day at the same hour. Nothing…. As well not to meet or talk…. Yet the mere fantastic idea of seeing Valentine Wannop for a minute…. She not allowed in the camp and he not going out. Talking under a sentry’s nose, very likely…. It had made him smell primroses. Primroses, like Miss Wannop. He said to the sergeant-major:
“What sort of a fellow is this?” Cowley, in open-mouthed suspense, gasped like a fish. Tietjens said:
“I suppose your mother is fairly feeble to stand in the cold?”
“A very decent man, sir,” the sergeant-major got out, “one of the best. No trouble. A perfectly clean conduct sheet. Very good education. A railway engineer in civil life…. Volunteered, of course, sir.”
“That’s the odd thing,” Tietjens said to the man, “that the percentages of absentees is as great amongst the volunteers as the Derby men or the compulsorily enlisted…. Do you understand what will happen to you if you miss the draft?”
The man said soberly:
“Yes, sir. Perfectly well.”
“You understand that you will be shot? As certainly as that you stand there. And that you haven’t a chance of escape.”
He wondered what Valentine Wannop, hot pacifist, would think of him if she heard him. Yet it was his duty to talk like that: his human, not merely his military duty. As much his duty as that of a doctor to warn a man that if he drank of typhoid-contaminated water he would get typhoid. But people are unreasonable. Valentine too was unreasonable. She would consider it brutal to speak to a man of the possibility of his being shot by a firing party. A groan burst from him at the thought that there was no sense in bothering about what Valentine Wannop would or would not think of him. No sense. No sense. No sense…
The man, fortunately, was assuring him that he knew, very soberly, all about the penalty for going absent off a draft. The sergeant-major, catching a sound from Tietjens, said with admirable fussiness to the man:
“There, there! Don’t you hear the officer’s speaking? Never interrupt an officer.”
“You’ll be shot,” Tietjens said, “at dawn…. Literally at dawn.” Why did they shoot them at dawn? To rub it in that they were never going to see another sunrise. But they drugged the fellows so that they wouldn’t know the sun if they saw it; all roped in a chair…. It was really the worse for the firing party. He added to the man:
“Don’t think I’m insulting you. You appear to be a very decent fellow. But very decent fellows have gone absent….” He said to the sergeant-major:
“Give this man a two-hours’ pass to go to the… whatever’s the name of the estaminet…. The draft won’t move off for two hours, will it?” He added to the man: “If you see your draft passing the pub you run out and fall in. Like mad, you understand. You’d never get another chance.”
There was a mumble like applause and envy of a mate’s good luck from a packed audience that had hung on the lips of simple melodrama… an audience that seemed to be all enlarged eyes, the khaki was so colourless…. They came as near applause as they dared, but there was no sense in worrying about whether Valentine Wannop would have applauded or not…. And there was no knowing whether the fellow would not go absent, either. As likely as not there was no mother. A girl very likely. And very likely the man would desert…. The man looked you straight in the eyes. But a strong passion, like that for escape — or a girl — will give you control over the muscles of the eyes. A little thing that, before a strong passion! One would look God in the face on the day of judgment and lie, in that case.
Because what the devil did he want of Valentine Wannop? Why could he not stall off the thought of her? He could stall off the thought of his wife… or his not-wife. But Valentine Wannop came wriggling in. At all hours of the day and night. It was an obsession. A madness… what those fools called “a complex”!… Due, no doubt, to something your nurse had done, or your parents said to you. At birth… A strong passion… or no doubt not strong enough. Otherwise he, too, would have gone absent. At any rate, from Sylvia… Which he hadn’t done. Which he hadn’t done. Or hadn’t he? There was no saying….
It was undoubtedly colder in the alley between the huts. A man was saying: “Hoo… Hooo… Hoo…” A sound like that, and flapping his arms and hopping… “Hand and foot, mark time!…” Somebody ought to fall these poor devils in and give them that to keep their circulations going. But they might not know the command…. It was a Guards’ trick, really…. What the devil were these fellows kept hanging about here for? he asked.
One or two voices said that they did not know. The majority said gutturally:
“Waiting for our mates, sir….”
“I should have thought you could have waited under cover,” Tietjens said caustically. “But never mind; it’s your funeral, if you like it….” This getting together… a strong passion. There was a warmed recreation-hut for waiting drafts not fifty yards away. But they stood, teeth chattering and mumbling “Hoo… Hooo…” rather than miss thirty seconds of gabble…. About what the English sergeant-major said and about what the officer said and how many dollars did they give you…. And of course about what you answered back…. Or perhaps not that. These Canadian troops were husky, serious fellows, without the swank of the Cockney or the Lincolnshire Moonrakers. They wanted, apparently, to learn the rules of war. They discussed anxiously information that they received in orderly rooms, and looked at you as if you were expounding the gospels….
But damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what he had answered back… to Destiny!… What was the fellow in the Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline. Always a bit of a swine, Dante… Rather like… like whom?… Oh, Sylvia Tietjens…. A good hater!… He imagined hatred coming to him in waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself…. Gone into retreat…. He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said she was going. For the rest of the war…. For the duration of hostilities or life, whichever were the longer…. He imagined Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed…. Hating… Her certainly glorious hair all round her…. Hating… Slowly and coldly… Like the head of a snake when you examined it…. Eyes motionless, mouth closed tight…. Looking away into the distance and hating…. She was presumably in Birkenhead…. A long way to send your hatred…. Across a country and a sea in an icy night! Over all that black land and water… with the lights out because of air-raids and U-boats…. Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment. She was well out of it….
It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on…. Even that ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of white stones…. In spite of his boasting about not wearing an overcoat; to catch women’s eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was carrying on like a leopard at feeding time.
Tietjens said:
“Sorry to keep you waiting, old man…. Or rather your lady…. But there were some men to see to. And, you know… ‘The comfort and — what is it? — of the men comes before every — is it “consideration”? — except the exigencies of actual warfare’… My memory’s gone phut these days…. And you want me to slide down this hill and wheeze back again…. To see a woman!”
Levin screeched: “Damn you, you ass! It’s your wife who’s waiting for you at the bottom there.”
III
THE one thing that stood out sharply in Tietjens’ mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his officer’s pocket-book complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability for giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a cheap French novel on a camp chair beside him he sat in his flea-bag with six army blankets over him — the one thing that stood out as sharply as Staff tabs was that that ass Levin was rather pathetic. His unnailed bootsoles very much cramping his action on the frozen hillside, he had alternately hobbled a step or two, and, reduced to inaction, had grabbed at Tietjens’ elbow, while he brought out breathlessly puzzled sentences.
There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright-coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then hobbled back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia’s activities, without any sequence, and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens himself… All sorts of singular things seemed to have been going on round him in the vague zone, outside all this engrossed and dust-coloured world — in the vague zone that held… Oh, the civilian population, tea-parties short of butter!…
