He tossed the buff slip across the table.
Tietjens sank down bulkily on to his bully-beef case. He read on the buff at first the initials of the signature, “E. C. Genl.”, and then: “For God’s sake keep your wife off me. I will not have skirts round my H.Q. You are more trouble to me than all the rest of my command put together.”
Tietjens groaned and sank more deeply on to his beef case. It was as if an unseen and unsuspected wild beast had jumped on his neck from an overhanging branch. The sergeant-major at his side said in his most admirable butler manner:
“Colour-Sergeant Morgan and Lance-Corporal Trench are obliging us by coming from depot orderly room to help with the draft’s papers. Why don’t you and the other officer go and get a bit of dinner, sir? The colonel and the padre have only just come in to mess, and I’ve warned the mess orderlies to keep your food ’ot … Both good men with papers, Morgan and Trench. We can send the soldiers’ small books to you at table to sign …”
His feminine solicitude enraged and overwhelmed Tietjens with blackness. He told the sergeant-major that he was to go to hell, for he himself was not going to leave that hut till the draft was moved off. Captain Mackenzie could do as he pleased. The sergeant-major told Captain Mackenzie that Captain Tietjens took as much trouble with his ragtime detachments as if he had been the Coldstream adjutant at Chelsea sending off a draft of Guards. Captain Mackenzie said that that was why they damn well got their details off four days faster than any other I.B.D. in that camp. He would say that much, he added grudgingly and dropped his head over his papers again. The hut was moving slowly up and down before the eyes of Tietjens. He might have just been kicked in the stomach. That was how shocks took him. He said to himself that by God he must take himself in hand. He grabbed with his heavy hands at a piece of buff paper and wrote on it a column of fat, wet letters
a
b
b
a
a
b
b
a
and so on.
He said opprobriously to Captain Mackenzie:
“Do you know what a sonnet is? Give me the rhymes for a sonnet. That’s the plan of it.”
Mackenzie grumbled:
“Of course I know what a sonnet is. What’s your game?”
Tietjens said:
“Give me the fourteen end-rhymes of a sonnet and I’ll write the lines. In under two minutes and a half.”
Mackenzie said injuriously:
“If you do I’ll turn it into Latin hexameters in three. In under three minutes.”
They were like men uttering deadly insults the one to the other. To Tietjens it was as if an immense cat were parading, fascinated and fatal, round that hut. He had imagined himself parted from his wife. He had not heard from his wife since her four-in-the-morning departure from their flat, months and eternities ago, with the dawn just showing up the chimney-pots of the Georgian rooftrees opposite. In the complete stillness of dawn he had heard her voice say very clearly “Paddington” to the chauffeur, and then all the sparrows in the inn waking up in chorus … Suddenly and appallingly it came into his head that it might not have been his wife’s voice that had said “Paddington,” but her maid’s … He was a man who lived very much by rules of conduct. He had a rule: Never think on the subject of a shock at a moment of shock. The mind was then too sensitized. Subjects of shock require to be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitized its then conclusions will be too strong. So he exclaimed to Mackenzie:
“Haven’t you got your rhymes yet? Damn it all!”
Mackenzie grumbled offensively:
“No, I haven’t. It’s more difficult to get rhymes than to write sonnets … death, moil, coil, breath …” He paused.
“Heath, soil, toil, staggereth,” Tietjens said contemptuously. “That’s your sort of Oxford young woman’s rhyme … Go on … What is it?”
An extremely age-faded and unmilitary officer was beside the blanketed table. Tietjens regretted having spoken to him with ferocity. He had a grotesquely thin white beard. Positively, white whiskers! He must have gone through as much of the army as he had gone through with those whiskers, because no superior officer—not even a fieldmarshal—would have the heart to tell him to take them off! It was the measure of his pathos. This ghostlike object was apologizing for not having been able to keep the draft in hand: he was requesting his superior to observe that these Colonial troops were without any instincts of discipline. None at all. Tietjens observed that he had a blue cross on his right arm where the vaccination marks are as a rule. He imagined the Canadians talking to this hero … The hero began to talk of Major Cornwallis of the R.A.S.C.
Tietjens said apropos of nothing:
“Is there a Major Cornwallis in the A.S.C.? Good God!”
The hero protested faintly:
“The R.A.S.C.”
Tietjens said kindly:
“Yes. Yes. The Royal Army Service Corps.”
Obviously his mind until now had regarded his wife’s “Paddington” as the definite farewell between his life and hers … He had imagined her, like Eurydice, tall, but faint and pale, sinking back into the shades … “Che faro senz’ Eurydice? …” he hummed. Absurd! And of course it might have been only the maid that had spoken … She too had a remarkably clear voice. So that the mystic word “Paddington” might perfectly well be no symbol at all, and Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens, far from being faint and pale, might perfectly well be playing the very devil with half the general officers commanding in chief from Whitehall to Alaska.
Mackenzie—he was like a damned clerk—was transferring the rhymes that he had no doubt at last found, on to another sheet of paper. Probably he had a round, copybook hand. Positively, his tongue followed
