for one's superiors.
Obviously! And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows. Stupid,
but relatively disinterested. But now! . . . What was one to do? . . .
He went on, almost mumbling. . . .

She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily
clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own
so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily
unselfish. He didn't betray one thought of self-interest . . . not one!

He was saying:

"But now! . . . with this crowd of boodlers! . . . Supposing one's asked
to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to
force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to,
say, Salonika--when they and you and common-sense and everyone and
everything else, know it's disastrous? . . . And from that to monkeying
with our own forces. . . . Starving particular units for political . . ."
He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said:

"I can't, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your
sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations."

She said passionately:

"They're not! They're not! How dare you say such a thing?"

He answered:

"It doesn't matter . . . No! I'm sure you're not . . . But, anyhow,
these things are official. One can't, if one's scrupulous, even talk
about them . . . And then . . . You see it means such infinite deaths of
men, such an infinite prolongation . . . all this interference for
side-ends! . . . I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over
their heads. . . . And then . . . I'm to carry out their orders because
they're my superiors. . . . But helping them means unnumbered
deaths. . . ."

He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile:

"You see!" he said, "we're perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn't
think you're the only one that sees all the deaths and all the
sufferings. All, you see: I, too, am a conscientious objector. My
conscience won't let me continue any longer with these fellows. . . ."

She said:

"But isn't there any other . . ."

He interrupted:

"No! There's no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these
affairs. I suppose I'm more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I'm
not. But my conscience won't let me use my brain in this service. So
I've a great, hulking body! I'll admit I'm probably not much good. But
I've nothing to live for: what I stand for isn't any more in this world
What I want, as you know, I can't have. So . . ."

She exclaimed bitterly:

"Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two
bullets in front of two small anæmic fellows. . . . And how can you say
you'll have nothing to live for? You'll come back. You'll do your good
work again. You know you did good work . . ."

He said:

"Yes! I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I've come to believe I
did. . . . But no! They'll never let me back. They've got me out, with
all sorts of bad marks against me. They'll pursue me, systematically. . . .
You see in such a world as this, an idealist--or perhaps it's only
a sentimentalist--must be stoned to death. He makes the others so
uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf. . . . No; they'll get me,
one way or the other. And some fellow--Macmaster here--will do my jobs.
He won't do them so well, but he'll do them more dishonestly. Or no. I
oughtn't to say dishonestly. He'll do them with enthusiasm and
righteousness. He'll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense
docility and unction. He'll fake figures against our allies with the
black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when _that_ war comes, he'll do the
requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priests
of Baal. And he'll be right. It's all we're fitted for. We ought never
to have come into this war. We ought to have snaffled other peoples'
colonies as the price of neutrality. . . ."

"Oh!" Valentine Wannop said, "how can you so hate your country?"

He said with great earnestness:

"Don't say it! Don't believe it! Don't even for a moment think it! I
love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey,
mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a
grosser name . . . and all the rest of the rubbish--you remember the
field between the Duchemins and your mother's--and we have always been
boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so
we've built up the great tradition that we love. . . . But, for the
moment, it's painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than
Walpole's. But one's too near them. One sees of Walpole that he
consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt: one doesn't
see his methods. . . . My son, or his son, will only see the glory of
the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won't
know about the methods. They'll teach him at school that across the
counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Though
that was another discreditable affair. . . ."

"But you!" Valentine Wannop exclaimed. "_You_! what will _you_ do! After
the war!"

"I!" he said rather bewilderedly. "I! . . . Oh, I shall go into the old
furniture business. I've been offered a job. . . ."

She didn't believe he was serious. He hadn't, she knew, ever thought
about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and
pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would
come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage
sale. She cried out:

"Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once?" for
in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.

He said:

"Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably
not itself for the minute. . . ." He was obviously thinking of something
else.

"I've probably been a low cad," he said, "wringing your heart with my
doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always
been--or we've seemed always to me--so alike in our thoughts. I daresay
I wanted you to respect me. . . ."

"Oh, I respect you! I respect you!" she said. "You're as innocent as a
child."

He went on:

"And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late
that one has had a quiet room and a fire and . . . you! To think in
front of. You _do_ make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very
muddled till to-day . . . till five minutes ago! Do you remember our
drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul. . .
But you see . . . Don't you see?"

She said:

"No! What am I to see? I remember . . ."

He said:

"That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the
gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for
me!"

She said:

"Did I say that? . . . Yes, I said that!"

The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out
her arms. . . . She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly
visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for
tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both
hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word
of love or she would have held it; it began with: "Well, I must be . . ."
He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great
waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room. . . .

The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and
unrelenting. Her mother's paper cut down her money; no orders for
serials came in: her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal
diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be
praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the
Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her
desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The
police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then
her brother went to prison: somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness
of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no
milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances.
For three days Mrs. Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew
better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But
there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour
and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in
prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace,
after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being
the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let
his mother use her influence--of which she had still some--to get him
appointed as an A.B. on a mine-sweeper. Great winds became an agony to
Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that
came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better: she took
pride in having a son in a service. She was then the more able to
appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small
mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs. Wannop in effigy in front of
their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs. Wannop ran out and in
the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer
hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs. Wannop's grey hair in the
firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration
card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to
London.

The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts: the air above it
filled with aeroplanes: the roads covered with military cars. There was
then no getting away from the sounds of the war.

Just as they had decided to move Tietjens came back. It was for a moment
heaven to have him in this country. But when, a month later, Valentine
Wannop saw him for a minute, he seemed very heavy, aged and dull. It was
then almost as bad as before, for it seemed to Valentine as if he hardly
had his reason.

On hearing that Tietjens was to be quartered--or, at any rate,
occupied--in the neighbourhood of Ealing, Mrs. Wannop at once took a
small house in Bedford Park, whilst, to make ends meet--for her mother
made terribly little--Valentine Wannop took a post as athletic mistress
in a great school in a not very near suburb. Thus, though Tietjens came
in for a cup of tea almost every afternoon with Mrs. Wannop in the
dilapidated little suburban house, Valentine Wannop hardly ever saw him.
The only free afternoon she had was the Friday, and on that day she
still regularly chaperoned Mrs. Duchemin: meeting her at Charing Cross
towards noon and taking her back to the same station in time to catch
the last train to Rye. On Saturdays and Sundays she was occupied all day
in typing her mother's manuscript.

Of Tietjens, then, she saw almost nothing. She knew that his poor mind
was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said he was a great help
to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory
conclusions--or quite startling and attractive theories--with extreme
rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her
whenever--though it wasn't now very often--she had an article to write
for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her
failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing. . . .

