ill. The moment you got it I could see you thinking that you must

conceal from me that you thought it was because of me she died. I could see you wondering if it wouldn't be practicable to conceal from me that she was dead. You couldn't, of course, do that because, you remember, we were to have gone to Wiesbaden and show ourselves; and we couldn't do that because we should have to be in mourning. So you took me to Russia to get out of taking me to the funeral."

"I took you to Russia," Tietjens said. "I remember it all now--because I had an order from Sir Robert Ingleby to assist the British Consul-General in preparing a Blue Book statistical table of the Government of Kiev. . . . It appeared to be the most industrially promising region in the world in those days. It isn't now, naturally. I shall never see back a penny of the money I put into it. I thought I was clever in those days. . . . And of course, yes, the money was my mother's settlement. It comes back . . . yes, of course. . . ."

"Did you," Sylvia asked, "get out of taking me to your mother's funeral because you thought I should defile your mother's corpse by my presence? Or because you were afraid that in the presence of your mother's body you wouldn't be able to conceal from me that you thought I killed her? . . . Don't deny it. And don't get out of it by saying that you can't remember those days. You're remembering now: that I killed your mother: that Miss Wannop sent the telegram--why don't you score it against her that she sent the news? . . . Or, good God, why don't you score it against yourself, as the wrath of the Almighty, that your mother was dying while you and that girl were croodling over each other? . . . At Rye! Whilst I was at Lobscheid. . . ."

Tietjens wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

"Well, let's drop that," Sylvia said. "God knows I've no right to put a spoke in that girl's wheel or in yours. If you love each other you've a right to happiness and I daresay she'll make you happy. I can't divorce you, being a Catholic; but I won't make it difficult for you other ways, and self-contained people like you and her will manage somehow. You'll have learned the way from Macmaster and his mistress. . . . But, oh, Christopher Tietjens, have you ever considered how foully you've used _me_!"

Tietjens looked at her attentively, as if with magpie anguish.

"If," Sylvia went on with her denunciation, "you had once in our lives said to me: 'You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it . . . .' If you'd only once said something like it . . . about the child! About Perowne! . . . you might have done something to bring us together. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"That's, of course, true!"

"I know," Sylvia said, "you can't help it. . . . But when, in your famous county family pride--though a youngest son!--you say to yourself: And I daresay if . . . Oh, Christ! . . . you're shot in the trenches you'll say it . . . oh, between the saddle and the ground! that you never did a dishonourable action. . . . And, mind you, I believe that no other man save one has ever had more right to say it than you. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"You believe that!"

"As I hope to stand before my Redeemer," Sylvia said, "I believe it. . . . But, in the name of the Almighty, how could any woman live beside you . . . and be for ever forgiven? Or no: not forgiven: ignored! . . . Well, be proud when you die because of your honour. But, God, you be humble about . . . your errors in judgment. _You_ know what it is to ride a horse for miles with too tight a curb-chain and its tongue cut almost in half. . . . You remember the groom your father had who had the trick of turning the hunters out like that. . . . And you horse-whipped him, and you've told me you've almost cried ever so often afterwards for thinking of that mare's mouth. . . . Well! Think of _this_ mare's mouth sometimes! You've ridden me like that for seven years. . . ."

She stopped and then went on again:

"Don't you know, Christopher Tietjens, that there is only one man from whom a woman could take '_Neither I condemn thee_' and not hate him more than she hates the fiend! . . ."

Tietjens so looked at her that he contrived to hold her attention.

"I'd like you to let me ask you," he said, "how I could throw stones at you? I have never disapproved of your actions."

Her hands dropped dispiritedly to her sides.

"Oh, Christopher," she said, "don't carry on that old play acting. I shall never see you again, very likely, to speak to; You'll sleep with the Wannop girl to-night: you're going out to be killed to-morrow. _Let's_ be straight for the next ten minutes or so. And give me your attention. The Wannop girl can spare that much if she's to have all the rest. . . ."

She could see that he was giving her his whole mind.

"As you said just now," he exclaimed slowly, "as I hope to meet my Redeemer I believe you to be a good woman. One that never did a dishonourable thing."

She recoiled a little in her chair.

"Then!" she said, "you're the wicked man I've always made believe to think you, though I didn't."

Tietjens said:

"No! . . . Let me try to put it to you as I see it."

She exclaimed:

"No! . . . I've been a wicked woman. I have ruined you. I am not going to listen to you."

He said:

"I daresay you have ruined me. That's nothing to me. I am completely indifferent."

She cried out:

"Oh! Oh! . . . Oh!" on a note of agony.

Tietjens said doggedly:

"I don't care. I can't help it. Those are--those _should_ be--the conditions of life amongst decent people. When our next war comes I hope it will be fought out under those conditions. Let us, for God's sake, talk of the gallant enemy. Always. We have _got_ to plunder the French or millions of our people must starve: they have _got_ to resist us successfully or be wiped out. . . . It's the same with you and me. . . ."

She exclaimed:

"You mean to say that you don't think I was wicked when I . . . when I trepanned is what mother calls it? . . ."

He said loudly:

"_No_! . . . You had been let in for it by some brute. I have always held that a woman who has been let down by one man has the right--has the duty for the sake of her child--to let down a man. It becomes woman against man: against one man. I happened to be that one man: it was the will of God. But you were within your rights. I will never go back on that. Nothing will make me, ever!"

She said:

"And the others! And Perowne. . . . I know you'll say that anyone is justified in doing anything as long as they are open enough about it. . . . But it killed your mother. Do you disapprove of my having killed your mother? Or you consider that I have corrupted the child. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I don't. . . . I want to speak to you about that."

She exclaimed:

"You _don't_. . . ."

He said calmly:

"You know I don't . . . while I was certain that I was going to be here to keep him straight and an Anglican I fought your influence over him. I'm obliged to you for having brought up of yourself the considerations that I may be killed and that I am ruined. I am. I could not raise a hundred pounds between now and to-morrow. I am, therefore, obviously not the man to have sole charge of the heir of Groby."

Sylvia was saying:

"Every penny I have is at your disposal. . . ." when the maid, Hullo Central, marched up to her master and placed a card in his hand. He said:

"Tell him to wait five minutes in the drawing-room."

Sylvia said:

"Who is it?"

Tietjens answered:

"A man . . . Let's get this settled. I've never thought you corrupted the boy. You tried to teach him to tell white lies. On perfectly straight Papist lines. I have no objection to Papists and no objection to white lies for Papists. You told him once to put a frog in Marchant's bath. I've no objection to a boy's putting a frog in his nurse's bath, as such. But Marchant is an old woman, and the heir to Groby should respect old women always and old family servants in particular. . . . It hasn't, perhaps, struck you that the boy is heir to Groby. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"If . . . if your second brother is killed. . . . But your eldest brother . . ."

"He," Tietjens said, "has got a French woman near Euston station. He's lived with her for over fifteen years, of afternoons, when there were no race meetings. She'll never let him marry and she's past the child-bearing stage. So there's no one else. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"You mean that I may bring the child up as a Catholic."

Tietjens said:

"A _Roman_ Catholic. . . . You'll teach him, please, to use that term before myself if I ever see him again. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"Oh, I thank God that he has softened your heart. This will take the curse off this house."

Tietjens shook his head:

"I think not," he said, "off you, perhaps. Off Groby very likely. It was, perhaps, time that there should be a Papist owner of Groby again. You've read Spelden on sacrilege about Groby? . . ."

She said:

"Yes! The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, was pretty bad to the Papist owners. . . ."

"He was a tough Dutchman," Tietjens said, "but let us get on! There's enough time, but not too much. . . . I've got this man to see."

"Who is he?" Sylvia asked.

Tietjens was collecting his thoughts.

"My dear!" he said. "You'll permit me to call you 'my dear'? We're old enemies enough and we're talking about the future of our child."

Sylvia said:

"You said 'our' child, not 'the' child. . . ."

Tietjens said with a great deal of concern:

"You will forgive me for bringing it up. You might prefer to think he was Drake's child. He can't be. It would be outside the course of nature. . . . I'm as poor as I am because . . . forgive me . . . I've spent a great deal of money on tracing the movements of you and Drake before our marriage. And if it's a relief to you to know . . ."

"It _is_," Sylvia said. "I . . . I've always been too beastly shy to put the matter before a specialist, or even before mother. . . . And we women are so ignorant. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I know . . . I know you were too shy even to think about it yourself, hard." He went into months and days; then he continued: "But it would have made no difference: a child born in wedlock is by law the father's, and if a man who's a gentleman suffers the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences: the woman and the child must come before the man, be he who he may. And worse-begotten children than ours have inherited statelier names. And I loved the little beggar with all my heart and with all my soul from the first minute I saw him. That may be the secret clue, or it may be sheer sentimentality. . . . So I fought your influence because it was Papist, while I was a whole man. But I'm not a whole man any more, and the evil eye that is on me might transfer itself to him."

He stopped and said:

"For I must to the greenwood go. Alone a banished man. . . . But have him well protected against the evil eye. . . ."

"Oh, Christopher," she said, "it's true I've not been a bad woman to the child. And I never will be. And I will keep Marchant with him till she dies. You'll tell her not to interfere with his religious instruction, and she won't. . . ."

Tietjens said with a friendly weariness:

"That's right . . . and you'll have Father . . . Father . . . the priest that was with us for a fortnight before he was born to give him his teachings. He was the best man I ever met and one of the most intelligent. It's been a great comfort to me to think of the boy as in his hands. . . ."

Sylvia stood up, her eyes blazing out of a pallid face of stone:

"Father Consett," she said, "was hung on the day they shot Casement. They dare not put it into the papers because he was a priest and all the witnesses Ulster witnesses. . . . And yet I may not say this is an accursed war."

Tietjens shook his head with the slow heaviness of an aged man.

"You may for me . . ." he said. "You might ring the bell, will you? Don't go away. . . ."

He sat with the blue gloom of that enclosed space all over him, lumped heavily in his chair.

"Spelden on sacrilege," he said, "may be right after all. You'd say so from the Tietjenses. There's not been a Tietjens since the first Lord Justice cheated the Papist Loundeses out of Groby, but died of a broken neck or of a broken heart: for all the fifteen thousand acres of good farming-land and iron land, and for all the heather on the top of it. . . . What's the quotation: 'Be ye something as something and something and ye shall not escape. . . .' What is it?"

"Calumny!" Sylvia said. She spoke with intense bitterness. . . . "Chaste as ice and cold as . . . as you are. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Yes! Yes. . . . And mind you none of the Tietjens were ever soft. Not one! They had reason for their broken hearts. . . . Take my poor father. . . ."

Sylvia said:

"_Don't_!"

"Both my brothers were killed in Indian regiments on the same day and not a mile apart. And my sister in the same week: out at sea, not so far from them. . . . Unnoticeable people. But one can be fond of unnoticeable people. . . ."

Hullo Central was at the door. Tietjens told her to ask Lord Port Scatho to step down. . . .

"You must, of course, know these details," Tietjens said, "as the mother to my father's heir. . . . My father got the three notifications on the same day. It was enough to break his heart. He only lived a month. I saw him . . ."

Sylvia screamed piercingly:

"Stop! stop! stop!" She clutched at the mantelpiece to hold herself up. "Your father died of a broken heart," she said, "because your brother's best friend, Ruggles, told him you were a squit who lived on women's money and had got the daughter of his oldest friend with child. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Oh! Ah! Yes! . . . I suspected that. I knew it, really. I suppose the poor dear knows better now. Or perhaps he doesn't. . . . It doesn't matter."

II

It has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. In the smaller matters of the general run of life he will be impeccable and not to be moved; but in sudden confrontations of anything but physical dangers he is apt--he is, indeed, almost certain--to go to pieces very badly. This, at least, was the view of Christopher Tietjens, and he very much dreaded his interview with Lord Port Scatho--because he feared that he must be near breaking point.

In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his temperament as he could control--for, though no man can choose the land of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his automatic habits--Tietjens had quite advisedly and of set purpose adopted a habit of behaviour that he considered to be the best in the world for the normal life. If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic and lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigramatically imbecile over unessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at all--or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of death--except at sea, by fire, railway accident or accidental drowning in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or--and particularly--prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantage of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914. Death for man came but once: the danger of death so seldom as to be practically negligible: love of a distracting kind was a disease merely of the weak: public dishonour for persons of position, so great was the hushing up power of the ruling class, and the power of absorption of the remoter Colonies, was practically unknown.

