“Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass,” and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion.
The colonel said:
“Why, what have I been doing now? … I wish you would walk the other way …”
Tietjens said:
“No, I can’t afford to go out of camp … I’ve got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract tomorrow afternoon, haven’t I? … I can’t leave camp twice in one week …”
“You’ve got to come down to the camp-guard,” Levin said. “I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold … though she is in the general’s car …”
Tietjens exclaimed:
“You’ve not been … oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?”
Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear:
“It isn’t Miss de Bailly!” Then he exclaimed quite aloud: “Damn it all, Tietjens, haven’t you had hints enough? …”
For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens’ mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general’s car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guardroom. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid …
For a minute Tietjens’ backbone stiffened. He didn’t intend to interfere between Mlle. de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress … Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman … He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn’t be … An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him. Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather pug-nosed face: under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward she would be, on the seat of the general’s illuminated car: glazed in: a regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the reflections on the inside of the glass …
He was saying to Levin:
“Look here, Stanley … why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss de Bailly has one chief luxury. It’s exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling it; exhibiting it.”
“Ought you,” Levin asked ironically, “to discuss my fiancée before me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all.”
“Why, of course,” Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. “As a sort of swollen best man, it’s my duty to instruct you. Mothers tell their daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent Benedict … woman …”
“I’m not doing it now,” Levin grumbled direly.
“Then what, in God’s name, are you doing? You’ve got a cast mistress, haven’t you, down there in old Campion’s car? …” They were beside the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim and desultory, still half filled it, a little way down.
“I haven’t,” Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. “I never had a mistress …”
“And you’re not married?” Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the schoolboy’s ejaculation “Lummy!” to soften the jibe. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I must just go and take a look at my crowd. To see if your orders have come down.”
He found no orders in a hut as full as ever of the dull mists and odours of khaki, but he found in revenge a fine upstanding, blond, Canadian-born lance-corporal of old Colonial lineage, with a moving story as related by Sergeant-Major Cowley:
“This man, sir, of the Canadian Railway lot, ’is mother’s just turned up in the town, come on from Eetarpels. Come all the way from Toronto where she was bedridden.”
Tietjens said:
“Well, what about it? Get a move on.”
The man wanted leave to go to his mother who was waiting in a decent estaminet at the end of the tramline just outside the camp where the houses of the town began.
Tietjens said: “It’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. You know that.”
The man stood erect and expressionless; his blue eyes looked confoundedly honest to Tietjens who was cursing himself. He said to the man:
“You can see for yourself that it’s impossible, can’t you?” The man said slowly:
“Not knowing the regulations in these circumstances I can’t say, sir. But my mother’s is a very special case … She’s lost two sons already.”
Tietjens said:
“A great many people have … Do you understand, if you went absent off my pass I might—I quite possibly might—lose my commission? I’m responsible for you fellows getting up the line.”
The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it was so. He said to the man:
“You said goodbye to your mother, didn’t you, in Toronto, before you left?”
The man said:
“No, sir.” He had not seen his mother in seven years. He had been up in the Chilkoot when war broke out and had not heard of it for ten months. Then he had at once joined up in British Columbia, and had been sent straight through for railway work, on to Aldershot where the Canadians had a camp in building. He had not known that his brothers were killed till he got there and his mother, being bedridden at the news, had not been able to get to Toronto when his batch had passed through. She lived about sixty miles from Toronto. Now she had risen from her bed like a miracle and come