Mrs. Duchemin, then, Valentine Wannop still chaperoned, though there was
no bond any more between them. Valentine knew, for instance, perfectly
well that Mrs. Duchemin, after she had been seen off by train from
Charing Cross, got out at Clapham Junction, took a taxicab back to
Gray's Inn after dark and spent the night with Macmaster, and Mrs.
Duchemin knew quite well that Valentine knew. It was a sort of parade of
circumspection and rightness, and they kept it up even after, at a
sinister registry office, the wedding had taken place, Valentine being
the one witness and an obscure-looking substitute for the usual pew
opener another. There seemed to be, by then, no very obvious reason why
Valentine should support Mrs. Macmaster any more on these rather dreary
occasions, but Mrs. Macmaster said she might just as well, until they
saw fit to make the marriage public. There were, Mrs. Macmaster said,
censorious tongues, and even if these were confuted afterwards it is
difficult, if not impossible, to outrun scandal. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster
was of opinion that the Macmaster afternoons with these geniuses must be
a liberal education for Valentine. But, as Valentine sat most of the
time at the tea-table near the door, it was the backs and side faces of
the distinguished rather than their intellects with which she was most
acquainted. Occasionally, however, Mrs. Duchemin would show Valentine,
as an enormous privilege, one of the letters to herself from men of
genius: usually North British, written, as a rule, from the Continent or
more distant and peaceful climates, for most of them believed it their
duty in these hideous times to keep alive in the world the only
glimmering spark of beauty. Couched in terms so eulogistic as to
resemble those used in passionate love-letters by men more profane,
these epistles recounted, or consulted Mrs. Duchemin as to, their love
affairs with foreign princesses, the progress of their ailments or the
progresses of their souls towards those higher regions of morality in
which floated their so beautiful-souled correspondent.

The letters entertained Valentine and, indeed, she was entertained by
that whole mirage. It was only the Macmaster's treatment of her mother
that finally decided Valentine that this friendship had died; for the
friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing
disillusionments, and Valentine Wannop was a woman of more than usual
loyalty. Indeed, if she couldn't respect Mrs. Duchemin on the old
grounds, she could very really respect her for her tenacity of purpose,
her determination to advance Macmaster and for the sort of ruthlessness
that she put into these pursuits.

Valentine's affection had, indeed, survived even Edith Ethel's continued
denigrations of Tietjens--for Edith Ethel regarded Tietjens as a clog
round her husband's neck, if only because he was a very unpopular man,
grown personally rather unpresentable and always extremely rude to the
geniuses on Fridays. Edith Ethel, however, never made these complaints
that grew more and more frequent as more and more the distinguished
flocked to the Fridays, before Macmaster. And they ceased very suddenly
and in a way that struck Valentine as odd.

Mrs. Duchemin's grievance against Tietjens was that, Macmaster being a
weak man, Tietjens had acted as his banker until, what with interest and
the rest of it, Macmaster owed Tietjens a great sum: several thousand
pounds. And there had been no real reason: Macmaster had spent most of
the money either on costly furnishings for his rooms or on his costly
journeys to Rye. On the one hand Mrs. Duchemin could have found
Macmaster all the bric-a-brac he could possibly have wanted from amongst
the things at the rectory, where no one would have missed them and, on
the other, she, Mrs. Duchemin, would have paid all Macmaster's
travelling expenses. She had had unlimited money from her husband, who
never asked for accounts. But, whilst Tietjens still had influence with
Macmaster, he had used it uncompromisingly against this course, giving
him the delusion--it enraged Mrs. Duchemin to think!--that it would have
been dishonourable. So that Macmaster had continued to draw upon him.

And, most enraging of all, at a period when she had had a power of
attorney over all Mr. Duchemin's fortune and could, perfectly easily,
have sold out something that no one would have missed for the couple of
thousand or so that Macmaster owed, Tietjens had very forcibly refused
to allow Macmaster to agree to anything of the sort. He had again put
into Macmaster's weak head that it would be dishonourable. But Mrs.
Duchemin--and she closed her lips determinedly after she had said
it--knew perfectly well Tietjens' motive. So long as Macmaster owed him
money he imagined that they couldn't close their doors upon him. And
their establishment was beginning to be a place where you meet people of
great influence who might well get for a person as lazy as Tietjens a
sinecure that would suit him. Tietjens, in fact, knew which side his
bread was buttered.

For what, Mrs. Duchemin asked, could there have been dishonourable about
the arrangement she had proposed? Practically the whole of Mr.
Duchemin's money was to come to her: he was by then insane; it was
therefore, morally, her own. But immediately after that, Mr. Duchemin
having been certified, the estate had fallen into the hands of the
Lunacy Commissioners and there had been no further hope of taking the
capital. Now, her husband being dead, it was in the hands of trustees,
Mr. Duchemin having left the whole of his property to Magdalen College
and merely the income to his widow. The income was very large; but
where, with their expenses, with the death duties and taxation, which
were by then merciless, was Mrs. Duchemin to find the money? She was to
be allowed, under her husband's will, enough capital to buy a pleasant
little place in Surrey, with rather a nice lot of land--enough to let
Macmaster know some of the leisures of a country gentleman's lot. They
were going in for shorthorns, and there was enough land to give them a
small golf-course and, in the autumn, a little--oh, mostly
rough!--shooting for Macmaster to bring his friends down to. It would
just run to that. Oh, no ostentation. Merely a nice little place. As an
amusing detail the villagers there already called Macmaster "squire" and
the women curtsied to him. But Valentine Wannop would understand that,
with all these expenses, they couldn't find the money to pay off
Tietjens. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster said she wasn't going to pay off
Tietjens. He had had his chance once: now he could go without, for her.
Macmaster would have to pay it himself and he would never be able to,
his contribution to their housekeeping being what it was. And there were
going to be complications. Macmaster wondered about their little place
in Surrey, saying that he would consult Tietjens about this and that
alteration. But over the doorsill of that place the foot of Tietjens was
never going to go! Never! It would mean a good deal of unpleasantness;
or rather it would mean one sharp: "C-r-r-unch!" And then: Napoo finny!
Mrs. Duchemin sometimes, and with great effect, condescended to use one
of the more picturesque phrases of the day.

To all these diatribes Valentine Wannop answered hardly anything. It was
no particular concern of her's; even if, for a moment, she felt
proprietarily towards Christopher as she did now and then, she felt no
particular desire that his intimacy with the Macmasters should be
prolonged, because she knew he could have no particular desire for its
prolongation. She imagined him turning them down with an unspoken and
good-humoured gibe. And, indeed, she agreed on the whole with Edith
Ethel. It _was_ demoralising for a weak little man like Vincent to have
a friend with an ever-open purse beside him. Tietjens ought not to have
been princely: it was a defect, a quality that she did not personally
admire in him. As to whether it would or wouldn't have been
dishonourable for Mrs. Duchemin to take her husband's money and give it
to Macmaster, she kept an open mind. To all intents and purposes the
money _was_ Mrs. Duchemin's, and if Mrs. Duchemin had then paid
Christopher off it would have been sensible. She could see that later it
had become very inconvenient. There were, however, male standards to be
considered, and Macmaster, at least, passed for a man. Tietjens, who was
wise enough in the affairs of others, had, in that, probably been wise;
for there might have been great disagreeablenesses with trustees and
heirs-at-law had Mrs. Duchemin's subtraction of a couple of thousand
pounds from the Duchemin estate afterwards come to light. The Wannops
had never been large property owners as a family, but Valentine had
heard enough of collateral wranglings over small family dishonesties to
know how very disagreeable these could be.

