formality and unpleasantness if he said again “Mrs. Tietjens!”
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: “
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 table-cloth towards Tietjens. He said, in the voice of one awaiting a reprieve:
“But you
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
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…. Don-caster… 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