Tietjens found himself now faced by all these things, coming upon him cumulatively and rather suddenly, and he had before him an interview that might cover them all and with a man whom he much respected and very much desired not to hurt. He had to face these, moreover, with a brain two-thirds of which felt numb. It was exactly like that.

It was not so much that he couldn't use what brain he had as trenchantly as ever: it was that there were whole regions of fact upon which he could no longer call in support of his argument. His knowledge of history was still practically negligible: he knew nothing whatever of the humaner letters and, what was far worse, nothing at all of the higher and more sensuous phases of mathematics. And the comings back of these things was much slower than he had confessed to Sylvia. It was with these disadvantages that he had to face Lord Port Scatho.

Lord Port Scatho was the first man of whom Sylvia Tietjens had thought when she had been considering of men who were absolutely honourable, entirely benevolent . . . and rather lacking in constructive intelligence. He had inherited the management of one of the most respected of the great London banks, so that his commercial and social influences were very extended: he was extremely interested in promoting Low Church interests, the reform of the divorce laws and sports for the people, and he had a great affection for Sylvia Tietjens. He was forty-five, beginning to put on weight, but by no means obese; he had a large, quite round head, very high-coloured cheeks that shone as if with frequent ablutions, an uncropped, dark moustache, dark, very cropped, smooth hair, brown eyes, a very new grey tweed suit, a very new grey Trilby hat, a black tie in a gold ring and very new patent leather boots that had white calf tops. He had a wife almost the spit of himself in face, figure, probity, kindliness and interests, except that for his interest in sports for the people she substituted that for maternity hospitals. His heir was his nephew, Mr. Brownlie, known as Brownie, who would also be physically the exact spit of his uncle, except that, not having put on flesh, he appeared to be taller and that his moustache and hair were both a little longer and more fair. This gentleman entertained for Sylvia Tietjens a gloomy and deep passion that he considered to be perfectly honourable because he desired to marry her after she had divorced her husband. Tietjens he desired to ruin because he wished to marry Mrs. Tietjens and partly because he considered Tietjens to be an undesirable person of no great means. Of this passion Lord Port Scatho was ignorant.

He now came into the Tietjens' dining-room, behind the servant, holding an open letter: he walked rather stiffly because he was very much worried. He observed that Sylvia had been crying and was still wiping her eyes. He looked round the room to see if he could see in it anything to account for Sylvia's crying. Tietjens was still sitting at the head of the lunch-table: Sylvia was rising from a chair beside the fireplace.

Lord Port Scatho said:

"I want to see you, Tietjens, for a minute on business."

Tietjens said:

"I can give you ten minutes. . . ."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"Mrs. Tietjens perhaps . . ."

He waved the open letter towards Mrs. Tietjens. Tietjens said:

"No! Mrs. Tietjens will remain." He desired to say something more friendly. He said: "Sit down."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"I shan't be stopping a minute. But really . . ." and he moved the letter, but not with so wide a gesture, towards Sylvia.

"I have no secrets from Mrs. Tietjens," Tietjens said.

"Absolutely none . . ."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"No . . . No, of course not . . . But . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Similarly, Mrs. Tietjens has no secrets from me. Again absolutely none."

Sylvia said:

"I don't, of course, tell Tietjens about my maid's love affairs or what the fish costs every day."

Tietjens said:

"You'd better sit down." He added on an impulse of kindness: "As a matter of fact I was just clearing up things for Sylvia to take over . . . this command." It was part of the disagreeableness of his mental disadvantages that upon occasion he could not think of other than military phrases. He felt intense annoyance. Lord Port Scatho affected him with some of the slight nausea that in those days you felt at contact with the civilian who knew none of your thoughts, phrases or preoccupations. He added, nevertheless equably:

"One has to clear up. I'm going out."

Lord Port Scatho said hastily:

"Yes; yes. I won't keep you. One has so many engagements in spite of the war. . . ." His eyes wandered in bewilderment. Tietjens could see them at last fixing themselves on the oil stains that Sylvia's salad dressing had left on his collar and green tabs. He said to himself that he must remember to change his tunic before he went to the War Office. He must not forget. Lord Port Scatho's bewilderment at these oil stains was such that he had lost himself in the desire to account for them. . . . You could see the slow thoughts moving inside his square, polished brown forehead. Tietjens wanted very much to help him. He wanted to say: "It's about Sylvia's letter that you've got in your hand, isn't it?" But Lord Port Scatho had entered the room with the stiffness, with the odd, high-collared sort of gait that on formal and unpleasant occasions Englishmen use when they approach each other; braced up, a little like strange dogs meeting in the street. In view of that, Tietjens couldn't say "Sylvia." . . . But it would add to the formality and unpleasantness if he said again "Mrs. Tietjens!" _That_ wouldn't help Port Scatho. . . .

Sylvia said suddenly:

"You don't understand, apparently. My husband is going out to the front line. To-morrow morning. It's for the second time."

Lord Port Scatho sat down suddenly on a chair beside the table. With his fresh face and brown eyes suddenly anguished he exclaimed:

"But, my dear fellow! You! Good God!" and then to Sylvia: "I beg your pardon!" To clear his mind he said again to Tietjens: "_You_! Going out to-morrow!" And, when the idea was really there, his face suddenly cleared. He looked with a swift, averted glance at Sylvia's face and then for a fixed moment at Tietjens' oil-stained tunic. Tietjens could see him explaining to himself with immense enlightenment that _that_ explained both Sylvia's tears and the oil on the tunic. For Port Scatho might well imagine that officers went to the conflict in their oldest clothes. . . .

But, if his puzzled brain cleared, his distressed mind became suddenly distressed doubly. He had to add to the distress he had felt on entering the room and finding himself in the midst of what he took to be a highly emotional family parting. And Tietjens knew that during the whole war Port Scatho had never witnessed a family parting at all. Those that were not inevitable he would avoid like the plague, and his own nephew and all his wife's nephews were in the bank. That was quite proper for, if the ennobled family of Brownlie were not of the Ruling Class--who had to go!--they were of the Administrative Class, who were privileged to stay. So he had seen no partings.

Of his embarrassed hatred of them he gave immediate evidence. For he first began several sentences of praise of Tietjens' heroism which he was unable to finish and then getting quickly out of his chair exclaimed:

"In the circumstances then . . . the little matter I came about . . . I couldn't of course think . . ."

Tietjens said:

"No; don't go. The matter you came about--I know all about it of course--had better be settled."

Port Scatho sat down again: his jaw fell slowly: under his bronzed complexion his skin became a shade paler. He said at last:

"You know what I came about? But then . . ."

His ingenuous and kindly mind could be seen to be working with reluctance: his athletic figure drooped. He pushed the letter that he still held along the tablecloth towards Tietjens. He said, in the voice of one awaiting a reprieve:

"But you _can't_ be . . . aware . . . Not of this letter. . . ."

Tietjens left the letter on the cloth, from there he could read the large handwriting on the blue-grey paper:

"Mrs. Christopher Tietjens presents her compliments to Lord Port Scatho and the Honourable Court of Benchers of the Inn. . . ." He wondered where Sylvia had got hold of that phraseology: he imagined it to be fantastically wrong. He said:

"I have already told you that I know about this letter, as I have already told you that I know--and I will add that I approve!--of all Mrs. Tietjens' actions. . . ." With his hard blue eyes he looked brow-beatingly into Port Scatho's soft brown orbs, knowing that he was sending the message: "Think what you please and be damned to you!"

The gentle brown things remained on his face; then they filled with an expression of deep pain. Port Scatho cried:

"But good God! Then . . ."

He looked at Tietjens again. His mind, which took refuge from life in the affairs of the Low Church, of Divorce Law Reform and of Sports for the People, became a sea of pain at the contemplation of strong situations. His eye said:

"For heaven's sake do not tell me that Mrs. Duchemin, the mistress of your dearest friend, is the mistress of yourself, and that you take this means of wreaking a vulgar spite on them."

Tietjens, leaning heavily forward, made his eyes as enigmatic as he could; he said very slowly and very clearly:

"Mrs. Tietjens is, of course, not aware of _all_ the circumstances."

Port Scatho threw himself back in his chair.

"I don't understand!" he said. "I do not understand. How am I to act? You do not wish me to act on this letter? You can't!"

Tietjens, who found himself, said:

"You had better talk to Mrs. Tietjens about that. I will say something myself later. In the meantime let me say that Mrs. Tietjens would seem to me to be quite within her rights. A lady, heavily veiled, comes here every Friday and remains until four of the Saturday morning. . . . If you are prepared to palliate the proceeding you had better do so to Mrs. Tietjens. . . ."

Port Scatho turned agitatedly on Sylvia.

"I can't, of course, palliate," he said. "God forbid. . . . But, my dear Sylvia . . . my dear Mrs. Tietjens. . . . In the case of two people so much esteemed! . . . We have, of course, argued the matter of principle. It is a part of a subject I have very much at heart: the granting of divorce . . . civil divorce, at least . . . in cases in which one of the parties to the marriage is in a lunatic asylum. I have sent you the pamphlets of E. S. P. Haynes that we publish. I know that as a Roman Catholic you hold strong views. . . . I do not, I assure you, stand for latitude. . . ." He became then simply eloquent: he really had the matter at heart, one of his sisters having been for many years married to a lunatic. He expatiated on the agonies of this situation all the more eloquently in that it was the only form of human distress which he had personally witnessed.

Sylvia took a long look at Tietjens: he imagined for counsel. He looked at her steadily for a moment, then at Port Scatho, who was earnestly turned to her, then back at her. He was trying to say:

"Listen to Port Scatho for a minute. I need time to think of my course of action!"

He needed, for the first time in his life, time to think of his course of action.

He had been thinking with his under mind ever since Sylvia had told him that she had written her letter to the benchers denouncing Macmaster and his woman; ever since Sylvia had reminded him that Mrs. Duchemin in the Edinburgh to London express of the day before the war had been in his arms he had seen, with extraordinary clearness a great many north country scenes though he could not affix names to all the places. The forgetfulness of the names was abnormal: he ought to know the names of places from Berwick down to the vale of York--but that he should have forgotten the incidents was normal enough. They had been of little importance: he preferred not to remember the phases of his friend's love affair; moreover, the events that happened immediately afterwards had been of a nature to make one forget quite normally what had just preceded them. That Mrs. Duchemin should be sobbing on his shoulder in a locked corridor carriage hadn't struck him as in the least important: she was the mistress of his dearest friend: she had had a very trying time for a week or so, ending in a violent, nervous quarrel with her agitated lover. She was, of course, crying off the effects of the quarrel which had been all the more shaking in that Mrs. Duchemin, like himself, had always been almost too self-contained. As a matter of fact he did not himself like Mrs. Duchemin, and he was pretty certain that she herself more than a little disliked him; so that nothing but their common feeling for Macmaster had brought them together. General Campion, however, was not to know that. . . . He had looked into the carriage in the way one does in a corridor just after the train had left. . . . He couldn't remember the name. . . . Doncaster . . . No! . . . Darlington; it wasn't that. At Darlington there was a model of the Rocket . . . or perhaps it isn't the Rocket. An immense clumsy leviathan of a locomotive by . . . by . . . The great gloomy stations of the north-going trains . . . Durham . . . No! Alnwick. . . . No! . . . Wooler . . . By God! Wooler! The junction for Bamborough. . . .

It had been in one of the castles at Bamborough that he and Sylvia had been staying with the Sandbachs. Then . . . a name had come into his mind spontaneously! . . . Two names! . . . It was, perhaps, the turn of the tide! For the first time . . . To be marked with a red stone . . . after this: some names, sometimes, on the tip of the tongue, might come over! He had, however, to get on. . . .

The Sandbachs, then, and he and Sylvia . . . others too . . . had been in Bamborough since mid-July: Eton and Harrow at Lord's, waiting for the real house parties that would come with the 12th. . . . He repeated these names and dates to himself for the personal satisfaction of knowing that, amongst the repairs effected in his mind, these two remained: Eton and Harrow, the end of the London season: 12th of August, grouse shooting begins. . . . It was pitiful. . . .

