“But I …” the general said.
Tietjens said:
“You never believed anything against me, sir.”
The general said:
“I know I’ve damn well worried myself to death over you …”
Tietjens was sentimental at rest, still with wet eyes. He was walking near Salisbury in a grove, regarding long pastures and ploughlands running to dark, high elms from which, embowered … Embowered was the word!—peeped the spire of George Herbert’s church … One ought to be a seventeenth-century parson at the time of the renaissance of Anglican saintliness … who wrote, perhaps poems. No, not poems. Prose. The statelier vehicle!
That was homesickness! … He himself was never to go home!
The general said:
“Look here … Your father … I’m concerned about your father … Didn’t Sylvia perhaps tell him some of the things that distressed him?”
Tietjens said distinctly:
“No, sir. That responsibility cannot be put on to Sylvia. My father chose to believe things that were said against me by a perfect—or a nearly perfect—stranger …” He added: “As a matter of fact, Sylvia and my father were not on any sort of terms. I don’t believe they exchanged two words for the last five years of my father’s life.”
The general’s eyes were fixed with an extreme hardness on Tietjens’. He watched Tietjens’ face, beginning with the edges round the nostrils, go chalk white. He said: “He knows he’s given his wife away! … Good God!” With his face colourless, Tietjens’ eyes of porcelain-blue stuck out extraordinarily. The general thought: “What an ugly fellow! His face is all crooked!” They remained looking at each other.
In the silence the voices of men talking over the game of House came as a murmur to them. A rudimentary card game monstrously in favour of the dealer. When you heard voices going on like that you knew they were playing House … So they had had their dinners.
The general said:
“It isn’t Sunday, is it?”
Tietjens said:
“No, sir; Thursday, the seventeenth, I think, of January …”
The general said:
“Stupid of me …”
The men’s voices had reminded him of church bells on a Sunday. And of his youth … He was sitting beside Mrs. Tietjens’ hammock under the great cedar at the corner of the stone house at Groby. The wind being from the east-north-east the bells of Middlesbrough came to them faintly. Mrs. Tietjens was thirty; he himself thirty; Tietjens—the father—thirty-five or so. A most powerful quiet man. A wonderful landowner. Like his predecessor for generations. It was not from him that this fellow got his … his … his what? … Was it mysticism? … Another word! He himself home on leave from India: his head full of polo. Talking for hours about points in ponies with Tietjens’ father, who was a wonderful hand with a horse.
But this fellow was much more wonderful! … Well, he got that from the sire, not the dam! … He and Tietjens continued to look at each other. It was as if they were hypnotized. The men’s voices went on in a mournful cadence. The general supposed that he too must be pale. He said to himself: “This fellow’s mother died of a broken heart in 1912. The father committed suicide five years after. He had not spoken to the son’s wife for four or five years! That takes us back to 1912 … Then, when I strafed him in Rye, the wife was in France with Perowne.”
He looked down at the blanket on the table. He intended again to look up at Tietjens’ eyes with ostentatious care. That was his technique with men. He was a successful general because he knew men. He knew that all men will go to hell over three things: alcohol, money … and sex.
This fellow apparently hadn’t. Better for him if he had! He thought:
“It’s all gone … mother! father! Groby! This fellow’s down and out. It’s a bit thick.”
He thought:
“But he’s right to do as he is doing.”
He prepared to look at Tietjens … He stretched out a sudden, ineffectual hand. Sitting on his beef-case, his hands on his knees, Tietjens had lurched. A sudden lurch—as an old house lurches when it is hit by a H.E. shell. It stopped at that. Then he righted himself. He continued to stare direct at the general. The general looked carefully back. He said—very carefully too:
“In case I decide to contest West Cleveland, it is your wish that I should make Groby my headquarters?”
Tietjens said:
“I beg, sir, that you will!”
It was as if they both heaved an enormous sigh of relief. The general said:
“Then I need not keep you …”
Tietjens stood on his feet, wanly, but with his heels together.
The general also rose, settling his belt. He said:
“… You can fall out.”
Tietjens said:
“My cookhouses, sir … Sergeant-Cook Case will be very disappointed … He told me that you couldn’t find anything wrong if I gave him ten minutes to prepare …”
The general said:
“Case … Case … Case was in the drums when we were at Delhi. He ought to be at least Quartermaster by now … But he had a woman he called his sister …”
Tietjens said:
“He still sends money to his sister.”
The general said:
“… He went absent over her when he was colour-sergeant and was reduced to the ranks … Twenty years ago that must be! … Yes, I’ll see your dinners!”
In the cookhouses, brilliantly accompanied by Colonel Levin, the cookhouse spotless with limed walls and mirrors that were the tops of camp-cookers, the general, Tietjens at his side, walked between goggle-eyed men in white who stood to attention holding ladles. Their eyes bulged, but the corners of their lips curved because they liked the general and his beautifully unconcerned companions. The cookhouse was like a cathedral’s nave, aisles being divided off by the pipes of
