Tietjens laughed at this madness. Then, in the dark brownness, an intolerable pang went all through his heavy frame — the intolerable pang of home news to these desperately occupied men, the pain caused by disasters happening in the darkness and at a distance. You could do nothing to mitigate them!… The extraordinary beauty of the wife from whom he was separated — for she was extraordinarily beautiful! — might well have caused scandals about her to have penetrated to the general’s headquarters, which was a sort of family party! Hitherto there had, by the grace of God, been no scandals. Sylvia Tietjens had been excruciatingly unfaithful, in the most painful manner. He could not be certain that the child he adored was his own…. That was not unusual with extraordinarily beautiful — and cruel! — women. But she had been haughtily circumspect.
Nevertheless, three months ago, they had parted…. Or he thought they had parted. Almost complete blankness had descended upon his home life. She appeared before him so extraordinarily bright and clear in the brown darkness that he shuddered: very tall, very fair, extraordinarily fit, and clean even. Thorough-bred! In a sheath gown of gold tissue, all illuminated, and her mass of hair, like gold tissue too, coiled round and round in plaits over her ears. The features very clean-cut and thinnish; the teeth white and small; the breasts small; the arms thin, long and at attention at her sides…. His eyes, when they were tired, had that trick of reproducing images on their retinas with that extreme clearness, images sometimes of things he thought of, sometimes of things merely at the back of the mind. Well, to-night his eyes were very tired! She was looking straight before her, with a little inimical disturbance of the corners of her lips. She had just thought of a way to hurt terribly his silent personality…. The semi-clearness became a luminous blue, like a tiny gothic arch, and passed out of his vision to the right.
He knew nothing of where Sylvia was. He had given up looking at the illustrated papers. She had said she was going into a convent at Birkenhead — but twice he had seen photographs of her. The first showed her merely with Lady Fiona Grant, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Ulleswater — and a Lord Swindon, talked of as next minister for International Finance — a new Business Peer…. All three walking straight into the camera in the courtyard of Lord Swindon’s castle… all three smiling!… It announced Mrs. Christopher Tietjens as having a husband at the front.
The sting had, however, been in the second picture — in the description of it supplied by the journal! It showed Sylvia standing in front of a bench in the park. On the bench in profile there extended himself in a guffaw of laughter, a young man in a top hat jammed well on to his head, which was thrown back, his prognathous jaw pointing upwards. The description stated that the picture showed Mrs. Christopher Tietjens, whose husband was in hospital at the Front, telling a good story to the son and heir of Lord Brigham!… Another of these pestilential, crooked newspaper-owning financial peers…
It had struck him for a painful moment whilst looking at the picture in a dilapidated mess ante-room after he had come out of hospital — that, considering the description, the journal had got its knife into Sylvia…. But the illustrated papers do not get their knives into society beauties. They are too precious to the photographers…. Then Sylvia must have supplied the information; she desired to cause comment by the contrast of her hilarious companions and the statement that her husband was in hospital at the Front…. It had occurred to him that she was on the warpath, but he had put it out of his mind…. Nevertheless, brilliant mixture as she was, of the perfectly straight, perfectly fearless, perfectly reckless, of the generous, the kind even — and the atrociously cruel, nothing might suit her better than positively to show contempt — no, not contempt! cynical hatred — for her husband, for the war, for public opinion… even for the interest of their child!… Yet, it came to him, the image of her that he had just seen had been the image of Sylvia, standing at attention, her mouth working a little, whilst she read out the figures beside the bright filament of mercury in a thermometer…. The child had had, with measles, a temperature that, even then, he did not dare think of. And — it was at his sister’s in Yorkshire, and the local doctor hadn’t cared to take the responsibility — he could still feel the warmth of the little mummy-like body; he had covered the head and face with a flannel, for he didn’t care for the sight, and lowered the warm, terrible, fragile weight into a shining surface of crushed ice in water…. She had stood at attention, the corners of her mouth moving a little: the thermometer going down as you watched it…. So that she mightn’t want, in damaging the father, atrociously to damage the child. For there could not be anything worse for a child than to have a mother known as a whore….