When General Campion had come up to rejoin his sister he, Tietjens, had stopped only two days. The coolness between the two of them remained; it was the first time they had met, except in Court, after the accident. . . . For Mrs. Wannop, with grim determination, had sued the General for the loss of her horse. It had lived all right--but it was only fit to draw a lawn-mower for cricket pitches. . . . Mrs. Wannop, then, had gone bald-headed for the General, partly because she wanted the money, partly because she wanted a public reason for breaking with the Sandbachs. The general had been equally obstinate and had undoubtedly perjured himself in Court: not the best, not the most honourable, the most benevolent man in the world would not turn oppressor of the widow and orphan when his efficiency as a chauffeur was impugned or the fact brought to light that at a very dangerous turning he hadn't sounded his horn. Tietjens had sworn that he hadn't: the General that he had. There _could_ not be any question of doubt, for the horn was a beastly thing that made a prolonged noise like that of a terrified peacock. . . . So Tietjens had not, till the end of that July, met the General again. It had been quite a proper thing for gentlemen to quarrel over and was quite convenient, though it had cost the General fifty pounds for the horse and, of course, a good bit over for costs. Lady Claudine had refused to interfere in the matter: she was privately of opinion that the General _hadn't_ sounded his horn, but the General was both a passionately devoted and explosive brother. She had remained closely intimate with Sylvia, mildly cordial with Tietjens and had continued to ask the Wannops to such of her garden parties as the General did not attend. She was also very friendly with Mrs. Duchemin.

Tietjens and the General had met with the restrained cordiality of English gentlemen who had some years before accused each other of perjury in a motor accident. On the second morning a violent quarrel had broken out between them on the subject of whether the General had or hadn't sounded his horn. The General had ended up by shouting . . . really shouting:

"By God! If I ever get you under my command. . . ."

Tietjens remembered that he had quoted and given the number of a succinct paragraph in King's Regs, dealing with the fate of general or higher field officers who gave their subordinates bad confidential reports because of private quarrels. The General had exploded into noises that ended in laughter.

"What a rag-bag of a mind you have, Chrissie!" he said. "What's King's Regs, to you? And how do you know it's paragraph 66 or whatever you say it is? I don't." He added more seriously: "_What_ a fellow you are for getting into obscure rows! What in the world do you do it for?"

That afternoon Tietjens had gone to stop, a long way up in the moors, with his son, the nurse, his sister Effie and her children. They were the last days of happiness he was to know and he hadn't known so many. He was then content. He played with his boy, who, thank God, was beginning to grow healthy at last. He walked about the moors with his sister Effie, a large, plain, parson's wife, who had no conversation at all, though at times they talked of their mother. The moors were like enough to those above Groby to make them happy. They lived in a bare, grim farmhouse, drank great quantities of butter-milk and ate great quantities of Wensleydale. It was the hard, frugal life of his desire and his mind was at rest.

His mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance. Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of its hills, the shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible pall, over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread from . . . oh, Middlesbrough! We were fitted neither for defeat nor for victory: we could be true to neither friend nor foe. Not even to ourselves!

But of war for us he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till the opportune moment and then grabbing a French channel port or a few German colonies as the price of neutrality. And he was thankful to be out of it; for his back-doorway out--his second!--was the French Foreign Legion. First Sylvia: then that! Two tremendous disciplines: for the soul and for the body.

The French he admired: for their tremendous efficiency, for their frugality of life, for the logic of their minds, for their admirable achievements in the arts, for their neglect of the industrial system, for their devotion, above all, to the eighteenth century. It would be restful to serve, if only as a slave, people who saw clearly, coldly, straight: not obliquely and with hypocrisy only such things as should deviously conduce to the standard of comfort of hogs and to lecheries winked at. . . . He would rather sit for hours on a bench in a barrack-room polishing a badge in preparation for the cruellest of route marches of immense lengths under the Algerian sun.

For, as to the Foreign Legion, he had had no illusion. You were treated not as a hero, but as a whipped dog: he was aware of all the _asticoteries_, the cruelties, the weight of the rifle, the cells. You would have six months of training in the desert and then be hurtled into the line to be massacred without remorse . . . as foreign dirt. But the prospect seemed to him one of deep peace: he had never asked for soft living and now was done with it. . . . The boy was healthy; Sylvia, with the economies they had made, very rich . . . and even at that date he was sure that, if the friction of himself, Tietjens, were removed, she would make a good mother. . . .

Obviously he might survive; but after that tremendous physical drilling what survived would not be himself, but a man with cleaned, sand-dried bones: a clear mind. His private ambition had always been for saintliness: he must be able to touch pitch and not be defiled. That he knew marked him off as belonging to the sentimental branch of humanity. He couldn't help it: Stoic or Epicurean: Caliph in the harem or Dervish desiccating in the sand: one or the other you must be. And his desire was to be a saint of the Anglican variety . . . as his mother had been, without convent, ritual, vows, or miracles to be performed by your relics! That sainthood, truly, the Foreign Legion might give you. . . . The desire of every English gentleman from Colonel Hutchinson upwards. . . . A mysticism. . . .

Remembering the clear sunlight of those naïvetés--though in his blue gloom he had abated no jot of the ambition--Tietjens sighed deeply as he came back for a moment to regard his dining-room. Really, it was to see how much time he had left in which to think out what to say to Port Scatho. . . . Port Scatho had moved his chair over to beside Sylvia and, almost touching her, was leaning over and recounting the griefs of his sister who was married to a lunatic. Tietjens gave himself again for a moment to the luxury of self-pity. He considered that he was dull-minded, heavy, ruined, and so calumniated that at times he believed in his own infamy, for it is impossible to stand up for ever against the obloquy of your land and remain unhurt in the mind. If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. . . .

His mind stopped for a moment and his eyes gazed dully at Sylvia's letter which lay open on the tablecloth. His thoughts came together, converging on the loosely-written words:

"For the last nine months a woman . . ."

He wondered swiftly what he had already said to Port Scatho: only that he had known of his wife's letter; not when! And that he approved! Well, on principle! He sat up. To think that one could be brought down to thinking so slowly!

He ran swiftly over what had happened in the train from Scotland and before. . . .

Macmaster had turned up one morning beside their breakfast table in the farm house, much agitated, looking altogether too small in a cloth cap and a new grey tweed suit. He had wanted £50 to pay his bill with: at some place up the line above . . . above . . . Berwick suddenly flashed into Tietjens' mind. . . .

That was the geographic position. Sylvia was at Bamborough on the coast (junction Wooler); he, himself, to the north-west, on the moors. Macmaster to the north-east of him, just over the border: in some circumspect beauty spot where you did not meet people. Both Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin would know that country and gurgle over its beastly literary associations. . . . The Shirra! Maida! Pet Marjorie . . . Faugh! Macmaster would, no doubt, turn an honest penny by writing articles about it and Mrs. Duchemin would hold his hand. . . .

She had become Macmaster's mistress, as far as Tietjens knew, after a dreadful scene in the rectory, Duchemin having mauled his wife like a savage dog, and Macmaster in the house. . . . It was natural: a Sadic reaction as it were. But Tietjens rather wished they hadn't. Now it appeared they had been spending a week together . . . or more. Duchemin by that time was in an asylum. . . .

From what Tietjens had made out they had got out of bed early one morning to take a boat and see the sunrise on some lake and had passed an agreeable day together quoting, "Since when we stand side by side only hands may meet" and other poems of Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, no doubt to justify their sin. On coming home they had run their boat's nose into the tea-table of the Port Scathos with Mr. Brownlie, the nephew, just getting out of a motor to join them. The Port Scatho group were spending the night at the Macmasters' hotel which backed on to the lake. It was the ordinary damn sort of thing that must happen in these islands that are only a few yards across.

The Macmasters appear to have lost their heads frightfully, although Lady Port Scatho had been as motherly as possible to Mrs. Duchemin; so motherly, indeed, that if they had not been unable to observe anything, they might have recognised the Port Scathos as backers rather than spies upon themselves. It was, no doubt, however, Brownlie who had upset them: he wasn't very civil to Macmaster, whom he knew as a friend of Tietjens. He had dashed up from London in his motor to consult his uncle, who was dashing down from the west of Scotland, about the policy of the bank in that moment of crisis. . . .

Macmaster, anyhow, did not spend the night in the hotel, but went to Jedburgh or Melrose or some such place, turning up again almost before it was light to have a frightful interview about five in the morning with Mrs. Duchemin, who, towards three, had come to a disastrous conclusion as to her condition. They had lost their nerves for the first time in their association, and they had lost them very badly indeed, the things that Mrs. Duchemin said to Macmaster seeming almost to have passed belief. . . .

Thus, when Macmaster turned up at Tietjens' breakfast, he was almost out of his mind. He wanted Tietjens to go over in the motor he had brought, pay the bill at the hotel, and travel down to town with Mrs. Duchemin, who was certainly in no condition to travel alone. Tietjens was also to make up the quarrel with Mrs. Duchemin and to lend Macmaster £50 in cash, as it was then impossible to change cheques anywhere. Tietjens got the money from his old nurse, who, because she distrusted banks, carried great sums in £5 notes in a pocket under her under-petticoat.

Macmaster, pocketing the money, had said:

"That makes exactly two thousand guineas that I owe you. I'm making arrangements to repay you next week. . . ."

Tietjens remembered that he had rather stiffened and had said: "For God's sake don't. I beg you not to. Have Duchemin properly put under trustees in lunacy, and leave his capital alone. I really beg you. You don't know what you'll be letting yourselves in for. You don't owe me anything and you can always draw on me."

Tietjens never knew what Mrs. Duchemin had done about her husband's estate over which she had at that date had a power of attorney; but he had imagined that, from that time on, Macmaster had felt a certain coldness for himself and that Mrs. Duchemin had hated him. During several years Macmaster had been borrowing hundreds at a time from Tietjens. The affair with Mrs. Duchemin had cost her lover a good deal: he had week-ended almost continuously in Rye at the expensive hostel. Moreover, the famous Friday parties for geniuses had been going on for several years now, and these had meant new furnishings, bindings, carpets, and loans to geniuses--at any rate before Macmaster had had the ear of the Royal Bounty. So the sum had grown to £2,000, and now to guineas. And, from that date, the Macmasters had not offered any repayment.

Macmaster had said that he dare not travel with Mrs. Duchemin because all London would be going south by that train. All London had. It pushed in at every conceivable and inconceivable station all down the line--it was the great rout of the 3-8-14. Tietjens had got on board at Berwick, where they were adding extra coaches, and by giving a £5 note to the guard, who hadn't been able to promise isolation for any distance, had got a locked carriage. It hadn't remained locked for long enough to let Mrs. Duchemin have her cry out--but it had apparently served to make some mischief. The Sandbach party had got on, no doubt at Wooler; the Port Scatho party somewhere else. Their petrol had run out somewhere and sales were stopped, even to bankers. Macmaster, who after all had travelled by the same train, hidden beneath two bluejackets, had picked up Mrs. Duchemin at King's Cross and that had seemed the end of it.

Tietjens, back in his dining-room, felt relief and also anger. He said:

"Port Scatho. Time's getting short. I'd like to deal with this letter if you don't mind."

Port Scatho came as if up out of a dream. He had found the process of attempting to convert Mrs. Tietjens to divorce law reform very pleasant--as he always did. He said:

"Yes! . . . Oh, yes!"

Tietjens said slowly:

"If you can listen. . . . Macmaster has been married to Mrs. Duchemin exactly nine months. . . . Have you got that? Mrs. Tietjens did not know this till this afternoon. The period Mrs. Tietjens complains of in her letter is nine months. She did perfectly right to write the letter. As such I approve of it. If she had known that the Macmasters were married she would not have written it. I didn't know she was going to write it. If I had known she was going to write it I should have requested her not to. If I had requested her not to she would, no doubt, not have done so. I did know of the letter at the moment of your coming in. I had heard of it at lunch only ten minutes before. I should, no doubt, have heard of it before, but this is the first time I have lunched at home in four months. I have to-day had a day's leave as being warned for foreign service. I have been doing duty at Ealing. To-day is the first opportunity I have had for serious business conversation with Mrs. Tietjens. . . . Have you got all that? . . ."

