The Last Post

to the quality of the meat he supplied for Mark’s broths. In addition, on many days, she had worked late, under Mark’s directions, on papers that the Office had sent him. She either could not or would not put her man into the charge of any kind of night nurse. She alleged that the war had mopped up every kind of available attendant on the sick, but Mark shrewdly suspected that she had made no kind of effort to secure an assistant. There was her national dread of draughts to account for that. She accepted with discipline, if with despair, the English doctor’s dictum that fresh air must be admitted to the sickroom, but she sat up night after night in a hooded chair, watching for any change in the wind and moving in accordance a complicated arrangement of screens that she maintained between her patient and the open window. She had, however, surrendered Mark to his brother without a murmur, and had quietly gone to her own room to sleep, and Mark, though he carried on almost every kind of conversation with his brother, and though he would not have asked her to leave them in order that he might engage on topics that his brother might like to regard as private⁠—Mark seized the opportunity to lay before Christopher what he thought of Sylvia and the relationships of that singular couple.

It amounted, in the end, to the fact that Mark wanted Christopher to divorce his wife, and to the fact that Christopher had not altered in his views that a man cannot divorce a woman. Mark put it that if Christopher intended to take up with Valentine, it mattered practically very little whether after an attempt at a divorce he married her or not. What a man has to do if he means to take up with a woman, and as far as possible to honour her, is to make some sort of fight of it⁠—as a symbol. Marriage, if you do not regard it as a sacrament⁠—as, no doubt, it ought to be regarded⁠—was nothing more than a token that a couple intended to stick to each other. Nowadays people⁠—the right people⁠—bothered precious little about anything but that. A constant change of partners was a social nuisance; you could not tell whether you could or couldn’t invite a couple together to a tea-fight. And society existed for social functions. That was why promiscuity was no good. For social functions you had to have an equal number of men and women, or someone got left out of conversations, and so you had to know who, officially in the social sense, went with whom. Everyone knew that all the children of Lupus at the War Office were really the children of a Prime Minister, so that presumably the Countess and the Prime Minister slept together most of the time, but that did not mean that you invited the Prime Minister and the woman to social-official functions, because they hadn’t any ostensible token of union. On the contrary, you invited Lord and Lady Lupus together to all functions that would get into the papers, but you took care to have the Lady at any private, weekendish parties or intimate dinners to which the Chief was coming.

And Christopher had to consider that if it came to marriage ninety percent of the inhabitants of the world regarded the marriages of almost everybody else as invalid. A Papist obviously could not regard a marriage before an English registrar or a French maire as having any moral validity. At best it was no more than a demonstration of aspirations after constancy. You went before a functionary publicly to assert that man and woman intended to stick to each other. Equally for extreme Protestants a marriage by a Papist priest, or a minister of any other sect, or a Buddhist Lama, had not the blessing of their own brand of Deity. So that really, to all practical intents, it was sufficient if a couple really assured their friends that they intended to stick together, if possible, forever; if not, at least for years enough to show that they had made a good shot at it. Mark invited Christopher to consult whom he liked in his, Mark’s, particular set and he would find that they agreed with his views.

So he was anxious that if Christopher intended to take up with the Wannop young woman he should take at least a shot at a divorce. He might not succeed in getting one. He obviously had grounds enough, but Sylvia might make counter-allegations, he, Mark, couldn’t say with what chance of success. He was prepared himself to accept his brother’s assertions of complete innocence, but Sylvia was a clever devil and there was no knowing what view a judge might take. Where there had been such a hell of a lot of smoke he might consider that there must be enough flame to justify refusing a divorce. There would no doubt be, thus⁠—a beastly stink. But a beastly stink would be better than the sort of veiled ill-fame that Sylvia had contrived to get attached to Christopher. And the fact that Christopher had faced the stink and made the attempt would be at least that amount of tribute to Miss Wannop. Society was good-natured and was inclined to take the view that if a fellow had faced his punishment and taken it he was pretty well absolved. There might be people who would hold out against them, but Mark supposed that what Christopher wanted for himself and his girl was reasonable material comfort with a society of sufficient people of the right sort to give them a dinner or so a week and a weekend or so a month in the weekending season.

Christopher had acquiesced in the justness of his views with so much amiability that Mark began to hope that he would get his way in the larger matter of Groby. He was prepared to go