So she had made little or no comment; sometimes she had even faintly
agreed as to the demoralisation of Macmaster and that had sufficed. For
Mrs. Duchemin had been certain of her rightness and cared nothing at all
for the opinion of Valentine Wannop, or else took it for granted.

And when Tietjens had been gone to France for a little time Mrs.
Duchemin seemed to forget the matter, contenting herself with saying
that he might very likely not come back. He was the sort of clumsy man
who generally got killed. In that case, since no I.O.U.s or paper had
passed, Mrs. Tietjens would have no claim. So that would be all right.

But two days after the return of Christopher--and that was how Valentine
knew he had come back!--Mrs. Duchemin with a lowering brow exclaimed:

"That oaf, Tietjens, is in England, perfectly safe and sound. And now
the whole miserable business of Vincent's indebtedness . . . Oh!"

She had stopped so suddenly and so markedly that even the stoppage of
Valentine's own heart couldn't conceal the oddness from her. Indeed it
was as if there were an interval before she completely realised what the
news was and as if, during that interval, she said to herself:

"It's very queer. It's exactly as if Edith Ethel has stopped abusing him
on my account . . . As if she _knew_!" But how could Edith Ethel know
that she loved the man who had returned? It was impossible! She hardly
knew herself. Then the great wave of relief rolled over her: he was in
England. One day she would see him, there: in the great room. For these
colloquies with Edith Ethel always took place in the great room where
she had last seen Tietjens. It looked suddenly beautiful and she was
resigned to sitting there, waiting for the distinguished.

It was indeed a beautiful room: it had become so during the years. It
was long and high--matching the Tietjens'. A great cut-glass chandelier
from the rectory hung dimly coruscating in the centre, reflected and
re-reflected in convex gilt mirrors, topped by eagles. A great number of
books had gone to make place on the white panelled walls for the
mirrors, and for the fair orange and brown pictures by Turner, also from
the rectory. From the rectory had come the immense scarlet and lapis
lazuli carpet, the great brass fire-basket and appendages, the great
curtains that, in the three long windows, on their peacock blue Chinese
silk showed parti-coloured cranes ascending in long flights--and all the
polished Chippendale arm-chairs. Amongst all these, gracious, trailing,
stopping with a tender gesture to rearrange very slightly the crimson
roses in the famous silver bowls, still in dark blue silks, with an
amber necklace and her elaborate black hair, waved exactly like that of
Julia Domna of the Musée Lapidaire at Arles, moved Mrs. Macmaster--also
from the rectory. Macmaster had achieved his desire: even to the
shortbread cakes and the peculiarly scented tea that came every Friday
morning from Princes Street. And, if Mrs. Macmaster hadn't the pawky,
relishing humour of the great Scots ladies of past days, she had in
exchange her deep aspect of comprehension and tenderness. An
astonishingly beautiful and impressive woman: dark hair; dark, straight
eyebrows; a straight nose; dark blue eyes in the shadows of her hair and
bowed, pomegranate lips in a chin curved like the bow of a Greek
boat. . . .

The etiquette of the place on Fridays was regulated as if by a royal
protocol. The most distinguished and, if possible, titled person was led
to a great walnut-wood fluted chair that stood askew by the fireplace,
its back and seat of blue velvet, heaven knows how old. Over him would
hover Mrs. Duchemin: or, if he were _very_ distinguished, both Mr. and
Mrs. Macmaster. The not so distinguished were led up by turns to be
presented to the celebrity and would then arrange themselves in a
half-circle in the beautiful arm-chairs; the less distinguished still,
in outer groups in chairs that had no arms: the almost undistinguished
stood, also in groups or languished, awestruck on the scarlet leather
window seats. When all were there Macmaster would establish himself on
the incredibly unique hearthrug and would address wise sayings to the
celebrity; occasionally, however, saying a kind thing to the youngest
man present--to give him a chance of distinguishing himself. Macmaster's
hair, at that date, was still black, but not quite so stiff or so well
brushed; his beard had in it greyish streaks and his teeth, not being
quite so white, looked less strong. He wore also a single eyeglass, the
retaining of which in his right eye gave him a slightly agonised
expression. It gave him, however, the privilege of putting his face very
close to the face of anyone upon whom he wished to make a deep
impression. He had lately become much interested in the drama, so that
there were usually several large--and, of course, very reputable and
serious actresses in the room. On rare occasions Mrs. Duchemin would say
across the room in her deep voice:

"Valentine, a cup of tea for his highness," or "Sir Thomas," as the case
might be, and when Valentine had threaded her way through the chairs
with a cup of tea Mrs. Duchemin, with a kind, aloof smile, would say:
"Your highness, this is my little brown bird." But as a rule Valentine
sat alone at the tea-table, the guests fetching from her what they
wanted.

Tietjens came to the Fridays twice during the five months of his stay at
Ealing. On each occasion he accompanied Mrs. Wannop.

In earlier days--during the earliest Fridays--Mrs. Wannop, if she ever
came, had always been installed, with her flowing black, in the throne
and, like an enlarged Queen Victoria, had sat there whilst suppliants
were led up to this great writer. But now: on the first occasion Mrs.
Wannop got a chair without arms in the outer ring, whilst a general
officer commanding lately in chief somewhere in the East, whose military
success had not been considerable, but whose despatches were considered
very literary, occupied, rather blazingly, the throne. But Mrs. Wannop
had chatted very contentedly all the afternoon with Tietjens, and it had
been comforting to Valentine to see Tietjens' large, uncouth, but quite
collected figure, and to observe the affection that these two had for
each other.

But, on the second occasion, the throne was occupied by a very young
woman who talked a great deal and with great assurance. Valentine didn't
know who she was. Mrs. Wannop, very gay and distracted, stood nearly the
whole afternoon by a window. And even at that, Valentine was contented,
quite a number of young men crowding round the old lady and leaving the
younger one's circle rather bare.

There came in a very tall, clean run and beautiful, fair woman,
dressed in nothing in particular. She stood with extreme--with
noticeable--unconcern near the doorway. She let her eyes rest on
Valentine, but looked away before Valentine could speak. She must have
had an enormous quantity of fair tawny hair, for it was coiled in a
great surface over her ears. She had in her hand several visiting cards
which she looked at with a puzzled expression and then laid on a card
table. She was no one who had ever been there before.

Edith Ethel--it was for the second time!--had just broken up the ring
that surrounded Mrs. Wannop, bearing the young men tributary to the
young women in the walnut chair and leaving Tietjens and the older woman
high and dry in a window: thus Tietjens saw the stranger, and there was
no doubt left in Valentine's mind. He came, diagonally, right down the
room to his wife and marched her straight up to Edith Ethel. His face
was perfectly without expression.

Macmaster, perched on the centre of the hearthrug, had an emotion that
was extraordinarily comic to witness, but that Valentine was quite
unable to analyse. He jumped two paces forward to meet Mrs. Tietjens,
held out a little hand, half withdrew it, retreated half a step. The
eyeglass fell from his perturbed eye: this gave him actually an
expression less perturbed, but, in revenge, the hairs on the back of his
scalp grew suddenly untidy. Sylvia, wavering along beside her husband,
held out her long arm and careless hand. Macmaster winced almost at the
contact, as if his fingers had been pinched in a vice. Sylvia wavered
desultorily towards Edith Ethel, who was suddenly small, insignificant
and relatively coarse. As for the young woman celebrity in the
arm-chair, she appeared to be about the size of a white rabbit.