Port Scatho was running towards Tietjens, his hand extended, and over his whole shining personage the air of an enraptured bridegroom. Tietjens moved his right hand a little to the right, thus eluding the pink, well-fleshed hand of Port Scatho. He went on frigidly:

"You had better, in addition, know as follows: The late Mr. Duchemin was a scathological--afterwards a homicidal--lunatic. He had recurrent fits, usually on a Saturday morning. That was because he fasted--not abstained merely--on Fridays. On Fridays he also drank. He had acquired the craving for drink when fasting, from finishing the sacramental wine after communion services. That is a not unknown occurrence. He behaved latterly with great physical violence to Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin, on the other hand, treated him with the utmost consideration and concern: she might have had him certified much earlier, but, considering the pain that confinement must cause him during his lucid intervals, she refrained. I have been an eye-witness of the most excruciating heroisms on her part. As for the behaviour of Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin, I am ready to certify--and I believe society accepts--that it has been most . . . oh, circumspect and right! . . . There has been no secret of their attachment to each other. I believe that their determination to behave with decency during their period of waiting has not been questioned. . . ."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"No! no! Never . . . Most . . . as you say . . . circumspect and, yes . . . right!"

"Mrs. Duchemin," Tietjens continued, "has presided at Macmaster's literary Fridays for a long time; of course since long before they were married. But, as you know, Macmaster's Fridays have been perfectly open: you might almost call them celebrated. . . ."

Lord Port Scatho said:

"Yes! yes! indeed . . . I sh'd be only too glad to have a ticket for Lady Port Scatho. . . ."

"She's only got to walk in," Tietjens said. "I'll warn them: they'll be pleased. . . . If, perhaps, you would look in to-night! They have a special party. . . . But Mrs. Macmaster was always attended by a young lady who saw her off by the last train to Rye. Or I very frequently saw her off myself, Macmaster being occupied by the weekly article that he wrote for one of the papers on Friday nights. . . . They were married on the day after Mr. Duchemin's funeral. . . ."

"You can't blame 'em!" Lord Port Scatho proclaimed.

"I don't propose to," Tietjens said. "The really frightful tortures Mrs. Duchemin had suffered justified--and indeed necessitated--her finding protection and sympathy at the earliest possible moment. They have deferred this announcement of their union partly out of respect for the usual period of mourning, partly because Mrs. Duchemin feels very strongly that, with all the suffering that is now abroad, wedding feasts and signs of rejoicing on the part of non-participants are eminently to be deprecated. Still, the little party of to-night is by way of being an announcement that they are married. . . ." He paused to reflect for a moment.

"I perfectly understand!" Lord Port Scatho exclaimed. "I perfectly approve. Believe me, I and Lady Port Scatho will do everything. . . . Everything! . . . Most admirable people. . . . Tietjens, my dear fellow, your behaviour . . . most handsome. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Wait a minute. . . . There was an occasion in August, '14. In a place on the border. I can't remember the name. . . ."

Lord Port Scatho burst out:

"My dear fellow . . . I beg you won't. . . . I beseech you not to . . ."

Tietjens went on:

"Just before then Mr. Duchemin had made an attack of an unparalleled violence on his wife. It was that that caused his final incarceration. She was not only temporarily disfigured, but she suffered serious internal injuries and, of course, great mental disturbance. It was absolutely necessary that she should have change of scene. . . . But I think you will bear me out that, in that case too, their behaviour was . . . again, circumspect and right. . . ."

Port Scatho said:

"I know; I know . . . Lady Port Scatho and I agreed--even without knowing what you have just told me--that the poor things almost exaggerated it. . . . He slept, of course, at Jedburgh? . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Yes! They almost exaggerated it. . . . I had to be called in to take Mrs. Duchemin home. . . . It caused, apparently, misunderstandings. . . ."

Port Scatho--full of enthusiasm at the thought that at least two unhappy victims of the hateful divorce laws had, with decency and circumspectness, found the haven of their desires--burst out:

"By God, Tietjens, if I ever hear a man say a word against you. . . . Your splendid championship of your friend. . . . Your . . . your unswerving devotion . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Wait a minute, Port Scatho, will you?" He was unbottoning the flap of his breast pocket.

"A man who can act so splendidly in one instance," Port Scatho said. . . . "And your going to France. . . . If any one . . . if _any_ one . . . dares . . ."

At the sight of a vellum-cornered, green-edged book in Tietjens' hand Sylvia suddenly stood up; as Tietjens took from an inner flap a cheque that had lost its freshness she made three great strides over the carpet to him.

"Oh, Chrissie! . . ." she cried out. "He hasn't . . . That beast hasn't . . ."

Tietjens answered:

"He has . . ." He handed the soiled cheque to the banker. Port Scatho looked at it with slow bewilderment.

"'Account overdrawn,'" he read. "Brownie's . . . my nephew's handwriting. . . . To the club . . . It's . . ."

"You aren't going to take it lying down?" Sylvia said. "Oh, thank goodness, you aren't going to take it lying down."

"No! I'm not going to take it lying down," Tietjens said. "Why should I?" A look of hard suspicion came over the banker's face.

"You appear," he said, "to have been overdrawing your account. People should not overdraw their accounts. For what sum are you overdrawn?"

Tietjens handed his pass-book to Port Scatho.

"I don't understand on what principle you work," Sylvia said to Tietjens. "There are things you take lying down; this you don't."

Tietjens said:

"It doesn't matter, really. Except for the child."

Sylvia said:

"I guaranteed an overdraft for you up to a thousand pounds last Thursday. You can't be overdrawn over a thousand pounds."

"I'm not overdrawn at all," Tietjens said. "I was for about fifteen pounds yesterday. I didn't know it."

Port Scatho was turning over the pages of the pass-book, his face completely blank.

"I simply don't understand," he said. "You appear to be in credit. . . . You appear always to have been in credit except for a small sum now and then. For a day or two."

"I was overdrawn," Tietjens said, "for fifteen pounds yesterday. I should say for three or four hours: the course of a post, from my army agent to your head office. During these two or three hours your bank selected two out of six of my cheques to dishonour--both being under two pounds. The other one was sent back to my mess at Ealing, who won't, of course, give it back to me. That also is marked "account overdrawn," and in the same handwriting."

"But good God," the banker said. "That means your ruin."

"It certainly means my ruin," Tietjens said. "It was meant to."

"But," the banker said--a look of relief came into his face which had begun to assume the aspect of a broken man's--"you must have other accounts with the bank . . . a speculative one, perhaps, on which you are heavily down. . . . I don't myself attend to client's accounts, except the very huge ones, which affect the bank's policy."

"You ought to," Tietjens said. "It's the very little ones you ought to attend to, as a gentleman making his fortune out of them. I have no other account with you. I have never speculated in anything in my life. I have lost a great deal in Russian securities--a great deal for me. But so, no doubt, have you."

"Then . . . betting!" Port Scatho said.

"I never put a penny on a horse in my life," Tietjens said. "I know too much about them."

Port Scatho looked at the faces first of Sylvia, then of Tietjens. Sylvia, at least, was his very old friend. She said:

"Christopher never bets and never speculates. His personal expenses are smaller than those of any man in town. You could say he had no personal expenses."

Again the swift look of suspicion came into Port Scatho's open face.

"Oh," Sylvia said, "you couldn't suspect Christopher and me of being in a plot to blackmail you."

"No; I couldn't suspect that," the banker said. "But the other explanation is just as extraordinary. . . . To suspect the bank . . . the _bank_. . . . How do _you_ account? . . ." He was addressing Tietjens; his round head seemed to become square, below; emotion worked on his jaws.

"I'll tell you simply this," Tietjens said. "You can then repair the matter as you think fit. Ten days ago I got my marching orders. As soon as I had handed over to the officer who relieved me I drew cheques for everything I owed--to my military tailor, the mess--for one pound twelve shillings. I had also to buy a compass and a revolver, the Red Cross orderlies having annexed mine when I was in hospital. . . ."

Port Scatho said: "Good God!"

"Don't you know they annex things?" Tietjens asked. He went on: "The total, in fact, amounted to an overdraft of fifteen pounds, but I did not think of it as such because my army agents ought to have paid my month's army pay over to you on the first. As you perceive, they have only paid it over this morning, the 13th. But, as you will see from my pass-book, they have always paid about the 13th, not the 1st. Two days ago I lunched at the club and drew that cheque for one pound fourteen shillings and sixpence: one ten for personal expenses and the four and six for lunch. . . ."

"You were, however, actually overdrawn," the banker said sharply.

Tietjens said:

"Yesterday, for two hours."

"But then," Port Scatho said, "what do you want done? We'll do what we can."

Tietjens said:

"I don't know. Do what you like. You'd better make what explanation you can to the military authority. If they court-martialled me it would hurt you more than me. I assure you of that. There _is_ an explanation."

Port Scatho began suddenly to tremble.

"What . . . what . . . what explanation?" he said. "You . . . damn it . . . you draw this out. . . . Do you dare to say my bank. . . ." He stopped, drew his hand down his face and said: "But yet . . . you're a sensible, sound man. . . . I've heard things against you. But I don't believe them. . . . Your father always spoke very highly of you. . . . I remember he said if you wanted money you could always draw on him through us for three or four hundred. . . . That's what makes it so incomprehensible. . . . It's . . . it's . . ." His agitation grew on him. "It seems to strike at the very heart. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Look here, Port Scatho. . . . I've always had a respect for you. Settle it how you like. Fix the mess up for both our sakes with any formula that's not humiliating for your bank. I've already resigned from the club. . . ."

Sylvia said: "Oh, _no_, Christopher . . . not from the _club_!"

Port Scatho started back from beside the table.

"But if you're in the right!" he said. "You _couldn't_ . . . Not resign from the club. . . . I'm on the committee. . . . I'll explain to them, in the fullest, in the most generous . . ."

"You couldn't explain," Tietjens said. "You can't get ahead of rumour. . . . It's half over London at this moment. You know what the toothless old fellows of your committee are. . . . Anderson! ffolliott. . . And my brother's friend, Ruggles. . . ."

Port Scatho said:

"Your brother's friend Ruggles. . . . But look here. . . . He's something about the Court, isn't he? But look here. . . ." His mind stopped. He said: "People shouldn't overdraw. . . . But if your father said you could draw on him I'm really much concerned. . . . You're a first-rate fellow. . . . I can tell that from your pass-book alone. . . . Nothing but cheques drawn to first-class tradesmen for reasonable amounts. The sort of pass-book I liked to see when I was a junior clerk in the bank. . . ." At that early reminiscence feelings of pathos overcame him and his mind once more stopped.

Sylvia came back into the room; they had not perceived her going. She in turn held in her hand a letter.

Tietjens said:

"Look here, Port Scatho, don't get into this state. Give me your word to do what you can when you've assured yourself the facts are as I say. I wouldn't bother you at all, it's not my line, except for Mrs. Tietjens. A man alone can live that sort of thing down, or die. But there's no reason why Mrs. Tietjens should live, tied to a bad hat, while he's living it down or dying."

"But that's not _right_" Port Scatho said, "it's not the right way to look at it. You can't pocket . . . I'm simply bewildered. . . ."

"You've no right to be bewildered," Sylvia said. "You're worrying your mind for expedients to save the reputation of your bank. We know your bank is more to you than a baby. You should look after it better, then."

Port Scatho, who had already fallen two paces away from the table, now fell two paces back, almost on top of it. Sylvia's nostrils were dilated.

She said:

"Tietjens shall not resign from your beastly club. He shall not! Your committee will request him formally to withdraw his resignation. You understand? He will withdraw it. Then he will resign for good. He is too good to mix with people like you. . . ." She paused, her chest working fast. "Do you understand what you've got to do?" she asked.

An appalling shadow of a thought went through Tietjens' mind: he would not let it come into words.

"I don't know . . ." the banker said. "I don't know that I can get the committee . . ."

"You've got to," Sylvia answered. "I'll tell you why . . . Christopher was never overdrawn. Last Thursday I instructed your people to pay a thousand pounds to my husband's account. I repeated the instruction by letter and I kept a copy of the letter witnessed by my confidential maid. I also registered the letter and have the receipt for it. . . . You can see them."

Port Scatho mumbled from over the letter:

"It's to Brownie . . . Yes, a receipt for a letter to Brownie . . ." She examined the little green slip on both sides. He said: "Last Thursday. . . . To-day's Monday. . . . An instruction to sell North-Western stock to the amount of one thousand pounds and place to the account of . . . Then . . ."

Sylvia said:

"That'll do. . . . You can't angle for time any more. . . . Your nephew has been in an affair of this sort before. . . . I'll tell you. Last Thursday at lunch your nephew told me that Christopher's brother's solicitors had withdrawn all the permissions for overdrafts on the books of the Groby estate. There were several to members of the family. Your nephew said that he intended to catch Christopher on the hop--that's his own expression--and dishonour the next cheque of his that came in. He said he had been waiting for the chance ever since the war and the brother's withdrawal had given it him. I begged him not to . . ."

