bedewed eyes at the theatre, after tender love scenes, and so avoided the theatre. He asked himself twice whether he should or shouldn’t make another effort, though it was almost beyond him. He wanted to sit still.
The stroking stopped; he scrambled on to his feet:
“Mrs. Wannop,” he said, facing her, “it’s perfectly true. I oughtn’t to care what these swine say about me, but I do. I’ll reflect about what you say till I get it into my system…”
She said:
“Yes, yes! My dear,” and continued to gaze at the photograph.
“But,” Tietjens said; he took her mittened hand and led her back to her chair: “what I’m concerned for at the moment is not my reputation, but your daughter Valentine’s.”
She sank down into the high chair, balloon-like and came to rest.
“Val’s reputation!” she said, “Oh! you mean they’ll be striking
Valentine was in the room, laughing a little. She had been giving the handy-man his dinner, and was still amused at his commendations of Tietjens.
“You’ve got one admirer,” she said to Tietjens. “‘Punched that rotten strap,’ he goes on saying, ‘like a gret ol’ yaffle punchin’ a ’ollow log!’ He’s had a pint of beer and said it between each gasp.” She continued to narrate the quaintnesses of Joel which appealed to her; informed Tietjens that “yaffle” was Kentish for great green woodpecker, and then said:
“You haven’t got any friends in Germany, have you?” She was beginning to clear the table.
Tietjens said:
“Yes, my wife’s in Germany; at a place called Lobscheid.”
She placed a pile of plates on a black japanned tray.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, without an expression of any deep regret. “It’s the ingenious clever stupidities of the telephone. I’ve got a telegraph message for you then. I thought it was the subject for mother’s leader. It always comes through with the initials of the paper which are not unlike Tietjens, and the girl who always sends it is called Hopside. It seemed rather inscrutable, but I took it to have to do with German politics and I thought mother would understand it…. You’re not both asleep, are you?”
Tietjens opened his eyes; the girl was standing over him, having approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the letters of the message ran together. The message was:
“Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia Hopside Germany.”
Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities on the telephone.
“Of course if I’d had any sense,” the girl said, “I should have known it couldn’t have been mother’s leader note; she never gets one on a Saturday.”
Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each word a pause:
“It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me.”
“Lucky you!” the girl said, “I wish I was you. I’ve never been in the Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg.” She went off with her great tray load, the table-cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realised that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil… though the devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions… if God then desired (and one couldn’t object but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness…. But He had done it; no doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just?… Perhaps God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences.
There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile inefficiency; with gross piles of hothouse flowers — that he detested for their exotic waxennesses!—with white enamelled panels that he disliked and framed, weak prints — quite genuine of course, my dear, guaranteed so by Sotheby — pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs. Satterthwaite, in neglige, but with an immense hat, reading the
Mrs. Wannop was talking to him now; he did not know what she said; he never knew afterwards what he had answered.
“God!” he said within himself, “if it’s sexual sins God punishes, He indeed is just and inscrutable!” Because he had had physical contact with this woman before he married her; in a railway carriage, coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl!
Where was the physical attraction of her gone to now? Irresistible; reclining back as the shires rushed past…. His mind said that she had lured him on. His intellect put the idea from him. No gentleman thinks such things of his wife.
No gentleman thinks…. By God; she must have been with child by another man…. He had been fighting the conviction down all the last four months. He knew now that he had been fighting the conviction all the last four months whilst, anaesthetised, he had bathed in figures and wave-theories. Her last words had been, her very last words, late, all in white she had gone up to her dressing-room, and he had never seen her again; her last words had been about the child…. “Supposing,” she had begun… He didn’t remember the rest. But he remembered her eyes. And her gesture as she peeled off her long white gloves….
He was looking at Mrs. Wannop’s ingle; he thought it a mistake in taste, really, to leave logs in an ingle during the summer. But then what are you to do with an ingle in summer. In Yorkshire cottages they shut the ingles up with painted doors. But that is stuffy, too!
He said to himself:
“By God! I’ve had a stroke!” and he got out of his chair to test his legs…. But he hadn’t had a stroke. It must then, he thought, be that the pain of his last consideration must be too great for his mind to register, as certain great physical pains go unperceived. Nerves, like weighing machines, can’t register more than a certain amount, then they go out of action. A tramp who had had his leg cut off by a train had told him that he had tried to get up, feeling nothing at all…. The pain comes back though…
He said to Mrs. Wannop, who was still talking:
“I beg your pardon. I really missed what you said.”
Mrs. Wannop said:
“I was saying that that’s the best thing I can do for you.”
He said:
“I’m really very sorry: it was that that I missed. I’m a little in trouble you know.”
She said:
“I know, I know. The mind wanders; but I wish you’d listen. I’ve got to go to work, so have you. I said: after tea you and Valentine will walk into Rye to fetch your luggage.”
Straining his intelligence, for, in his mind, he felt a sudden strong pleasure: sunlight on pyramidal red roof in the distance: themselves descending in a long diagonal, a green hill. God, yes, he wanted open air. Tietjens said:
“I see. You take us both under your protection. You’ll bluff it out.”
