They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty. … But her brother was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking treason. At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas couldn’t for the moment concern him. … That bus touched her skirt as she ran for the island. … It might have been better. … But one hadn’t the courage!
She was looking at patterned deaths under a little green roof, such as they put over bird shelters. Her heart stopped! Before, she had been breathless! She was going mad. She was dying. … All these deaths! And not merely the deaths. … The waiting for the approach of death; the contemplation of the parting from life! This minute you were; that, and you weren’t! What was it like? Oh heaven, she knew. … She stood there contemplating parting from … One minute you were; the next … Her breath fluttered in her chest. … Perhaps he wouldn’t come …
He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him and said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and his like responsible! … He had apparently a brother, a responsible one too! Browner complexioned! … But he! He! He! He! completely calm; with direct eyes. … It wasn’t possible. “Holde Lippen: klare Augen: heller Sinn. …” Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn’t look at you so, unless …
She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he belonged—more than to any browner, mere civilian, brother!—to her! She was going to ask him! If he answered: “Yes! I am such a man!” she was going to say: “Then you must take me too! If them, why not me? I must have a child. I too!” She desired a child. She would overwhelm these hateful lodestones with a flood of argument; she imagined—she felt—the words going between her lips. … She imagined her fainting mind; her consenting limbs. …
His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings. Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word from him. Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists. He might as well have recited the names of railway stations. His eyes, his unconcerned face, his tranquil shoulders; they were what acquitted him. The greatest love speech he had ever and could ever make her was when, harshly and angrily, he said something like:
“Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better”—brushing her aside as if she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to her!
She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said “Pink! pink!” The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clearheaded. … It was just a problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him. … Good for him was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like water that goes off the boil. … “Waters stilled at even.” Nonsense. It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save his brother. Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm feeling settled down upon her; this was her brother; the next to the best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, never so grateful as to the other—who had done nothing!
Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the blessed word Transport! “They,” so Mark said: he and she—the family feeling again—were going to get Christopher into the Transport. … By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. “Hooray!” he had written to his mother, “I’ve been off my feed; recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they’re putting me senior N.C.O. of First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally front line caboodle!” Valentine had had to read this letter in the scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But charity begins surely with the char! She had had to. Now she could thank God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. “Why,” one sentence ran, “our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b⸺y hell to the man who walks across it!” There the O.C. practised casting with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. “That’ll show you what a soft job it is!” the sergeant had finished triumphantly. …
So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall; downright, healthy middle-class—or perhaps upper middle-class—for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible, moccasined shoes