"But, good God," the banker said, "this is unheard of . . ."

"It isn't," Sylvia said. "Christopher has had five snotty, little, miserable subalterns to defend at court-martials for exactly similar cases. One was an exact reproduction of this. . . ."

"But, good God," the banker exclaimed again, "men giving their lives for their country. . . . Do you mean to say Brownie did this out of revenge for Tietjens' defending at court-martials. . . . And then . . . your thousand pounds is not shown in your husband's pass-book. . . ."

"Of course it's not," Sylvia said. "It has never been paid in. On Friday I had a formal letter from your people pointing out that North-Westerns were likely to rise and asking me to reconsider my position. The same day I sent an express telling them explicitly to do as I said. . . . Ever since then your nephew has been on the 'phone begging me not to save my husband. He was there, just now, when I went out of the room. He was also beseeching me to fly with him."

Tietjens said:

"Isn't that enough, Sylvia? It's rather torturing."

"Let them be tortured," Sylvia said. "But it appears to be enough."

Port Scatho had covered his face with both his pink hands. He had exclaimed:

"Oh, my God! Brownie again. . . ."

Tietjens' brother Mark was in the room. He was smaller, browner and harder than Tietjens and his blue eyes protruded more. He had in one hand a bowler hat, in the other an umbrella, wore a pepper-and-salt suit and had race-glasses slung across him. He disliked Port Scatho, who detested him. He had lately been knighted. He said:

"Hullo, Port Scatho," neglecting to salute his sister-in-law. His eyes, whilst he stood motionless, rolled a look round the room and rested on a miniature bureau that stood on a writing-table, in a recess, under and between bookshelves.

"I see you've still got that cabinet," he said to Tietjens.

Tietjens said:

"I haven't. I've sold it to Sir John Robertson. He's waiting to take it away till he has room in his collection."

Port Scatho walked, rather unsteadily, round the lunch-table and stood looking down from one of the long windows. Sylvia sat down on her chair beside the fireplace. The two brothers stood facing each other, Christopher suggesting wheat-sacks, Mark, carved wood. All round them, except for the mirror that reflected bluenesses, the gilt backs of books. Hullo Central was clearing the table.

"I hear you're going out again to-morrow," Mark said. "I want to settle some things with you."

"I'm going at nine from Waterloo," Christopher said. "I've not much time. You can walk with me to the War Office if you like."

Mark's eyes followed the black and white of the maid round the table. She went out with the tray. Christopher suddenly was reminded of Valentine Wannop clearing the table in her mother's cottage. Hullo Central was no faster about it. Mark said:

"Port Scatho! As you're there we may as well finish one point. I have cancelled my father's security for my brother's overdraft."

Port Scatho said, to the window, but loud enough:

"We all know it. To our cost."

"I wish you, however," Mark Tietjens went on, "to make over from my own account a thousand a year to my brother as he needs it. Not more than a thousand in any one year."

Port Scatho said:

"Write a letter to the bank. I don't look after clients' accounts on social occasions."

"I don't see why you don't," Mark Tietjens said. "It's the way you make your bread and butter, isn't it?"

Tietjens said:

"You may save yourself all this trouble, Mark. I am closing my account in any case."

Port Scatho spun round on his heel.

"I beg that you won't," he exclaimed. "I beg that we . . . that we may have the honour of continuing to have you draw upon us." He had the trick of convulsively working jaws: his head against the light was like the top of a rounded gate-post. He said to Mark Tietjens: "You may tell your friend, Mr. Ruggles, that your brother is empowered by me to draw on my private account . . . on my personal and private account up to any amount he needs. I say that to show my estimate of your brother; because I know he will incur no obligations he cannot discharge."

Mark Tietjens stood motionless; leaning slightly on the crook of his umbrella on the one side; on the other displaying, at arm's length, the white silk lining of his bowler hat, the lining being the brightest object in the room.

"That's your affair," he said to Port Scatho. "All I'm concerned with is to have a thousand a year paid to my brother's account till further notice."

Christopher Tietjens said, with what he knew was a sentimental voice, to Port Scatho. He was very touched; it appeared to him that with the spontaneous appearance of several names in his memory, and with this estimate of himself from the banker, his tide was turning and that this day might indeed be marked by a red stone:

"Of course, Port Scatho, I won't withdraw my wretched little account from you if you want to keep it. It flatters me that you should." He stopped and added: "I only wanted to avoid these . . . these family complications. But I suppose you can stop my brother's money being paid into my account. I don't want his money."

He said to Sylvia:

"You had better settle the other matter with Port Scatho."

To Port Scatho:

"I'm intensely obliged to you, Port Scatho. . . . You'll get Lady Port Scatho round to Macmaster's this evening if only for a minute; before eleven. . . ." And to his brother:

"Come along, Mark. I'm going down to the War Office. We can talk as we walk."

Sylvia said very nearly with timidity--and again a dark thought went over Tietjens' mind:

"Do we meet again then? . . . I know you're very busy. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Yes. I'll come and pick you out from Lady Job's, if they don't keep me too long at the War Office. I'm dining, as you know, at Macmaster's; I don't suppose I shall stop late."

"I'd come," Sylvia said, "to Macmaster's, if you thought it was appropriate. I'd bring Claudine Sandbach and General Wade. We're only going to the Russian dancers. We'd cut off early."

Tietjens could settle that sort of thought very quickly.

"Yes, do," he said hurriedly. "It would be appreciated."

He got to the door: he came back: his brother was nearly through. He said to Sylvia, and for him the occasion was a very joyful one:

"I've worried out some of the words of that song. It runs:

'Somewhere or other there must surely be The face not seen: the voice not heard . . .'

Probably it's 'the voice not ever heard' to make up the metre. . . . I don't know the writer's name. But I hope I'll worry it all out during the day."

Sylvia had gone absolutely white.

"Don't!" she said. "Oh . . . _don't_." She added coldly: "Don't take the trouble," and wiped her tiny handkerchief across her lips as Tietjens went away.

She had heard the song at a charity concert and had cried as she heard it. She had read, afterwards, the words in the programme and had almost cried again. But she had lost the programme and had never come across the words again. The echo of them remained with her like something terrible and alluring: like a knife she would some day take out and with which she would stab herself.

III

The two brothers walked twenty steps from the door along the empty Inn pavements without speaking. Each was completely expressionless. To Christopher it seemed like Yorkshire. He had a vision of Mark, standing on the lawn at Groby, in his bowler hat and with his umbrella, whilst the shooters walked over the lawn, and up the hill to the butts. Mark probably never had done that; but it was so that his image always presented itself to his brother. Mark was considering that one of the folds of his umbrella was disarranged. He seriously debated with himself whether he should unfold it at once and refold it--which was a great deal of trouble to take!--or whether he should leave it till he got to his club, where he would tell the porter to have it done at once. That would mean that he would have to walk for a mile and a quarter through London with a disarranged umbrella, which was disagreeable.

He said:

"If I were you I wouldn't let that banker fellow go about giving you testimonials of that sort."

Christopher said:

"Ah!"

He considered that, with a third of his brain in action, he was over a match for Mark, but he was tired of discussions. He supposed that some unpleasant construction would be put by his brother's friend, Ruggles, on the friendship of Port Scatho for himself. But he had no curiosity. Mark felt a vague discomfort. He said:

"You had a cheque dishonoured at the club this morning?" Christopher said:

"Yes."

Mark waited for explanations. Christopher was pleased at the speed with which the news had travelled: it confirmed what he had said to Port Scatho. He viewed his case from outside. It was like looking at the smooth working of a mechanical model.

Mark was more troubled. Used as he had been for thirty years to the vociferous south he had forgotten that there were taciturnities still. If at his Ministry he laconically accused a transport clerk of remissness, or if he accused his French mistress--just as laconically--of putting too many condiments on his nightly mutton-chop, or too much salt in the water in which she boiled his potatoes, he was used to hearing a great many excuses or negations, uttered with energy and continued for long. So he had got into the habit of considering himself almost the only laconic being in the world. He suddenly remembered with discomfort--but also with satisfaction--that his brother was his brother.

He knew nothing about Christopher, for himself. He had seemed to look at his little brother down avenues, from a distance, the child misbehaving himself. Not a true Tietjens: born very late: a mother's child, therefore, rather than a father's. The mother an admirable woman, but from the South Riding. Soft, therefore, and ample. The elder Tietjens' children, when they had experienced failures, had been wont to blame their father for not marrying a woman of their own Riding. So, for himself, he knew nothing of this boy. He was said to be brilliant: an un-Tietjens-like quality. Akin to talkativeness! . . . Well, he wasn't talkative. Mark said:

"What have you done with all the brass our mother left you? Twenty thousand, wasn't it?"

They were just passing through a narrow way between Georgian houses. In the next quadrangle Tietjens stopped and looked at his brother. Mark stood still to be looked at. Christopher said to himself:

"This man has the right to ask these questions!"

It was as if a queer slip had taken place in a moving-picture. This fellow had become the head of the house: he, Christopher, was the heir. At that moment, their father, in the grave four months now, was for the first time dead.

Christopher remembered a queer incident. After the funeral, when they had come back from the churchyard and had lunched, Mark--and Tietjens could now see the wooden gesture--had taken out his cigar-case and, selecting one cigar for himself, had passed the rest round the table. It was as if people's hearts had stopped beating. Groby had never, till that day, been smoked in: the father had had his twelve pipes filled and put in the rose-bushes in the drive. . . .

It had been regarded merely as a disagreeable incident: a piece of bad taste. . . . Christopher, himself, only just back from France, would not even have known it as such, his mind was so blank, only the parson had whispered to him: "And Groby never smoked in till this day."

But now! It appeared a symbol, and an absolutely right symbol. Whether they liked it or not, here were the head of the house and the heir. The head of the house must make his arrangements, the heir agree or disagree; but the elder brother had the right to have his enquiries answered.

Christopher said:

"Half the money was settled at once on my child. I lost seven thousand in Russian securities. The rest I spent. . . ."

Mark said:

"Ah!"

They had just passed under the arch that leads into Holborn. Mark, in turn, stopped and looked at his brother and Christopher stood still to be inspected, looking into his brother's eyes. Mark said to himself:

"The fellow isn't at least afraid to look at you!" He had been convinced that Christopher would be. He said:

"You spent it on women? Or where do you get the money that you spend on women?"

Christopher said:

"I never spent a penny on a woman in my life."

Mark said:

"Ah!"

They crossed Holborn and went by the backways towards Fleet Street.

Christopher said:

"When I say 'woman' I'm using the word in the ordinary sense. Of course I've given women of our own class tea or lunch and paid for their cabs. Perhaps I'd better put it that I've never--either before or after marriage--had connection with any woman other than my wife."

Mark said:

"Ah!"

He said to himself:

"Then Ruggles must be a liar." This neither distressed nor astonished him. For twenty years he and Ruggles had shared a floor of a large and rather gloomy building in Mayfair. They were accustomed to converse whilst shaving in a joint toilet-room, otherwise they did not often meet except at the club. Ruggles was attached to the Royal Court in some capacity, possibly as sub-deputy gold-stick-in-waiting. Or he might have been promoted in the twenty years. Mark Tietjens had never taken the trouble to enquire. Enormously proud and shut in on himself, he was without curiosity of any sort. He lived in London because it was immense, solitary, administrative and apparently without curiosity as to its own citizens. If he could have found, in the north, a city as vast and as distinguished by the other characteristics, he would have preferred it.