A complete silence had fallen on the room. Every woman in it was
counting the pleats of Sylvia's skirt and the amount of material in it.
Valentine Wannop knew that because she was doing it herself. If one had
that amount of material and that number of pleats one's skirt might hang
like that. . . . For it was extraordinary: it fitted close round the
hips, and gave an effect of length and swing--yet it did not descend as
low as the ankles. It was, no doubt, the amount of material that did
that, like the Highlander's kilt that takes twelve yards to make. And
from the silence Valentine could tell that every woman and most of the
men--if they didn't know that this was Mrs. Christopher Tietjens--knew
that this was a personage of _Illustrated Weekly_, as who should say of
county family, rank. Little Mrs. Swan, lately married, actually got up,
crossed the room and sat down beside her bridegroom. It was a movement
with which Valentine could sympathise.

And Sylvia, having just faintly greeted Mrs. Duchemin, and completely
ignored the celebrity in the arm-chair--in spite of the fact that Mrs.
Duchemin had tried half-heartedly to effect an introduction--stood
still, looking round her. She gave the effect of a lady in a
nurseryman's hot-house considering what flower should interest her,
collectedly ignoring the nurserymen who bowed round her. She had just
dropped her eyelashes, twice, in recognition of two staff officers with
a good deal of scarlet streak about them who were tentatively rising
from their chairs. The staff officers who came to the Macmasters were
not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such.

Valentine was by that time beside her mother, who had been standing all
alone between two windows. She had dispossessed, in hot indignation, a
stout musical critic of his chair and had sat her mother in it. And,
just as Mrs. Duchemin's deep voice sounded, yet a little waveringly:

"Valentine . . . a cup of tea for . . ." Valentine was carrying a cup of
tea to her mother.

Her indignation had conquered her despairing jealousy, if you could call
it jealousy. For what was the good of living or loving when Tietjens had
beside him, for ever, the radiant, kind and gracious perfection. On the
other hand, of her two deep passions, the second was for her mother.

Rightly or wrongly, Valentine regarded Mrs. Wannop as a great, an august
figure: a great brain, a high and generous intelligence. She had
written, at least, one great book, and if the rest of her time had been
frittered away in the desperate struggle to live that had taken both
their lives, that could not detract from that one achievement that
should last and for ever take her mother's name down time. That this
greatness should not weigh with the Macmasters had hitherto neither
astonished nor irritated Valentine. The Macmasters had their game to
play and, for the matter of that, they had their predilections. Their
game kept them amongst the officially influential, the semi-official and
the officially accredited. They moved with such C.B.s, knights,
presidents, and the rest as dabbled in writing or the arts: they went
upwards with such reviewers, art critics, musical writers and
archæologists as had posts in, if possible, first-class public offices
or permanent positions on the more august periodicals. If an imaginative
author seemed assured of position and lasting popularity Macmaster would
send out feelers towards him, would make himself humbly useful, and
sooner or later either Mrs. Duchemin would be carrying on with him one
of her high-souled correspondences--or she wouldn't.

Mrs. Wannop they had formerly accepted as permanent leader writer and
chief critic of a great organ, but the great organ having dwindled and
now disappeared the Macmasters no longer wanted her at their parties.
That was the game--and Valentine accepted it. But that it should have
been done with such insolence, so obviously meant to be noted--for in
twice breaking up Mrs. Wannop's little circle Mrs. Duchemin had not even
once so much as said: "How d'ye do?" to the elder lady!--that was almost
more than Valentine could, for the moment, bear, and she would have
taken her mother away at once and would never have re-entered the house,
but for the compensations.

Her mother had lately written and even found a publisher for a book--and
the book had showed no signs of failing powers. On the contrary, having
been perforce stopped off the perpetual journalism that had dissipated
her energies, Mrs. Wannop had turned out something that Valentine knew
was sound, sane and well done. Abstractions caused by failing attention
to the outside world are not necessarily in a writer signs of failing,
as a writer. It may mean merely that she is giving so much thought to
her work that her other contacts suffer. If that is the case her work
will gain. That this might be the case with her mother was Valentine's
great and secret hope. Her mother was barely sixty: many great works
have been written by writers aged between sixty and seventy. . . .

And the crowding of youngish men round the old lady had given Valentine
a little confirmation of that hope. The book naturally, in the maelstrom
flux and reflux of the time, had attracted little attention, and poor
Mrs. Wannop had not succeeded in extracting a penny for it from her
adamantine publisher: she hadn't, indeed, made a penny for several
months, and they existed almost at starvation point in their little den
of a villa--on Valentine's earnings as athletic teacher. . . . But that
little bit of attention in that semi-public place had seemed, at least,
as a confirmation to Valentine: there probably was something sound, sane
and well done in her mother's work. That was almost all she asked of
life.

And, indeed, whilst she stood by her mother's chair, thinking with a
little bitter pathos that if Edith Ethel had left the three or four
young men to her mother the three or four might have done her poor
mother a little good, with innocent puffs and the like--and heaven knew
they needed that little good badly enough!--a very thin and untidy young
man _did_ drift back to Mrs. Wannop and asked, precisely, if he might
make a note or two for publication as to what Mrs. Wannop was doing.
"Her book," he said, "had attracted so much attention. They hadn't known
that they had still writers among them. . . ."

A singular, triangular drive had begun through the chairs from the
fireplace. That was how it had seemed to Valentine! Mrs. Tietjens had
looked at them, had asked Christopher a question and, immediately, as if
she were coming through waist-high surf, had borne down Macmaster and
Mrs. Duchemin, flanking her obsequiously, setting aside chairs and their
occupants, Tietjens and the two, rather bashfully following staff
officers, broadening out the wedge.

Sylvia, her long arm held out from a yard or so away, was giving her
hand to Valentine's mother. With her clear, high, unembarrassed voice
she exclaimed, also from a yard or so away, so as to be heard by every
one in the room:

"You're Mrs. Wannop. The great writer! I'm Christopher Tietjens' wife."

The old lady, with her dim eyes, looked up at the younger woman towering
above her.

"You're Christopher's wife!" she said. "I must kiss you for all the
kindness he has shown me."

Valentine felt her eyes filling with tears. She saw her mother stand up,
place both her hands on the other woman's shoulders. She heard her
mother say:

"You're a most beautiful creature. I'm sure you're good!"

Sylvia stood, smiling faintly, bending a little to accept the embrace.
Behind the Macmasters, Tietjens and the staff officers, a little crowd
of goggle eyes had ranged itself.

Valentine was crying. She slipped back behind the tea-urns, though she
could hardly feel the way. Beautiful! The most beautiful woman she had
ever seen! And good! Kind! You could see it in the lovely way she had
given her cheek to that poor old woman's lips. . . . And to live all
day, for ever, beside him . . . she, Valentine, ought to be ready to lay
down her life for Sylvia Tietjens. . . .

