There had seemed to be no understanding them then. … It had appeared that Mark insisted that the girl should stop there with her lover: the lover, on the contrary, insisted that she should go home to her mother. The girl kept saying that on no account would she leave Christopher. He could not be left. He would die if he was left. … And, indeed, that brother-in-law had seemed sick enough. He panted worse than Mark.
She had eventually taken the girl to her own room. A little, agonized, fair creature. She had felt inclined to enfold her in her arms but she had not done so. Because of the money. … She might as well have. It was impossible to get these people to touch money. She would now give no little to lend that girl twenty pounds for a frock and some undergarments.
The girl had sat there without speaking. It had seemed for hours. Then some drunken man on the church steps opposite had begun to play the bugle. Long calls. … Tee … Teee … Teeee. … Ta-heee. … To-hee. … Continuing forever. …
Valentine had begun to cry. She had said that it was dreadful. But you could not object. It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead. You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you mad. The Dead ought to have all they could get.
If she had not made the necessary allowances that would have seemed to Marie Léonie an exaggerated sentiment. The English bugle-notes could do no good to the French dead and the English losses were so negligible in quantity that it hardly seemed worth while to become émotionnée when their funeral call was played by a drunken man. The French papers estimated the English losses at a few hundreds: what was that as against the millions of her own people? … But she gathered that this girl had gone through something terrible that night with the wife, and being too proud to show emotion over her personal vicissitudes she pretended to find an outlet because of the sounds of that bugle. … Well, it was mournful enough. She had understood it when Christopher, putting his face in at the crack of the door, had whispered to her that he was going to stop the bugle because its sound was intolerable to Mark.
The girl apparently had been in a reverie, for she had not heard him. She, Marie Léonie, had gone to look at Mark, and the girl sat there, on the bed. Mark was by then quite quiescent. The bugle had stopped. To cheer him she had made a few remarks about the inappropriateness of playing, for a negligible number of dead, a funeral call at three in the morning. If it had been for the French dead—or if her country had not been betrayed! It was betraying her country to have given those monsters an armistice when they were far from their borders. Merely that was treachery on the part of these sham Allies. They should have gone right through those monsters slaying them by the million, defenceless, and then they should have laid waste their country with fire and sword. Let them, too, know what it was to suffer as France had suffered. It was treachery enough not to have done that, and the child unborn would suffer for it.
But there they waited, then, even after that treachery had been done, to know what were the terms of even that treachery. They might even now not intend to be going to Berlin. … What, then, was Life for?
Mark had groaned. In effect he was a good Frenchman. She had seen to that. The girl had come into the room. She could not bear to be alone. … What a night of movement and cross movement. She had begun to argue with Mark. Hadn’t there, she had asked, been enough of suffering? He agreed that there had been enough of suffering. But there must be more. … Even out of justice to the poor bloody Germans. … He had called them the poor bloody Germans. He had said that it was the worst disservice you could do your foes not to let them know that remorseless consequences follow determined actions. To interfere in order to show fellows that if they did what they wanted they need not of necessity take what they got for it was in effect to commit a sin against God. If the Germans did not experience that in the sight of the world there was an end of Europe and the world. What was to hinder endless recurrences of what had happened near a place called Gemmenich on the 4th of August, 1914, at six o’clock in the morning? There was nothing to hinder it. Any other state from the smallest to the largest might …
The girl had interrupted to say that the world had changed, and Mark, lying back exhausted on his pillows, had said with a sort of grim sharpness:
“It is you who say it. … Then you may run the world. … I know nothing about it. …” He appeared exhausted.
It was singular the way those two discussed—discussed “the situation” at three-thirty in the morning. Well, nobody wanted to be asleep that night, it seemed. Even in that obscure street mobs went by, shouting and playing concertinas. She had never heard Mark discuss before—and she was never to hear him discuss again. He appeared to regard that girl with a sort of aloof indulgence; as if he were fond of her but regarded her as overlearned, too young, devoid of all experience. And Marie Léonie had watched them and listened with intentness.