Of Ruggles he thought little or nothing. He had once heard the phrase "agreeable rattle," and he regarded Ruggles as an agreeable rattle, though he did not know what the phrase meant. Whilst they shaved Ruggles gave out the scandal of the day. He never, that is to say, mentioned a woman whose virtue was not purchasable, or a man who would no: sell his wife for advancement. This matched with Mark's ideas of the south. When Ruggles aspersed the fame of a man of family from the north, Mark would stop him with:

"Oh, no. That's not true. He's a Craister of Wantley Fells," or another name, as the case might be. Half Scotchman, half Jew, Ruggles was very tall and resembled a magpie, having his head almost always on one side. Had he been English Mark would never have shared his rooms with him: he knew indeed few Englishmen of sufficient birth and position to have that privilege, and, on the other hand, few Englishmen of birth and position would have consented to share rooms so grim and uncomfortable, so furnished with horse-hair seated mahogany, or so lit with ground-glass skylights. Coming up to town at the age of twenty-five, Mark had taken these rooms with a man called Peebles, long since dead, and he had never troubled to make any change, though Ruggles had taken the place of Peebles. The remote similarity of the names had been less disturbing to Mark Tietjens than would have been the case had the names been more different. It would have been very disagreeable, Mark often thought, to share with a man called, say. Granger. As it was he still often called Ruggles Peebles, and no harm was done. Mark knew nothing of Ruggles' origins, then--so that, in a remote way, their union resembled that of Christopher with Macmaster. But whereas Christopher would have given his satellite the shirt off his back, Mark would not have lent Ruggles more than a five pound note, and would have turned him out of their rooms if it had not been returned by the end of the quarter. But, since Ruggles never had asked to borrow anything at all, Mark considered him an entirely honourable man. Occasionally Ruggles would talk of his determination to marry some widow or other with money, or of his influence with people in exalted stations, but, when he talked like that, Mark would not listen to him and he soon returned to stories of purchasable women and venial men.

About five months ago Mark had said one morning to Ruggles:

"You might pick up what you can about my youngest brother Christopher and let me know."

The evening before that Mark's father had called Mark to him from over the other side of the smooking-room and had said:

"You might find out what you can about Christopher. He may be in want of money. Has it occurred to you that he's the heir to the estate! After you, of course." Mr. Tietjens had aged a good deal after the deaths of his children. He said: "I suppose you won't marry?" and Mark had answered:

"No; I shan't marry. But I suppose I'm a better life than Christopher. He appears to have been a good deal knocked about out there."

Armed then with this commission Mr. Ruggles appears to have displayed extraordinary activity in preparing a Christopher Tietjens dossier. It is not often that an inveterate gossip gets a chance at a man whilst being at the same time practically shielded against the law of libel. And Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips. And Christopher Tietjens had displayed more than his usual insolence to Ruggles. So Ruggles' coat-tails flashed round an unusual number of doors and his top-hat gleamed before an unusual number of tall portals during the next week.

Amongst others he had visited the lady known as Glorvina.

There is said to be a book, kept in a holy of holies, in which bad marks are set down against men of family and position in England. In this book Mark Tietjens and his father--in common with a great number of hard-headed Englishmen of county rank--implicitly believed. Christopher Tietjens didn't: he imagined that the activities of gentlemen like Ruggles were sufficient to stop the careers of people whom they disliked. On the other hand, Mark and his father looked abroad upon English society and saw fellows, apparently with every qualification for successful careers in one service or the other; and these fellows got no advancements, orders, titles or preferments of any kind. Just, rather mysteriously, they didn't make their marks. This they put down to the workings of the book.

Ruggles, too, not only believed in the existence of that compilation of the suspect and doomed, but believed that his hand had a considerable influence over the inscriptions in its pages. He believed that if, with more moderation and with more grounds than usual, he uttered denigrations of certain men before certain personages, it would at least do those men a great deal of harm. And, quite steadily and with, indeed, real belief in much of what he said, Ruggles had denigrated Tietjens before these personages. Ruggles could not see why Christopher had taken Sylvia back after her elopement with Perowne: he could not see why Christopher had, indeed, married Sylvia at all when she was with child by a man called Drake--just as he wasn't going to believe that Christopher could get a testimonial out of Lord Port Scatho except by the sale of Sylvia to the banker. He couldn't see anything but money or jobs at the bottom of these things: he couldn't see how Tietjens otherwise got the money to support Mrs. Wannop, Miss Wannop and her child, and to maintain Mrs. Duchemin and Macmaster in the style they affected, Mrs. Duchemin being the mistress of Christopher. He simply could see no other solution. It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you.

Ruggles, however, hadn't any pointers as to whether or no or to what degree he had really damaged his room-mate's brother. He had talked in what he considered to be the right quarters, but he hadn't any evidence that what he had said had got through. It was to ascertain that that he had called on the great lady, for if anybody knew, she would.

He hadn't definitely ascertained anything, for the great lady was--and he knew it--a great deal cleverer than himself. The great lady, he was allowed to discover, had a real affection for Sylvia, her daughter's close friend, and she expressed real concern to hear that Christopher Tietjens wasn't getting on. Ruggles had gone to visit her quite openly to ask whether something better couldn't be done for the brother of the man with whom he lived. Christopher had, it was admitted, great abilities; yet neither in his office--in which he would surely have remained had he been satisfied with his prospects--nor in the army did he occupy anything but a very subordinate position. Couldn't, he asked, Glorvina do anything for him? And he added: "It's almost as if he had a bad mark against him. . . ."

The great lady had said, with a great deal of energy, that she could not do anything at all. The energy was meant to show how absolutely her party had been downed, outed and jumped on by the party in power, so that she had no influence of any sort anywhere. That was an exaggeration; but it did Christopher Tietjens no good, since Ruggles chose to take it to mean that Glorvina said she could do nothing because there _was_ a black mark against Tietjens in the book of the inner circle to which--if anyone had--the great lady must have had access.

Glorvina, on the other hand, had been awakened to concern for Tietjens. In the existence of a book she didn't believe: she had never seen it. But that a black mark of a metaphorical nature might have been scored against him she was perfectly ready to believe and, when occasion served, during the next five months, she made enquiries about Tietjens. She came upon a Major Drake, an intelligence officer, who had access to the central depôt of confidential reports upon officers, and Major Drake showed her, with a great deal of readiness, as a specimen, the report on Tietjens. It was of a most discouraging sort and peppered over with hieroglyphics, the main point being Tietjens' impecuniosity and his predilection for the French; and apparently for the French Royalists. There being at that date and with that Government a great deal of friction with our Allies this characteristic which earlier had earned him a certain number of soft jobs had latterly done him a good deal of harm. Glorvina carried away the definite information that Tietjens had been seconded to the French artillery as a liaison officer and had remained with them for some time, but, having been shell-shocked, had been sent back. After that a mark had been added against him: "Not to be employed as liaison officer again."

On the other hand, Sylvia's visits to Austrian officer-prisoners had also been noted to Tietjens' account and a final note added: "Not to be entrusted with any confidential work."

To what extent Major Drake himself compiled these records the great lady didn't know and didn't want to know. She was acquainted with the relationships of the parties and was aware that in certain dark, full-blooded men the passion for sexual revenge is very lasting, and she let it go at that. She discovered, however, from Mr. Waterhouse--now also in retreat--that he had a very high opinion of Tietjens' character and abilities, and that just before Waterhouse's retirement he had especially recommended Tietjens for very high promotion. That alone, in the then state of Ministerial friendships and enmities, Glorvina knew to be sufficient to ruin any man within range of Governmental influence.

She had, therefore, sent for Sylvia and had put all these matters before her, for she had too much wisdom to believe that, even supposing there should be differences between the young people of which she had no evidence at all, Sylvia could wish to do anything but promote her husband's material interests. Moreover, sincerely benevolent as the great lady was towards this couple, she also saw that here was a possibility of damaging, at least, individuals of the party in power. A person in a relatively unimportant official position can sometimes make a very nasty stink if he is unjustly used, has determination and a small amount of powerful backing. This Sylvia, at least, certainly had.

And Sylvia had received the great lady's news with so much emotion that no one could have doubted that she was utterly devoted to her husband and would tell him all about it. This Sylvia had not as yet managed to do.

Ruggles in the meantime had collected a very full budget of news and inferences to present to Mark Tietjens whilst shaving. Mark had been neither surprised nor indignant. He had been accustomed to call all his father's children, except the brother immediately next him, "the whelps," and their concerns had been no concerns of his. They would marry, beget unimportant children who would form collateral lines of Tietjens and disappear as is the fate of sons of younger sons. And the deaths of the intermediate brothers had been so recent that Mark was not yet used to thinking of Christopher as anything but a whelp, a person whose actions might be disagreeable but couldn't matter. He said to Ruggles:

"You had better talk to my father about this. I don't know that I could keep all these particulars accurately in my head."

Ruggles had been only too pleased to, and--with to give him weight, his intimacy with the eldest son, who certified to his reliability in money matters and his qualifications for amassing details as to personalities, acts and promotions--that day, at tea at the club, in a tranquil corner, Ruggles had told Mr. Tietjens senior that Christopher's wife had been with child when he had married her; he had hushed up her elopement with Perowne and connived at other love affairs of hers to his own dishonour, and was suspected in high places of being a French agent, thus being marked down as suspect in the great book. . . . All this in order to obtain money for the support of Miss Wannop, by whom he had had a child, and to maintain Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin on a scale unsuited to their means, Mrs. Duchemin being his mistress. The story that Tietjens had had a child by Miss Wannop was first suggested, and then supported, by the fact that in Yorkshire he certainly had a son who never appeared in Gray's Inn.

Mr. Tietjens was a reasonable man: not reasonable enough to doubt Ruggles' circumstantial history. He believed implicitly in the great book--which has been believed in by several generations of country gentlemen: he perceived that his brilliant son had made no advancement commensurate with either his brilliance or his influence: he suspected that brilliance was synonymous with reprehensible tendencies. Moreover, his old friend, General ffolliott, had definitely told him some days before that he ought to enquire into the goings on of Christopher. On being pressed ffolliott had, also definitely, stated that Christopher was suspected of very dishonourable dealings, both in money and women. Ruggles' allegations came, therefore, as a definite confirmation of suspicions that appeared only too well backed up.

He bitterly regretted that, knowing Christopher to be brilliant, he had turned the boy--as is the usual portion of younger sons--adrift, with what of a competence could be got together, to sink or swim. He had, he said to himself, always wished to keep at home and under his own eyes this boy for whom he had had especial promptings of tenderness. His wife, to whom he had been absolutely attached by a passionate devotion, had been unusually wrapped up in Christopher, because Christopher had been her youngest son, born very late. And, since his wife's death, Christopher had been especially dear to him, as if he had carried about his presence some of the radiance and illumination that had seemed to attach to his mother. Indeed, after his wife's death, Mr. Tietjens had very nearly asked Christopher and his wife to come and keep house for him at Groby, making, of course, special testamentary provision for Christopher in order to atone for his giving up his career at the Department of Statistics. His sense of justice to his other children had prevented him doing this.

What broke his heart was that Christopher should not only have seduced but should have had a child by Valentine Wannop. Very grand seigneur in his habits, Mr. Tietjens had always believed in his duty to patronise the arts and, if he had actually done little in this direction beyond purchasing some chocolate-coloured pictures of the French historic school, he had for long prided himself on what he had done for the widow and children of his old friend. Professor Wannop. He considered, and with justice, that he had made Mrs. Wannop a novelist, and he considered her to be a very great novelist. And his conviction of the guilt of Christopher was strengthened by a slight tinge of jealousy of his son: a feeling that he would not have acknowledged to himself. For, since Christopher, he didn't know how, for he had given his son no introduction, had become an intimate of the Wannop household, Mrs. Wannop had completely given up asking him, Mr. Tietjens, clamourously and constantly for advice. In return she had sung the praises of Christopher in almost extravagant terms. She had, indeed, said that if Christopher had not been almost daily in the house or at any rate at the end of the 'phone she would hardly have been able to keep on working at full pressure. This had not overpleased Mr. Tietjens. Mr. Tietjens entertained for Valentine Wannop an affection of the very deepest, the same qualities appealing to the father as appealed to the son. He had even, in spite of his sixty odd years, seriously entertained the idea of marrying the girl. She was a lady: she would have managed Groby very well; and, although the entail on the property was very strict indeed, he would, at least, have been able to put her beyond the reach of want after his death. He had thus no doubt of his son's guilt, and he had to undergo the additional humiliation of thinking that not only had his son betrayed this radiant personality, but he had done it so clumsily as to give the girl a child and let it be known. That was unpardonable want of management in the son of a gentleman. And now this boy was his heir with a misbegotten brat to follow. Irrevocably!

All his four tall sons, then, were down. His eldest tied for good to--a quite admirable!--trollops: his two next dead: his youngest worse than dead: his wife dead of a broken heart.

A soberly but deeply religious man, Mr. Tietjens' very religion made him believe in Christopher's guilt. He knew that it is as difficult for a rich man to go to heaven as it is for a camel to go through the gate in Jerusalem called the Needle's Eye. He humbly hoped that his Maker would receive him amongst the pardoned. Then, since he was a rich--an enormously rich--man, his sufferings on this earth must be very great. . . .

