Mrs. Wannop’s voice said:
“Still, it’s kept you alive for us!”
He said:
“I sometimes wish it hadn’t!” He was astonished that he had said it; he was astonished at the bitterness of his voice. He added: “I don’t mean that in cold blood of course,” and he was again astonished at the deference in his voice. He was leaning down, positively, as if over a very distinguished, elderly, seated lady. He straightened himself. It struck him as distasteful hypocrisy to bow before an elderly lady when you entertained designs upon her daughter. Her voice said:
“My dear boy … my dear, almost son. …”
Panic overcame him. There was no mistaking those tones. He looked round at Valentine. She had her hands together as if she were wringing them. She said, exploring his face painfully with her eyes:
“Oh, be kind to her. Be kind to her. …”
Then there had been revelation of their … you couldn’t call it intimacy!
He never liked her Girl Guides’ uniform. He liked her best in a white sweater and a fawn-coloured short skirt. She had taken off her hat—her cowboyish hat. She had had her hair cut. Her fair hair.
Mrs. Wannop said:
“I’ve got to think that you have saved us. Today I have to think that you have saved us. … And of all you have suffered.” Her voice was melancholy, slow, and lofty.
Intense, hollow reverberations filled the house. He said:
“That’s nothing. That’s over. You don’t have to think of it.”
The reverberations apparently reached her ear. She said:
“I can’t hear you. There seems to be thunder.”
External silence came back. He said:
“I was telling you not to think of my sufferings.”
She said:
“Can’t you wait? You and she? Is there no …” The reverberations began again. When he could again hear she was saying:
“Has had to contemplate such contingencies arising for one’s child. It is useless to contend with the tendency of one’s age. But I had hoped. …”
The knocker below gave three isolated raps, but the echoes prolonged them. He said to Valentine:
“That’s the knocking of a drunken man. But then half the population might well be drunk. If they knock again, go down and send them away.”
She said:
“I’ll go in any case before they can knock again.”
She heard him say as she left the room—she could not help waiting for the end of the sentence: she must gather all that she could as to that agonising interview between her mother and her lover. Equally, she must go or she would go mad. It was no good saying that her head was screwed on straight. It wasn’t. It was as if it contained two balls of string with two ends. On the one her mother pulled, on the other, he. … She heard him say:
“I don’t know. One has desperate need. Of talk. I have not really spoken to a soul for two years!” Oh, blessed, adorable man! She heard him going on, getting into a stride of talk:
“It’s that that’s desperate. I’ll tell you. I’ll give you an instance. I was carrying a boy. Under rifle-fire. His eye got knocked out. If I had left him where he was his eye would not have been knocked out. I thought at the time that he might have been drowned, but I ascertained afterwards that the water never rose high enough. So I am responsible for the loss of his eye. It’s a sort of monomania. You see, I am talking of it now. It recurs. Continuously. And to have to bear it in complete solitude …”
She was not frightened going now down the great stairs. They whispered, but she was like a calm Fatima. He was Sister Anne, and a brother, too. The enemy was fear. She must not fear. He rescued her from fear. It is to a woman that you must come for refuge from regrets about a boy’s eyes.
Her physical interior turned within her. He had been under fire! He might never have been there, a grey badger, a tender, tender grey badger leaning down and holding a telephone. Explaining things with tender care. It was lovely how he spoke to her mother; it was lovely that they were all three together. But her mother would keep them apart. She was taking the only way to keep them apart if she was talking to him as she had talked to her.
There was no knowing. She had heard him say:
He was pretty well. … “Thank God!” … Weakish. … “Ah, give me the chance to cherish him!” … He had just come out of hospital. Four days ago. He had had pneumonia all right, but it had been mental rather than physical. …
Ah, the dreadful thing about the whole war was that it had been—the suffering had been—mental rather than physical. And they had not thought of it. … He had been under fire. She had pictured him always as being in a Base, thinking. If he had been killed it would not have been so dreadful for him. But now he had come back with his obsessions and mental troubles. … And he needed his woman. And her mother was forcing him to abstain from his woman! That was what was terrible. He had suffered mental torture and now his pity was being worked on to make him abstain from the woman that could atone.
Hitherto, she had thought of the War as physical suffering only: Now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds. That remained. Men might stand up on hills, but the mental torture could not be expelled.
She ran suddenly down the steps that remained to her and was fumbling at the bolts of the front door. She