Sergeant-Major Cowley was standing beside the table. He said:
“Wouldn’t it be a good thing, sir, to send a runner to the depot sergeant cook and tell him we’re going to indent for suppers for the draft? We could send the other with the 128’s to Quarter. They’re neither wanted here for the moment.”
The other captain went on incessantly talking — but about his fabulous uncle, not about Sylvia. It was difficult for Tietjens to get what he wanted said. He wanted the second runner sent to the depot quartermaster with a message to the effect that if G.S. candles for hooded lamps were not provided for the use of his orderly room by return of bearer he, Captain Tietjens, commanding Number XVI Casual Battalion, would bring the whole matter of supplies for his battalion that same night before Base Headquarters. They were all three talking at once; heavy fatalism overwhelmed Tietjens at the thought of the stubbornness showed by the depot quartermaster. The big unit beside his camp was a weary obstinacy of obstruction. You would have thought they would have displayed some eagerness to get his men up into the line. Let alone that the men were urgently needed, the more of his men went the more of
It was as if a tender and masculine butler withdrew himself. Cowley’s grey walrus moustache and scarlet cheeks showed for a moment beside the brazier, whispering at the ears of the runners, a hand kindly on each of their shoulders. The runners went; the Canadian went. Sergeant-Major Cowley, his form blocking the doorway, surveyed the stars. He found it difficult to realise that the same pinpricks of light through black manifolding paper as he looked at, looked down also on his villa and his elderly wife at Isleworth beside the Thames above London. He knew it to be the fact, yet it was difficult to realise. He imagined the trams going along the High Street, his missus in one of them with her supper in a string bag on her stout knees; the trams lit up and shining. He imagined her having kippers for supper: ten to one it would be kippers; her favourites. His daughter was in the Waac’s by now. She had been cashier to Parks’s, the big butchers in Brentford, and pretty she had used to look in the glass case. Like as if it might have been the British Museum where they had Pharaohs and others in glass cases…. There were threshing machines droning away all over the night. He always said they were like threshing machines…. Crikey, if only they were!… But they might be our own planes, of course. A good Welsh rarebit he had had for tea.
In the hut, the light from the brazier having fewer limbs on which to fall, a sort of intimacy seemed to descend, and Tietjens felt himself gain in ability to deal with his mad friend. Captain Mackenzie — Tietjens was not sure that the name was Mackenzie: it had looked something like it in the general’s hand — Captain Mackenzie was going on about the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of some fabulous uncle. Apparently at some important juncture the uncle had refused to acknowledge acquaintanceship with the nephew. From that all the misfortunes of the nephew had arisen…. Suddenly Tietjens said:
“Look here, pull yourself together. Are you mad? Stark, staring?… Or only just play-acting?”
The man suddenly sank down on to the bully-beef case that served for a chair. He stammered a question as to what — what — what Tietjens meant.
“If you let yourself go,” Tietjens said, “you may let yourself go a tidy sight farther than you want to.”
“You’re not a mad doctor,” the other said. “It’s no good your trying to come it over me. I know all about you. I’ve got an uncle who’s done the dirty on me — the dirtiest dirty ever was done on a man. If it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t be here now.”
“You talk as if the fellow had sold you into slavery,” Tietjens said.
“He’s your closest friend,” Mackenzie seemed to advance as a motive for revenge on Tietjens. “He’s a friend of the general’s too. Of your wife’s as well. He’s in with everyone.”
A few desultory, pleasurable “pop-op-ops” sounded from far overhead to the left.
“They imagine they’ve found the Hun again,” Tietjens said. “That’s all right; you concentrate on your uncle. Only don’t exaggerate his importance to the world. I assure you you are mistaken if you call him a friend of mine. I