The voice of Tietjens said, just above her head:

"Your mother seems to be having a regular triumph," and, with his
good-natured cynicism, he added, "it seems to have upset some
apple-carts!" They were confronted with the spectacle of Macmaster
conducting the young celebrity from her deserted arm-chair across the
room to be lost in the horseshoe of crowd that surrounded Mrs. Wannop.

Valentine said:

"You're quite gay to-day. Your voice is different. I suppose you're
better?" She did not look at him. His voice came:

"Yes! I'm relatively gay!" It went on: "I thought you might like to
know. A little of my mathematical brain seems to have come to life
again. I've worked out two or three silly problems. . . ."

She said:

"Mrs. Tietjens will be pleased."

"Oh!" the answer came. "Mathematics don't interest her any more than
cock-fighting." With immense swiftness, between word and word, Valentine
read into that a hope! This splendid creature did not sympathise with
her husband's activities. But he crushed it heavily by saying: "Why
should she? She's so many occupations of her own that she's unrivalled
at!"

He began to tell her, rather minutely, of a calculation he had made only
that day at lunch. He had gone into the Department of Statistics and had
had rather a row with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln. A pretty title the fellow
had taken! They had wanted him to ask to be seconded to his old
department for a certain job. But he had said he'd be damned if he
would. He detested and despised the work they were doing.

Valentine, for the first time in her life, hardly listened to what he
said. Did the fact that Sylvia Tietjens had so many occupations of her
own mean that Tietjens found her unsympathetic? Of their relationships
she knew nothing. Sylvia had been so much of a mystery as hardly to
exist as a problem hitherto. Macmaster, Valentine knew, hated her. She
knew that through Mrs. Duchemin; she had heard it ages ago, but she
didn't know why. Sylvia had never come to the Macmaster afternoons; but
that was natural. Macmaster passed for a bachelor, and it was excusable
for a young woman of the highest fashion not to come to bachelor teas of
literary and artistic people. On the other hand, Macmaster dined at the
Tietjens quite often enough to make it public that he was a friend of
that family. Sylvia, too, had never come down to see Mrs. Wannop. But
then it would, in the old days, have been a long way to come for a lady
of fashion with no especial literary interests. And no one, in mercy,
could have been expected to call on poor them in their dog kennel in an
outer suburb. They had had to sell almost all their pretty things.

Tietjens was saying that after his tempestuous interview with Lord
Ingleby of Lincoln--she wished he would not be so rude to powerful
people!--he had dropped in on Macmaster in his private room, and finding
him puzzled over a lot of figures had, in the merest spirit of bravado,
taken Macmaster and his papers out to lunch. And, he said, chancing to
look, without any hope at all, at the figures, he had suddenly worked
out an ingenious mystification. It had just come!

His voice had been so gay and triumphant that she hadn't been able to
resist looking up at him. His cheeks were fresh coloured, his hair
shining; his blue eyes had a little of their old arrogance--and
tenderness! Her heart seemed to sing with joy! He was, she felt, her
man. She imagined the arms of his mind stretching out to enfold her.

He went on explaining. He had rather, in his recovered self-confidence,
gibed at Macmaster. Between themselves, wasn't it easy to do what the
Department, under orders, wanted done? They had wanted to rub into our
allies that their losses by devastation had been nothing to write home
about--so as to avoid sending reinforcements to their lines! Well, if
you took just the bricks and mortar of the devastated districts, you
could prove that the loss in bricks, tiles, woodwork and the rest
didn't--and the figures with a little manipulation would prove
it!--amount to more than a normal year's dilapidations spread over the
whole country in peace time. . . . House repairs in a normal year had
cost several million sterling. The enemy had only destroyed just about
so many million sterling in bricks and mortar. And what was a mere
year's dilapidations in house property! You just neglected to do them
and did them next year.

So, if you ignored the lost harvests of three years, the lost industrial
output of the richest industrial region of the country, the smashed
machinery, the barked fruit trees, the three years' loss of four and a
half-tenths of the coal output for three years--and the loss of
life!--we could go to our allies and say:

"All your yappings about losses are the merest bulls. You can perfectly
well afford to reinforce the weak places of your own lines. We intend to
send our new troops to the Near East, where lies our true interest!"
And, though they might sooner or later point out the fallacy, you would
by so much have put off the abhorrent expedient of a single command.

Valentine, though it took her away from her own thoughts, couldn't help
saying:

"But weren't you arguing against your own convictions?"

He said:

"Yes, of course I was. In the lightness of my heart! It's always a good
thing to formulate the other fellow's objections."

She had turned half round in her chair. They were gazing into each
other's eyes, he from above, she from below. She had no doubt of his
love: he, she knew, could have no doubt of hers. She said:

"But isn't it dangerous? To show these people how to do it?"

He said:

"Oh, no, no. No! You don't know what a good soul little Vinnie is. I
don't think you've ever been quite just to Vincent Macmaster! He'd as
soon think of picking my pocket as of picking my brains. The soul of
honour!"

Valentine had felt a queer, queer sensation. She was not sure afterwards
whether she had felt it before she had realised that Sylvia Tietjens was
looking at them. She stood there, very erect, a queer smile on her face.
Valentine could not be sure whether it was kind, cruel, or merely
distantly ironic; but she was perfectly sure it showed, whatever was
behind it, that its wearer knew all that there was to know of her,
Valentine's, feelings for Tietjens and for Tietjens' feelings for
her. . . . It was like being a woman and man in adultery in Trafalgar
Square.

Behind Sylvia's back, their mouths agape, were the two staff officers.
Their dark hairs were too untidy for them to amount to much, but, such
as they were, they were the two most presentable males of the
assembly--and Sylvia had snaffled them.

Mrs. Tietjens said:

"Oh, Christopher! I'm going on to the Basil's."

Tietjens said:

"All right. I'll pop Mrs. Wannop into the tube as soon as she's had
enough of it, and come along and pick you up!"

Sylvia had just drooped her long eyelashes, in sign of salutation, to
Valentine Wannop, and had drifted through the door, followed by her
rather unmilitary military escort in khaki and scarlet.

From that moment Valentine Wannop never had any doubt. She knew that
Sylvia Tietjens knew that her husband loved her, Valentine Wannop, and
that she, Valentine Wannop, loved her husband--with a passion absolute
and ineffable. The one thing she, Valentine, didn't know, the one
mystery that remained impenetrable, was whether Sylvia Tietjens was good
to her husband!

A long time afterwards Edith Ethel had come to her beside the tea-cups
and had apologised for not having known, earlier than Sylvia's
demonstration, that Mrs. Wannop was in the room. She hoped that they
might see Mrs. Wannop much more often. She added after a moment that she
hoped Mrs. Wannop wouldn't, in future, find it necessary to come under
the escort of Mr. Tietjens. They were too old friends for that, surely.

Valentine said:

"Look here, Ethel, if you think that you can keep friends with mother
and turn on Mr. Tietjens after all he's done for you, you're mistaken.
You are really. And mother's a great deal of influence. I don't want to
see you making any mistakes: just at this juncture. It's a mistake to
make nasty rows. And you'd make a very nasty one if you said anything
against Mr. Tietjens to mother. She knows a great deal. Remember. She
lived next door to the rectory for a number of years. And she's got a
dreadfully incisive tongue. . . ."