From tea-time that day until it was time to catch the midnight train for Bishop's Auckland he had been occupied with his son Mark in the writing-room of the club. They had made many notes. He had seen his son Christopher, in uniform, looking broken and rather bloated, the result, no doubt, of debauch. Christopher had passed through the other end of the room and Mr. Tietjens had avoided his eye. He had caught the train and reached Groby, travelling alone. Towards dusk he had taken out a gun. He was found dead next morning, a couple of rabbits beside his body, just over the hedge from the little churchyard. He appeared to have crawled through the hedge, dragging his loaded gun, muzzle forwards, after him. Hundreds of men, mostly farmers, die from that cause every year in England. . . .

With these things in his mind--or as much of them as he could keep at once--Mark was now investigating his brother's affairs. He would have let things go on longer, for his father's estate was by no means wound up, but that morning Ruggles had told him that the club had had a cheque of his brother's returned and that his brother was going out to France next day. It was five months exactly since the death of their father. That had happened in March, it was now August: a bright, untidy day in narrow, high courts.

Mark arranged his thoughts.

"How much of an income," he said, "do you need to live in comfort? If a thousand isn't enough, how much? Two?"

Christopher said that he needed no money and didn't intend to live in comfort. Mark said:

"I am to let you have three thousand, if you'll live abroad. I'm only carrying out our father's instructions. You could cut a hell of a splash on three thousand in France."

Christopher did not answer.

Mark began again:

"The remaining three thousand then: that was over from our mother's money. Did you settle it on your girl, or just spend it on her?"

Christopher repeated with patience that he hadn't got a girl.

Mark said:

"The girl who had a child by you. I'm instructed, if you haven't settled anything already--but father took it that you would have--I was to let her have enough to live in comfort. How much do you suppose she'll need to live in comfort? I allow Charlotte four hundred. Would four hundred be enough? I suppose you want to go on keeping her? Three thousand isn't a great lot for her to live on with a child."

Christopher said:

"Hadn't you better mention names?"

Mark said:

"No! I never mention names. I mean a woman writer and her daughter. I suppose the girl is father's daughter, isn't she?"

Christopher said:

"No. She couldn't be. I've thought of it. She's twenty-seven. We were all in Dijon for the two years before she was born. Father didn't come into the estate till next year. The Wannops were also in Canada at the time. Professor Wannop was principal of a university there. I forget the name."

Mark said:

"So we were. In Dijon! For my French!" He added: "Then she can't be father's daughter. It's a good thing. I thought, as he wanted to settle money on them, they were very likely his children. There's a son, too. He's to have a thousand. What's he doing?"

"The son," Tietjens said, "is a conscientious objector. He's on a mine-sweeper. A bluejacket. His idea is that picking up mines is saving life, not taking it."

"Then he won't want the brass yet," Mark said, "it's to start him in any business. What's the full name and address of your girl? Where do you keep her?"

They were in an open space, dusty, with half-timber buildings whose demolition had been interrupted. Christopher halted close to a post that had once been a cannon; up against this he felt that his brother could lean in order to assimilate ideas. He said slowly and patiently:

"If you're consulting with me as to how to carry out our father's intentions, and as there's money in it you had better make an attempt to get hold of the facts. I wouldn't bother you if it wasn't a matter of money. In the first place, no money is wanted at this end. I can live on my pay. My wife is a rich woman, relatively. Her mother is a very rich woman. . . ."

"She's Rugeley's mistress, isn't she?" Mark asked.

Christopher said:

"No, she isn't. I should certainly say she wasn't. Why should she be? She's his cousin."

"Then it's your wife who was Rugeley's mistress?" Mark asked. "Or why should she have the loan of his box?"

"Sylvia also is Rugeley's cousin, of course, a degree further removed," Tietjens said. "She isn't anyone's mistress. You can be certain of that."

"They _say_ she is," Mark answered. "They say she's a regular tart. . . . I suppose you think I've insulted you."

Christopher said:

"No, you haven't. . . . It's better to get all this out. We're practically strangers, but you've a right to ask."

Mark said:

"Then you haven't got a girl and don't need money to keep her. . . . You could have what you liked. There's no reason why a man shouldn't have a girl, and if he has he ought to keep her decently. . . ."

Christopher did not answer. Mark leaned against the half-buried cannon and swung his umbrella by its crook.

"But," he said, "if you don't keep a girl what do you do for . . ." He was going to say "for the comforts of home," but a new idea had come into his mind. "Of course," he said, "one can see that your wife's soppily in love with you." He added: "Soppily . . . one can see that with half an eye. . . ."

Christopher felt his jaw drop. Not a second before--that very second!--he had made up his mind to ask Valentine Wannop to become his mistress that night. It was no good, any more, he said to himself. She loved him, he knew, with a deep; an unshakable passion, just as his passion for her was a devouring element that covered his whole mind as the atmosphere envelopes the earth. Were they, then, to go down to death separated by years, with no word ever spoken? To what end? For whose benefit? The whole world conspired to force them together! To resist became a weariness!

His brother Mark was talking on. "I know all about women," he had announced. Perhaps he did. He had lived with exemplary fidelity to a quite unpresentable woman, for a number of years. Perhaps the complete study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest!

Christopher said:

"Look here, Mark. You had better go through all my pass-books for the last ten years. Or ever since I had an account. This discussion is no good if you don't believe what I say."

Mark said:

"I don't want to see your pass-books. I believe you."

He added, a second later:

"Why the devil shouldn't I believe you? It's either believing you're a gentleman or Ruggles a liar. It's only common-sense to believe Ruggles a liar, in that case. I didn't before because I had no grounds to." Christopher said:

"I doubt if liar is the right word. He picked up things that were said against me. No doubt he reported them faithfully enough. Things _are_ said against me. I don't know why."

"Because," Mark said with emphasis, "you treat these south country swine with the contempt that they deserve. They're incapable of understanding the motives of a gentleman. If you live among dogs they'll think you've the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you?" He added: "I thought you'd been buried so long under their muck that you were as mucky as they!"

Tietjens looked at his brother with the respect one has to give to a man ignorant but shrewd. It was a discovery: that his brother was shrewd.

But, of course, he would be shrewd. He was the indispensable head of a great department. He had to have some qualities. . . . Not cultivated, not even instructed. A savage! But penetrating!

"We must move on," he said, "or I shall have to take a cab." Mark detached himself from his half buried cannon.

"What did you do with the other three thousand?" he asked. "Three thousand is a hell of a big sum to chuck away. For a younger son."

"Except for some furniture I bought for my wife's rooms," Christopher said, "it went mostly in loans."

"Loans!" Mark exclaimed. "To that fellow Macmaster?"

"Mostly to him," Christopher answered. "But about seven hundred to Dicky Swipes, of Cullercoats."

"Good God! Why to him?" Mark ejaculated.

"Oh, because he was Swipes, of Cullercoats," Christopher said, "and asked for it. He'd have had more, only that was enough for him to drink himself to death on."

Mark said:

"I suppose you don't give money to every fellow that asks for it?"

Christopher said:

"I do. It's a matter of principle."

"It's lucky," Mark said, "that a lot of fellows don't know that. You wouldn't have much brass left for long."

"I didn't have it for long," Christopher said.

"You know," Mark said, "you couldn't expect to do the princely patron on a youngest son's portion. It's a matter of taste. I never gave a ha'penny to a beggar myself. But a lot of the Tietjens were princely. One generation to addle brass: one to keep: one to spend. That's all right. . . . I suppose Macmaster's wife _is_ your mistress? That'll account for it not being the girl. They keep an arm-chair for you."

Christopher said:

"No. I just backed Macmaster for the sake of backing him. Father lent him money to begin with."

"So he did," Mark exclaimed.

"His wife," Christopher said, "was the widow of Breakfast Duchemin. _You_ knew Breakfast Duchemin?"

"Oh, _I_ knew Breakfast Duchemin," Mark said. "I suppose Macmaster's a pretty warm man now. Done himself proud with Duchemin's money."

"Pretty proud!" Christopher said. "They won't be knowing me long now."

"But damn it all!" Mark said. "You've Groby to all intents and purposes. _I'm_ not going to marry and beget children to hinder you."

Christopher said:

"Thanks. I don't want it."

"Got your knife into me?" Mark asked.

"Yes. I've got my knife into you," Christopher answered. "Into the whole bloody lot of you, and Ruggles' and ffolliott's and our father!"

Mark said: "Ah!"

"You don't suppose I wouldn't have?" Christopher asked.

"Oh, _I_ don't suppose you wouldn't have," Mark answered. "I thought you were a soft sort of bloke. I see you aren't."

"I'm as North Riding as yourself!" Christopher answered.

They were in the tide of Fleet Street, pushed apart by foot passengers and separated by traffic. With some of the imperiousness of the officer of those days Christopher barged across through motor-buses and paper lorries. With the imperiousness of the head of a department Mark said:

"Here, policeman, stop these damn things and let me get over." But Christopher was over much the sooner and waited for his brother in the gateway of the Middle Temple. His mind was completely swallowed up in the endeavour to imagine the embraces of Valentine Wannop. He said to himself that he had burnt his boats.

Mark, coming alongside him, said:

"You'd better know what our father wanted."

Christopher said:

"Be quick then. I must get on." He had to rush through his War Office interview to get to Valentine Wannop. They would have only a few hours in which to recount the loves of two lifetimes. He saw her golden head and her enraptured face. He wondered how her face would look, enraptured. He had seen on it humour, dismay, tenderness, in the eyes--and fierce anger and contempt for his, Christopher's, political opinions. His militarism!

Nevertheless they halted by the Temple fountain. That respect was due to their dead father. Mark had been explaining. Christopher had caught some of his words and divined the links. Mr. Tietjens had left no will, confident that his desires as to the disposal of his immense fortune would be carried out meticulously by his eldest son. He would have left a will, but there was the vague case of Christopher to be considered. Whilst Christopher had been a youngest son you arranged that he had a good lump sum and went, with it, to the devil how he liked. He was no longer a youngest son: by the will of God.

"Our father's idea," Mark said by the fountain, "was that no settled sum could keep you straight. His idea was that if you were a bloody pimp living on women . . . You don't mind?"

"I don't mind your putting it straightforwardly," Christopher said. He considered the base of the fountain that was half full of leaves. This civilisation had contrived a state of things in which leaves rotted by August. Well, it was doomed!

"If you were a pimp living on women," Mark repeated, "it was no good making a will. You might need uncounted thousands to keep you straight. You were to have 'em. You were to be as debauched as you wanted, but on clean money. I was to see how much in all probability that would be and arrange the other legacies to scale. . . . Father had crowds of pensioners. . . ."

"How much did father cut up for?" Christopher asked. Mark said:

"God knows. . . . You saw we proved the estate at a million and a quarter as far as ascertained. But it might be twice that. Or five times! . . . With steel prices what they have been for the last three years it's impossible to say what the Middlesbrough district property won't produce. . . . The death duties even can't catch it up. And there are all the ways of getting round _them_."

Christopher inspected his brother with curiosity. This brown-complexioned fellow with bulging eyes, shabby on the whole, tightly buttoned into a rather old pepper-and-salt suit, with a badly rolled umbrella, old race-glasses and his bowler hat the only neat thing about him, was, indeed, a prince. With a rigid outline! All real princes must look like that. He said:

"Well! You won't be a penny the poorer by me."

Mark was beginning to believe this. He said:

"You won't forgive father?"

Christopher said:

"I won't forgive father for not making a will. I won't forgive him for calling in Ruggles. I saw him and you in the writing-room the night before he died. He never spoke to me. He could have. It was clumsy stupidity. That's unforgiveable."

"The fellow shot himself," Mark said. "You usually forgive a fellow who shoots himself."

"I don't," Christopher said. "Besides he's probably in heaven and don't need my forgiveness. Ten to one he's in heaven. He was a good man."

"One of the best," Mark said. "It was I that called in Ruggles though."

"I don't forgive you either," Christopher said.

"But you _must_," Mark said--and it was a tremendous concession to sentimentality--"take enough to make you comfortable."

"By God!" Christopher exclaimed. "I loathe your whole beastly buttered toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication. . . ." He was carried away, as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. . . . "You won't," he repeated, "be a penny the poorer by me."

Mark said:

"Well, you needn't get shirty about it. If you won't you won't. We'd better move on. You've only just time. We'll say that settles it. . . . Are you, or aren't you, overdrawn at your bank? I'll make that up, whatever you damn well do to stop it."

