The general said:
“Pulling the …”
Tietjens said:
“It expresses it, sir … Last night was nothing but pulling the string of a shower-bath. Perfectly justifiable. I maintain that it was perfectly justifiable.”
The general said:
“Then why have you given her Groby? … You’re not a little soft, are you? … You don’t imagine you’ve … say, got a mission? Or that you’re another person? … That you have to … to forgive …” He took off his pretty hat and wiped his forehead with a tiny cambric handkerchief. He said: “Your poor mother was a little …”
He said suddenly:
“Tonight when you are coming to my dinner … I hope you’ll be decent. Why do you so neglect your personal appearance? Your tunic is a disgusting spectacle …”
Tietjens said:
“I had a better tunic, sir … but it has been ruined by the blood of the man who was killed here last night …”
The general said:
“You don’t say you have only two tunics? … Have you no mess clothes?”
Tietjens said:
“Yes, sir, I’ve my blue things. I shall be all right for tonight … But almost everything else I possessed was stolen from my kit when I was in hospital … Even Sylvia’s two pair of sheets …”
“But hang it all,” the general exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say you’ve spaffled all your father left you?”
Tietjens said:
“I thought fit to refuse what my father left me owing to the way it was left …”
The general said:
“But, good God! … Read that!” He tossed the small sheet of paper at which he had been looking across the table. It fell face downwards. Tietjens read, in the minute handwriting of the general’s:
“Colonel’s horse: Sheets: Jesus Christ: Wannop girl: Socialism?”
The general said irritably:
“The other side … the other side …”
The other side of the paper displayed the words in large capitals: Workers of the World, a woodcut of a sickle and some other objects. Then high treason for a page.
The general said:
“Have you ever seen anything like that before? Do you know what it is?”
Tietjens answered:
“Yes, sir. I sent that to you. To your Intelligence …” The general thumped both his fists violently on the army blanket:
“You …” he said. “It’s incomprehensible … It’s incredible …”
Tietjens said:
“No, sir … You sent out an order asking commanders of units to ascertain what attempts were being made by Socialists to undermine the discipline of their other ranks … I naturally asked my sergeant-major, and he produced this sheet, which one of the men had given to him as a curiosity. It had been handed to the man in the street in London. You can see my initials on the top of the sheet!”
The general said:
“You … you’ll excuse me, but you’re not a Socialist yourself?”
Tietjens said:
“I knew you were working round to that, sir. But I’ve no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century. You, sir, prefer the seventeenth!”
“Another shower-bath, I suppose,” the general said.
“Of course,” Tietjens said, “if it’s Sylvia that called me a Socialist, it’s not astonishing. I’m a Tory of such an extinct type that she might take me for anything. The last megatherium. She’s absolutely to be excused …”
The general was not listening. He said:
“What was wrong with the way your father left his money to you?”
“My father,” Tietjens said—the general saw his jaw stiffen—“committed suicide because a fellow called Ruggles told him that I was … what the French called maquereau … I can’t think of the English word. My father’s suicide was not an act that can be condoned. A gentleman does not commit suicide when he has descendants. It might influence my boy’s life very disastrously …”
The general said:
“I can’t … I can’t get to the bottom of all this … What in the world did Ruggles want to go and tell your father that for? … What are you going to do for a living after the war? They won’t take you back into your office, will they?”
Tietjens said:
“No, sir. The Department will not take me back. Everyone who has served in this war will be a marked man for a long time after it is over. That’s proper enough. We’re having our fun now.”
The general said:
“You say the wildest things.”
Tietjens answered:
“You generally find the things I say come true, sir. Could we get this over? Ruggles told my father what he did because it is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to have taken one’s public-school’s ethical system seriously. I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That’s an eighteenth-century product. What with the love of truth that—God help me!—they rammed into me at Clifton and the belief Arnold forced upon Rugby that the vilest of sins—the vilest of all sins—is to peach to the head master! That’s me, sir. Other men get over their schooling. I never have. I remain adolescent. These things are obsessions with me. Complexes, sir!”
The general said:
“All this seems to be very wild … What’s this about peaching to a head master?”
Tietjens said:
“For a swan song, it’s not wild, sir. You’re asking for a swan song. I am to go up into the line so that the morals of the troops in your command may not be contaminated by the contemplation of my marital infelicities.”
The general said:
“You don’t want to go back to England, do you?” Tietjens exclaimed:
“Certainly not! Very certainly not! I can never go home. I have to go underground somewhere. If I went back to England there would be nothing for me but going underground by suicide.”
The general said:
“You see all that? I can give you testimonials …”
Tietjens asked:
“Who couldn’t see that it’s impossible?”
The general said:
“But … suicide! You won’t do that. As you said: think of your son.”
Tietjens said:
“No, sir. I shan’t do that. But you see how bad for one’s descendants suicide is. That is why I do not forgive my father. Before he did it I should never have contemplated the idea. Now I have contemplated it. That’s a weakening of the moral fibre. It’s contemplating a fallacy as a possibility. For suicide is no remedy for a twisted situation of a psychological kind. It