Edith Ethel coiled back on her feet as if her whole body were threaded
by a steel spring. Her mouth opened, but she bit her lower lip and then
wiped it with a very white handkerchief. She said:

"I hate that man! I detest that man! I shudder when he comes near me."

"I know you do!" Valentine Wannop answered. "But I wouldn't let other
people know it if I were you. It doesn't do you any real credit. He's a
good man."

Edith Ethel looked at her with a long, calculating glance. Then she went
to stand before the fireplace.

That had been five--or at most six--Fridays before Valentine sat with
Mark Tietjens in the War Office waiting hall, and, on the Friday
immediately before that again, all the guests being gone, Edith Ethel
had come to the tea-table and, with her velvet kindness, had placed her
right hand on Valentine's left. Admiring the gesture with a deep
fervour, Valentine knew that that was the end.

Three days before, on the Monday, Valentine, in her school uniform, in a
great store to which she had gone to buy athletic paraphernalia, had run
into Mrs. Duchemin, who was buying flowers. Mrs. Duchemin had been
horribly distressed to observe the costume. She had said:

"But do you go _about_ in that? It's really dreadful." Valentine had
answered:

"Oh, yes. When I'm doing business for the school in school hours I'm
expected to wear it. And I wear it if I'm going anywhere in a hurry
after school hours. It saves my dresses. I haven't got too many."

"But _any_ one might meet you," Edith Ethel said in a note of agony.
"It's very inconsiderate. Don't you _think_ you've been very
inconsiderate? You might meet any of the people who come to our
Fridays!"

"I frequently do," Valentine said. "But they don't seem to mind. Perhaps
they think I'm a Waac officer. That would be quite respectable. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin drifted away, her arms full of flowers and real agony upon
her face.

Now, beside the tea-table she said, very softly:

"My dear, we've decided not to have our usual Friday afternoon next
week." Valentine wondered whether this was merely a lie to get rid of
her. But Edith Ethel went on: "We've decided to have a little evening
festivity. After a great deal of thought we've come to the conclusion
that we ought, now, to make our union public." She paused to await
comment, but Valentine making none she went on: "It coincides very
happily--I can't help feeling it coincides very happily!--with another
event. Not that we set much store by these things. . . . But it has been
whispered to Vincent that next Friday. . . . Perhaps, my dear Valentine,
you, too, will have heard . . ."

Valentine said:

"No, I haven't. I suppose he's got the O.B.E. I'm very glad."

"The Sovereign," Mrs. Duchemin said, "is seeing fit to confer the honour
of knighthood on him."

"Well!" Valentine said. "He's had a quick career. I've no doubt he
deserves it. He's worked very hard. I do sincerely congratulate you.
It'll be a great help to you."

"It's," Mrs. Duchemin said, "not for mere plodding. That's what makes it
so gratifying. It's for a special piece of brilliance, that has marked
him out. It's, of course, a secret. But . . ."

"Oh, I know!" Valentine said. "He's worked out some calculations to
prove that losses in the devastated districts, if you ignore machinery,
coal output, orchard trees, harvests, industrial products and so on,
don't amount to more than a year's household dilapidations for
the . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin said with real horror:

"But how did you know? How on _earth_ did you know? . . ." She paused.
"It's such a _dead_ secret. . . . That fellow must have told you. . . .
But how on earth could _he_ know?"

"I haven't seen Mr. Tietjens to speak to since the last time he was
here," Valentine said. She saw, from Edith Ethel's bewilderment, the
whole situation. The miserable Macmaster hadn't even confided to his
wife that the practically stolen figures weren't his own. He desired to
have a little prestige in the family circle; for once a little prestige!
Well! Why shouldn't he have it? Tietjens, she knew, would wish him to
have all he could get. She said therefore:

"Oh, it's probably in the air. . . . It's known the Government want to
break their claims to the higher command. And anyone who could help them
to that would get a knighthood. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin was more calm.

"It's certainly," she said, "Burke'd, as you call it, those beastly
people." She reflected for a moment. "It's probably that," she went on.
"It's in the air. Anything that can help to influence public opinion
against those horrible people is to be welcomed. That's known pretty
widely. . . . No! It could hardly be Christopher Tietjens who thought of
it and told you. It wouldn't enter his head. He's their friend! He would
be . . ."

"He's certainly," Valentine said, "not a friend of his country's
enemies. I'm not myself."

Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed sharply, her eyes dilated.

"What do you mean? What on earth do you dare to mean? I thought you were
a pro-German!"

Valentine said:

"I'm not! I'm not! . . . I hate men's deaths. . . . I hate any men's
deaths. . . . Any men . . ." She calmed herself by main force. "Mr.
Tietjens says that the more we hinder our allies the more we drag the
war on and the more lives are lost. . . . More lives, do you understand?
. . ."

Mrs. Duchemin assumed her most aloof, tender and high air: "My poor
child," she said, "what possible concern can the opinions of that broken
fellow cause anyone? You can warn him from me that he does himself no
good by going on uttering these discredited opinions. He's a marked man.
Finished! It's no good Guggums, my husband, trying to stand up for him."

"He _does_ stand up for him?" Valentine asked. "Though I don't see why
it's needed. Mr. Tietjens is surely able to take care of himself."

"My good child," Edith Ethel said, "you may as well know the worst.
There's not a more discredited man in London than Christopher Tietjens,
and my husband does himself infinite harm in standing up for him. It's
our one quarrel."

She went on again:

"It was all very well whilst that fellow had brains. He was said to have
some intellect, though I could never see it. But now that, with his
drunkenness and debaucheries, he has got himself into the state he is
in; for there's no other way of accounting for his condition! They're
striking him, I don't mind telling you, off the roll of his
office. . . ."

It was there that, for the first time, the thought went through
Valentine Wannop's mind, like a mad inspiration: this woman must at one
time have been in love with Tietjens. It was possible, men being what
they were that she had even once been Tietjens' mistress. For it was
impossible otherwise to account for this spite, which to Valentine
seemed almost meaningless. She had, on the other hand, no impulse to
defend Tietjens against accusations that could not have any possible
grounds.

Mrs. Duchemin was going on with her kind loftiness:

"Of course a fellow like that--in that condition!--could not understand
matters of high policy. It is imperative that these fellows should not
have the higher command. It would pander to their insane spirit of
militarism. They _must_ be hindered. I'm talking, of course, between
ourselves, but my husband says that that is the conviction in the very
highest circles. To let them have their way, even if it led to earlier
success, would be to establish a precedent--so my husband
says!--compared with which the loss of a few lives. . . ."

Valentine sprang up, her face distorted.

"For the sake of Christ," she cried out, "as you believe that Christ
died for you, try to understand that millions of men's lives are at
stake. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin smiled.

"My poor child," she said, "if you moved in the higher circles you would
look at these things with more aloofness. . . ."

Valentine leant on the back of a high chair for support.

"You don't move in the higher circles," she said. "For Heaven's
sake--for your own--remember that you are a woman, not for ever and for
always a snob. You were a good woman once. You stuck to your husband for
quite a long time. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin, in her chair, had thrown herself back.

"My good girl," she said, "have you gone mad?"