"I'm not overdrawn," Christopher said. "I'm over thirty pounds in credit, and I've an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a mistake of the bank's."

Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England.

They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved like marionettes practising crucifixions.

"By God!" he said, "this is the last of England. . . . There's only my department where they never make mistakes. I tell you, if there were any mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!" He added: "But don't you think that I'm going to give up comfort, I'm not. My Charlotte makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she's got a tap of French rum that's saved my life over and over again after a beastly wet day's racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a Frenchwoman for managing. . . . By God, I'd marry the doxy if she wasn't a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn't hurt me. But I couldn't stomach marrying a Papist. They're not to be trusted."

"You'll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby," Christopher said. "My son's to be brought up as a Papist."

Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground.

"Eh, but that's a bitter one," he said. "Whatever made ye do that? . . . I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you married her." He added: "I'd not like to sleep with that wife of yours. She's too athletic. It'd be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I suppose though you're a pair of turtle doves. . . . Eh, but I'd not have thought ye would have been so weak."

"I only decided this morning," Christopher said, "when my cheque was returned from the bank. You won't have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about Groby."

"I can't say I have," Mark answered.

"It's no good trying to explain that side of it then," Christopher said, "there isn't time. But you're wrong in thinking Sylvia made it a condition of our marriage. Nothing would have made me consent then. It has made her a happy woman that I have. The poor thing thought our house was under a curse for want of a Papist heir."

"What made ye consent now?" Mark asked.

"I've told you," Christopher said, "it was getting my cheque returned to the club; that on the top of the rest of it. A fellow who can't do better than that had better let the mother bring up the child. . . . Besides, it won't hurt a Papist boy to have a father with dishonoured cheques as much as it would a Protestant. They're not quite English."

"That's true too," Mark said.

He stood still by the railings of the public garden near the Temple station.

"Then," he said, "if I'd let the lawyers write and tell you the guarantee for your overdraft from the estate was stopped as they wanted to, the boy wouldn't be a Papist? You wouldn't have overdrawn."

"I didn't overdraw," Christopher said. "But if you had warned me I should have made enquiries at the bank and the mistake wouldn't have occurred. Why didn't you?"

"I meant to," Mark said. "I meant to do it myself. But I hate writing letters. I put it off. I didn't much like having dealings with the fellow I thought you were. I suppose that's another thing you won't forgive me for?"

"No. I shan't forgive you for not writing to me," Christopher said. "You ought to write business letters."

"I hate writing 'em," Mark said. Christopher was moving on. "There's one thing more," Mark said. "I suppose the boy is your son?"

"Yes, he's my son," Christopher said.

"Then that's all," Mark said. "I suppose if you're killed you won't mind my keeping an eye on the youngster?"

"I'll be glad," Christopher said.

They strolled along the Embankment side by side, walking rather slowly, their backs erected and their shoulders squared because of their satisfaction of walking together, desiring to lengthen the walk by going slow. Once or twice they stopped to look at the dirty silver of the river, for both liked grim effects of landscape. They felt very strong, as if they owned the land!

Once Mark chuckled and said:

"It's too damn funny. To think of our both being . . . what is it? . . . monogamists? Well, it's a good thing to stick to one woman . . . you can't say it isn't. It saves trouble. And you know where you are."

Under the lugubrious arch that leads into the War Office quadrangle Christopher halted.

"No. I'm coming in," Mark said. "I want to speak to Hogarth. I haven't spoken to Hogarth for some time. About the transport waggon parks in Regent's Park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more."

"They say you do it damn well," Christopher said. "They say you're indispensable." He was aware that his; brother desired to stay with him as long as possible. He desired it himself.

"I damn well am!" Mark said. He added: "I suppose you couldn't do that sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses."

"I could," Christopher said, "but I suppose I shall go back to liaison work."

"I don't think you will," Mark said. "I could put in a word for you with the transport people."

"I wish you would," Christopher said. "I'm not fit to go back into the front line. Besides I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of."

They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to save the ratepayers' money.

With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:

"Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!"

The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day.

Tietjens had fallen a step back off the curb of the pavement that ran round the quadrangle. He said:

"I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have to. They're two different patterns that we see." He added: "This is my brother Mark."

She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She said to Mark:

"I didn't know Mr. Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I've never heard him speak of you."

Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his hat.

"I don't suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of _him_," he said, "but he's my brother all right!"

She stepped on to the asphalte carriage-way and caught between her fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher's khaki sleeve.

"I must speak to you," she said; "I'm going then."

She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard and ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard, it was as if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world.

The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her voice was hard between her little teeth. She said:

"Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife says you were."

Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said vaguely:

"Ethel? Who's she?" In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr. and Mrs. Macmaster called each other always "Guggums!" Christopher had in all probability never heard Mrs. Duchemin's Christian names since his disaster had swept all names out of his head.

He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb.

The girl said:

"Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs. Macmaster that is!" She was obviously waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness:

"No! Certainly not! . . . What was said?"

Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the green-stained shelter, like a child over a brookside. He was obviously waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any preparation at all: the girl repeated, without any preparation at all:

"You'd better keep off the grass if you're the Wannop girl. Mrs. Duchemin is my husband's mistress already. You keep off!"

Christopher said:

"She said that, did she?" He was wondering how Mark kept his balance, really. The girl said nothing more. She was waiting. With an insistence that seemed to draw him: a sort of sucking in of his personality. It was unbearable. He made his last effort of that afternoon.

He said:

"Damn it all. How could you ask such a tomfool question? _You_! I took you to be an intelligent person. The only intelligent person I know. Don't you _know_ me?"

She made an effort to retain her stiffening.

"Isn't Mrs. Tietjens a truthful person?" she asked. "I thought she looked truthful when I saw her at Vincent and Ethel's."

He said:

"What she says she believes. But she only believes what she wants to, for the moment. If you call that truthful, she's truthful. I've nothing against her." He said to himself: "I'm not going to appeal to her by damning my wife."

She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water.

"Oh," she said, "it _isn't_ true. I _knew_ it wasn't true." She began to cry.

Christopher said:

"Come along. I've been answering tomfool questions all day. I've got another tomfool to see here, then I'm through."

She said:

"I can't come with you, crying like this."

He answered:

"Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry." He added: "Besides there's Mark. He's a comforting ass."

He delivered her over to Mark.

"Here, look after Miss Wannop," he said. "You want to talk to her anyhow, don't you?" and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shopwalker into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn't come soon to an unemotional ass in red, green, blue or pink tabs, who would have fishlike eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was a place where men cried, too!

He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair: not dustbins.

The dark man said to him at once:

"Look here! What's the matter with the Command Depôts? You've been lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies about? Is it the rotten old colonels in command?"

Tietjens said amiably:

"Look here! I'm not a beastly spy, you know? I've had hospitality from the rotten old colonels."

The dark man said:

"I daresay you have. But that's what you were sent round for. General Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He's gone out now, worse luck. . . . What's the matter with the Command Depôts? Is it the men? Or is it the officers? You needn't mention names."

Tietjens said:

"Kind of Campion. It isn't the officers and it isn't the men. It's the foul system. You get men who think they've deserved well of their country--and they damn well have!--and you crop their heads. . . ."

"That's the M.O.s." the dark man said. "They don't want lice."

"If they prefer mutinies . . ." Tietjens said. "A man wants to walk with his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don't like being regarded as convicts. That's how they are regarded."

The dark man said:

"All right. Go on. Why don't you sit down?"

"I'm a little in a hurry," Tietjens said. "I'm going out to-morrow and I've got a brother and people waiting below."

The dark man said:

"Oh, I'm sorry. . . . But damn. You're the sort of man we want at home. Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don't."

Tietjens hesitated for a moment.

"Yes!" he said eventually. "Yes, I want to go."

For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; but, whether or no, the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night with the girl who was crying downstairs. . . .

He heard in his ear, perfectly distinctly, the lines:

"_The voice that never yet . . . Made answer to my word_ . . ."

He said to himself:

"That was what Sylvia wanted! I've got that much!" The dark man had said something. Tietjens repeated:

"I'd take it very unkindly if you stopped my going . . . I want to go."

The dark man said:

"Some do. Some do not. I'll make a note of your name in case you come back . . . You won't mind going on with your cinder-sifting, if you do? . . . Get on with your story as quick as you can. And get what fun you can before you go. They say it's rotten out there. Damn awful! There's a hell of a strafe on. That's why they want all you."

For a moment Tietjens saw the grey dawn at rail-head with the distant sound of a ceaselessly boiling pot, from miles away! The army feeling re-descended upon him. He began to talk about Command Depôts, at great length and with enthusiasm. He snorted with rage at the way men were treated in these gloomy places. With ingenious stupidity!

Every now and then the dark man interrupted him with:

"Don't forget that a Command Depôt is a place where sick and wounded go to get made fit. We've got to get 'em back as soon as we can."

"And do you?" Tietjens would ask.

"No, we don't," the other would answer. "That's what this enquiry is about."

"You've got," Tietjens would continue, "on the north side of a beastly clay hill nine miles from Southampton three thousand men from the Highlands, North Wales, Cumberland. . . . God knows where, as long as it's three hundred miles from home to make them rather mad with nostalgia. . . . You allow 'em out for an hour a day during the pub's closing time: you shave their heads to prevent 'em appealing to local young women who don't exist, and you don't let 'em carry the swagger-canes! God knows why! To prevent their poking their eyes out, if they fall down, I suppose. Nine miles from anywhere, with chalk down roads to walk on and not a bush for shelter or shade . . . And, damn it, if you get two men, chums, from the Seaforths or the Argylls you don't let them sleep in the same hut, but shove 'em in with a lot of fat Buffs or Welshmen, who stink of leeks and can't speak English. . . ."

"That's the infernal medicals' orders to stop 'em talking all night."

"To make 'em conspire all night not to turn-out for parade," Tietjens said. "And there's a beastly mutiny begun. . . . And, damn it, they're fine men. They're first-class fellows. Why don't you--as this is a Christian land--let 'em go home to convalesce with their girls and pubs and friends and a little bit of swank, for heroes? Why in God's name don't you? Isn't there suffering enough?"

"I wish you wouldn't say 'you,'" the dark man said. "It isn't me. The only A.C.I. I've drafted was to give every Command Depôt a cinema and a theatre. But the beastly medicals got it stopped . . . for fear of infection. And, of course, the parsons and Nonconformist magistrates . . ."

"Well, you'll have to change it all," Tietjens said, "or you'll just have to say: thank God we've got a navy. You won't have an army. The other day three fellows--Warwicks--asked me at question time, after a lecture, why they were shut up there in Wiltshire whilst Belgian refugees were getting bastards on their wives in Birmingham. And when I asked how many men made that complaint over fifty stood up. All from Birmingham. . . ."

The dark man said:

"I'll make a note of that. . . . Go on."

Tietjens went on; for as long as he stayed there he felt himself a man, doing work that befitted a man, with the bitter contempt for fools that a man should have and express. It was a letting up: a real last leave.

IV

Mark Tietjens, his umbrella swinging sheepishly, his bowler hat pushed firmly down on to his ears to give him a sense of stability, walked beside the weeping girl in the quadrangle.

"I say," he said, "don't give it to old Christopher too beastly hard about his militarist opinions. . . . Remember, he's going out to-morrow and he's one of the best."

She looked at him quickly, tears remaining upon her cheeks, and then away.

"One of the best," Mark said. "A fellow who never told a lie or did a dishonourable thing in his life. Let him down easy, there's a good girl. You ought to, you know."

The girl, her face turned away, said:

"I'd lay down my life for him!"

Mark said:

"I know you would. I know a good woman when I see one. And think! He probably considers that he _is_ . . . offering his life, you know, for you. And me, too, of course! . . . It's a different way of looking at things." He gripped her awkwardly but irresistibly by the upper arm. It was very thin under her blue cloth coat. He said to himself:

"By Jove! Christopher likes them skinny. It's the athletic sort that attracts him. This girl is as clean run as . . ." He couldn't think of anything as clean run as Miss Wannop, but he felt a warm satisfaction at having achieved an intimacy with her and his brother. He said:

"You aren't going away? Not without a kinder word to him. You think! He might be killed. . . . Besides. Probably he's never killed a German. He was a liaison officer. Since then he's been in charge of a dump where they sift army dustbins. To see how they can give the men less to eat. That means that the civilians get more. You don't object to his giving civilians more meat? . . . It isn't even helping to kill Germans. . . ."

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