“I should have thought you could have waited under cover,” Tietjens said caustically. “But never mind; it’s your funeral, if you like it …” This getting together … a strong passion. There was a warmed reception-hut for waiting drafts not fifty yards away … But they stood, teeth chattering and mumbling “Hoo … Hoo …” rather than miss thirty seconds of gabble … About what the English sergeant-major said and about what the officer said and how many dollars did they give you … And of course about what you answered back … Or perhaps not that. These Canadian troops were husky, serious fellows, without the swank of the Cockney or the Lincolnshire Moonrakers. They wanted, apparently, to learn the rules of war. They discussed anxiously information that they received in orderly rooms, and looked at you as if you were expounding the gospels …
But, damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what he had answered back … to Destiny! … What was the fellow in the Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline … Always a bit of a swine, Dante … Rather like … like whom? … Oh, Sylvia Tietjens … A good hater! … He imagined hatred coming to him in waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself … Gone into retreat … He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said she was going. For the rest of the war … For the duration of hostilities or life, whichever were the longer … He imagined Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed … Hating … Her certainly glorious hair all round her … Hating … Slowly and coldly … Like the head of a snake when you examined it … Eyes motionless: mouth closed tight … Looking away into the distance and hating … She was presumably in Birkenhead … A long way to send your hatred … Across a country and a sea in an icy night … ! Over all that black land and water … with the lights out because of air-raids and U-boats … Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment. She was well out of it …
It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on … Even that ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of white stones … In spite of his boasting about not wearing an overcoat; to catch women’s eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was carrying on like a leopard at feeding time …
Tietjens said:
“Sorry to keep you waiting, old man … Or rather your lady … But there were some men to see to … And, you know … ‘The comfort and’—what is it?—‘of the men comes before every’—is it ‘consideration’?—‘except the exigencies of actual warfare’ … My memory’s gone phut these days … And you want me to slide down this hill and wheeze back again … To see a woman!”
Levin screeched: “Damn you, you ass! It’s your wife who’s waiting for you at the bottom there.”
III
The one thing that stood out sharply in Tietjens’ mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his officer’s pocketbook complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability of giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a cheap French novel on a camp chair beside him, he sat in his fleabag with six army blankets over him—the one thing that stood out as sharply as Staff tabs was that that ass Levin was rather pathetic. His unnailed bootsoles very much cramping his action on the frozen hillside, he had alternately hobbled a step or two, and, reduced to inaction, had grabbed at Tietjens’ elbow, while he brought out breathlessly puzzled sentences …
There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright-coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then hobbled back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia’s activities, without any sequence, and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens himself … All sorts or singular things seemed to have been going on round him in the vague zone, outside all this engrossed and dust-coloured world—in the vague zone that held … Oh, the civilian population, tea-parties short of butter! …
And as Tietjens, seated on his hams, his knees up, pulled the soft woolliness of his fleabag under his chin and damned the paraffin heater for letting out a new and singular stink, it seemed to him that this affair was like coming back after two months and trying to get the hang of battalion orders … You come back to the familiar, slightly battered mess anteroom. You tell the mess orderly to bring you the last two months’ orders, for it is as much as your life is worth not to know what is or is not in them … There might be an A.C.I. ordering you to wear your helmet back to the front, or a battalion order that Mills bombs must always be worn in the left breast pocket. Or there might be the detail for putting on a new gas helmet! … The orderly hands you a dishevelled mass of faintly typewritten matter, thumbed out of all chance of legibility, with the orders for November 26 fastened inextricably into the middle of those for the 1st of December, and those for the 10th, 25th and 29th missing altogether … And all that you gather is that headquarters has some exceedingly insulting things to say about A Company; that a fellow called Hartopp, whom you don’t know, has been deprived of his commission; that at a court of inquiry held to ascertain deficiencies in C Company Captain