Valentine said:

"Yes, very nearly. I've got a brother at sea; I've had a man I loved out
there for an infinite time. You can understand that, I suppose, even if
you can't understand how one can go mad merely at the thoughts of
suffering at all. . . . And I know, Edith Ethel, that you are afraid of
my opinion of you, or you wouldn't have put up all the subterfuges and
concealments of all these years. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin said quickly:

"Oh, my good girl. . . . If you've got personal interests at stake you
can't be expected to take abstract views of the higher matters. We had
better change the subject."

Valentine said:

"Yes, do. Get on with your excuses for not asking me and mother to your
knighthood party."

Mrs. Duchemin, too, rose at that. She felt at her amber beads with long
fingers that turned very slightly at the tips. She had behind her all
her mirrors, the drops of her lustres, shining points of gilt and of the
polish of dark woods. Valentine thought that she had never seen anyone
so absolutely impersonate kindness, tenderness and dignity. She said:

"My dear, I was going to suggest that it was the sort of party to which
you might not care to come. . . . The people will be stiff and formal
and you probably haven't got a frock."

Valentine said:

"Oh, I've got a frock all right. But there's a Jacob's ladder in my
party stockings and that's the sort of ladder you can't kick down." She
couldn't help saying that.

Mrs. Duchemin stood motionless and very slowly redness mounted into her
face. It was most curious to see against that scarlet background the
vivid white of the eyes and the dark, straight eyebrows that nearly met.
And, slowly again her face went perfectly white; then her dark blue eyes
became marked. She seemed to wipe her long, white hands one in the
other, inserting her right hand into her left and drawing it out again.

"I'm sorry," she said in a dead voice. "We had hoped that, if that man
went to France--or if other things happened--we might have continued on
the old friendly footing. But you yourself must see that, with our
official position, we can't be expected to connive . . ."

Valentine said:

"I don't understand!"

"Perhaps you'd rather I didn't go on!" Mrs. Duchemin retorted. "I'd much
rather not go on."

"You'd probably better," Valentine answered.

"We had meant," the elder woman said, "to have a quiet little dinner--we
two and you, before the party--for auld lang syne. But that fellow has
forced himself in, and you see for yourself that we can't have you as
well."

Valentine said:

"I don't see why not. I always like to see Mr. Tietjens!"

Mrs. Duchemin looked hard at her.

"I don't see the use," she said, "of your keeping on that mask. It is
surely bad enough that your mother should go about with that man and
that terrible scenes like that of the other Friday should occur. Mrs.
Tietjens was heroic; nothing less than heroic. But you have no right to
subject us, your friends, to such ordeals."

Valentine said:

"You mean . . . Mrs. Christopher Tietjens . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin went on:

"My husband insists that I should ask you. But I will not. I simply will
not. I invented for you the excuse of the frock. Of course we could have
given you a frock if that man is so mean or so penniless as not to keep
you decent. But I repeat, with our official position we cannot--we
cannot; it would be madness!--connive at this intrigue. And all the more
as the wife appears likely to be friendly with us. She has been once:
she may well come again." She paused and went on solemnly: "And I warn
you, if the split comes--as it must, for what woman could stand it!--it
is Mrs. Tietjens we shall support. She will always find a home here."

An extraordinary picture of Sylvia Tietjens standing beside Edith Ethel
and dwarfing her as a giraffe dwarfs an emu, came into Valentine's head.
She said:

"Ethel! Have I gone mad? Or is it you? Upon my word I can't
understand. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed:

"For God's sake hold your tongue, you shameless thing! You've had a
child by the man, haven't you?"

Valentine saw suddenly the tall silver candlesticks, the dark polished
panels of the rectory and Edith Ethel's mad face and mad hair whirling
before them.

She said:

"No! I certainly haven't. Can you get that into your head? I certainly
haven't." She made a further effort over immense fatigue. "I assure
you--I beg you to believe if it will give you any ease--that Mr.
Tietjens has never addressed a word of love to me in his life. Nor have
I to him. We have hardly talked to each other in all the time we have
known each other."

Mrs. Duchemin said in a harsh voice:

"Seven people in the last five weeks have told me you have had a child
by that brute beast: he's ruined because he has to keep you and your
mother and the child. You won't deny that he has a child somewhere
hidden away? . . ."

Valentine exclaimed suddenly:

"Oh, Ethel, you mustn't . . . you _mustn't_ be jealous of me! If you
only knew you wouldn't be jealous of me. . . . I suppose the child you
were going to have was by Christopher? Men are like that. . . . But not
of me! You need never, never. I've been the best friend you can ever
have had. . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed harshly, as if she were being strangled:

"A sort of blackmail! I knew it would come to that! It always does with
your sort. Then do your damnedest, you harlot. You never set foot in
this house again! Go you and rot. . . ." Her face suddenly expressed
extreme fear and with great swiftness she ran up the room. Immediately
afterwards she was tenderly bending over a great bowl of roses beneath
the lustre. The voice of Vincent Macmaster from the door had said:

"Come in, old man. Of course I've got ten minutes. The book's in here
somewhere. . . ."

Macmaster was beside her, rubbing his hands, bending with his curious,
rather abject manner, and surveying her agonisedly with his eyeglass,
which enormously magnified his lashes, his red lower lid and the veins
on his cornea.

"Valentine!" he said, "my dear Valentine. . . . You've heard? We've
decided to make it public. . . . Guggums will have invited you to our
little feast. And there will be a surprise, I believe. . . ."

Edith Ethel looked, as she bent, lamentably and sharply, over her
shoulder at Valentine.

"Yes," she said bravely, aiming her voice at Edith Ethel, "Ethel has
invited me. I'll try to come. . . ."

"Oh, but you must," Macmaster said, "just you and Christopher, who've
been so kind to us. For old time's sake. You could not . . ."

Christopher Tietjens was ballooning slowly from the door, his hand
tentatively held out to her. As they practically never shook hands at
home it was easy to avoid his hand. She said to herself: "Oh! How is it
possible! How could he have. . ." And the terrible situation poured
itself over her mind: the miserable little husband, the desperately
nonchalant lover--and Edith Ethel mad with jealousy! A doomed household.
She hoped Edith Ethel had seen her refuse her hand to Christopher.

But Edith Ethel, bent over her rose bowl, was burying her beautiful face
in flower after flower. She was accustomed to do this for many minutes
on end: she thought that, so, she resembled a picture by the subject of
her husband's first little monograph. And so, Valentine thought, she
did. She was trying to tell Macmaster that Friday evenings were
difficult times for her to get away. But her throat ached too much.
That, she knew, was her last sight of Edith Ethel, whom she had loved
very much. That also, she hoped, would be her last sight of Christopher
Tietjens--whom also she had loved very much. . . . He was browsing along
a bookshelf, very big and very clumsy.

Macmaster pursued her into the stony hall with clamorous repetitions of
his invitation. She couldn't speak. At the great iron-lined door he held
her hand for an eternity, gazing lamentably, his face close up against
hers. He exclaimed in accents of great fear:

"Has Guggums? . . . She _hasn't_ . . ." His face, which when you saw it
so closely was a little blotched, distorted itself with anxiety: he
glanced aside with panic at the drawing-room door.

Valentine burst a voice through her agonised throat.

"Ethel," she said, "has told me she's to be Lady Macmaster. I'm so glad.
I'm so truly glad for you. You've got what you wanted, haven't you?"

His relief let him get out distractedly, yet as if he were too tired to
be any more agitated:

"Yes! yes! . . . It's, of course, a secret. . . . I don't want _him_
told till Friday next . . . so as to be a sort of _bonne bouche_ . . .
He's practically certain to go out again on Saturday. . . . They're
sending out a great batch of them . . . for the big push. . . ." At that
she tried to draw her hand from his: she missed what he was saying. It
was something to the effect that he would give it all for a happy little
party. She caught the rather astonishing words: "_Wie der alten schoenen
Zeit._" She couldn't tell whether it was his or her eyes that were full
of tears. She said:

"I believe . . . I believe you're a kind man!"

In the great stone hall, hung with long Japanese paintings on silk, the
electric light suddenly jumped; it was at best a sad, brown place.

He exclaimed:

"I, too, beg you to believe that I will never abandon . . ." He glanced
again at the inner door and added: "You both . . . I will never abandon
. . . you both!" he repeated.

He let go her hand: she was on the stone stairs in the damp air. The
great door closed irresistibly behind her, sending a whisper of air
downwards.

V

Mark Tietjens' announcement that his father had after all carried out
his long-standing promise to provide for Mrs. Wannop in such a way as to
allow her to write for the rest of her life only the more lasting kind
of work, delivered Valentine Wannop of all her problems except one. That
one loomed, naturally and immediately, immensely large.

She had passed a queer, unnatural week, the feeling dominating its
numbness having been, oddly, that she would have nothing to do on
Friday! This feeling recurred to her whilst she was casting her eyes
over a hundred girls all in their cloth jumpers and men's black ties,
aligned upon asphalte; whilst she was jumping on trams; whilst she was
purchasing the tinned or dried fish that formed the staple diet of
herself and her mother; whilst she was washing-up the dinner-things;
upbraiding the house agent for the state of the bath, or bending closely
over the large but merciless handwriting of the novel of her mother's
that she was typing. It came, half as a joy, half mournfully across her
familiar businesses; she felt as a man might feel who, luxuriating in
the anticipation of leisure, knew that it was obtained by being
compulsorily retired from some laborious but engrossing job. There would
be nothing to do on Fridays!

It was, too, as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she
would never know the end. Of the fairy-tale she knew the end: the
fortunate and adventurous tailor had married his beautiful and
be-princessed goose girl, and was well on the way to burial in
Westminster Abbey--or at any rate to a memorial service, the squire
being actually buried amongst his faithful villagers. But she would
never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch
tiles they wanted to line their bathroom. . . . She would never know.
Yet witnessing similar ambitions had made up a great deal of her life.

And, she said to herself, there was another tale ended. On the surface
the story of her love for Tietjens had been static enough. It had begun
in nothing and in nothing it had ended. But, deep down in her being--ah!
it had progressed enough. Through the agency of two women! Before the
scene with Mrs. Duchemin there could, she thought, have been few young
women less preoccupied than she with the sexual substrata, either of
passion or of life. Her months as a domestic servant had accounted for
that, sex, as she had seen it from a back kitchen, having been a
repulsive affair, whilst the knowledge of its manifestations that she
had thus attained had robbed it of the mystery which caused most of the
young women whom she knew to brood upon these subjects.

Her conviction: as to the moral incidence of sex were, she knew, quite
opportunist. Brought up amongst rather "advanced" young people, had she
been publicly challenged to pronounce her views she would probably, out
of loyalty to her comrades, have declared that neither morality nor any
ethical aspects were concerned in the matter. Like most of her young
friends, influenced by the advanced teachers and tendential novelists of
the day, she would have stated herself to advocate an--of course,
enlightened!--promiscuity. That, before the revelations of Mrs.
Duchemin! Actually she had thought very little about the matter.

Nevertheless, even before that date, had her deeper feelings been
questioned she would have reacted with the idea that sexual incontinence
was extremely ugly and chastity to be prized in the egg and spoon race
that life was. She had been brought up by her father--who, perhaps, was
wiser than appeared on the surface--to admire athleticism, and she was
aware that proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety,
cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the
heading of abnegation. She couldn't have lived amongst the Ealing
servant-class--the eldest son of the house in which she had been
employed bad been the defendant in a peculiarly scabrous breach of
promise case, and the comments of the drunken cook on this and similar
affairs had run the whole gamut from the sentimentally reticent to the
extreme of coarseness according to the state of her alcoholic
barometer--she couldn't then have lived among the Ealing servant-class
and come to any other subliminal conclusion. So that, dividing the world
into bright beings on the one hand and, on the other, into the mere
stuff to fill graveyards whose actions during life couldn't matter, she
had considered that the bright beings must be people whose public
advocating of enlightened promiscuity went along with an absolute
continence. She was aware that enlightened beings occasionally fell away
from these standards in order to become portentous Egerias; but the Mary
Wollstonecrafts, the Mrs. Taylors, and the George Eliots of the last
century she had regarded humorously as rather priggish nuisances.
Indeed, being very healthy and very hard worked, she had been in the
habit of regarding the whole matter, if not humorously, then at least
good-humouredly, as a nuisance.

But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a
first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs. Duchemin
had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely
æsthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and
infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook.
The language that she had used about her lover--calling him always "that
oaf" or "that beast"!--had seemed literally to pain the girl internally,
as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports at each
two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through the
darkness from the rectory.

And she had never heard what had become of Mrs. Duchemin's baby. Next
day Mrs. Duchemin had been as suave, as circumspect, and as collected as
ever. Never a word more had passed between them on the subject. This
left in Valentine Wannop's mind a dark patch--as it were of murder--at
which she must never look. And across the darkened world of her sexual
tumult there flitted continually the quick suspicion that Tietjens might
have been the lover of her friend. It was a matter of the simplest
analogy. Mrs. Duchemin had appeared a bright being: so had Tietjens. But
Mrs. Duchemin was a foul whore. . . . How much more then must Tietjens,
who was a man, with the larger sexual necessities of the male . . . Her
mind always refused to complete the thought.

Its suggestion wasn't to be combated by the idea of Vincent Macmaster
himself: he was, she felt, the sort of man that it was almost a
necessity for either mistress or comrade to betray. He seemed to ask for
it. Besides, she once put it to herself, how could any woman, given the
choice and the opportunity--and God knows there was opportunity
enough--choose that shadowy, dried leaf, if there were the splendid
masculinity of Tietjens in whose arms to lie. She so regarded these two
men. And that shadowy conviction was at once fortified and appeased
when, a little later, Mrs. Duchemin herself began to apply to Tietjens
the epithets of "oaf" and "beast"--the very ones that she had used to
designate the father of her putative child!

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 he said, 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
re-arrangement 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--that 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 "_Cadaver_"
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 _Cadaver_ 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 as 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 Godsend, 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 mine-sweepers. 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. . . .

"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 vitamines. . . .

If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a larger pile to put
into the leering--or compassionate--taxicabman'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,
mocassined 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 cat-gut 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! Fivepence! 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