She told Connie one day: “I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford last night.”
“And did he take the money from you?” asked Connie aghast.
“Why, of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!”
Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs. Bolton’s wages a hundred a year, and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really going deader.
She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.
“Seventeenth!” he said. “And when will you be back?”
“By the twentieth of July at the latest.”
“Yes! the twentieth of July.”
Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.
“You won’t let me down, now, will you?” he said.
“How?”
“While you’re away. I mean, you’re sure to come back?”
“I’m as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.”
“Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!”
He looked at her so strangely.
Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.
She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself, himself, should be ripe.
She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.
“And then when I come back,” she said, “I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?”
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
“You’ve never been to the Colonies, have you?” he asked her.
“No! Have you?”
“I’ve been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.”
“Why shouldn’t we go to South Africa?”
“We might!” he said slowly.
“Or don’t you want to?” she asked.
“I don’t care. I don’t much care what I do.”
“Doesn’t it make you happy? Why not? We shan’t be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It’s not much, but it’s enough, isn’t it?”
“It’s riches to me.”
“Oh, how lovely it will be!”
“But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we’re going to have complications.”
There was plenty to think about.
Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.
“And weren’t you happy when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?”
“Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.”
“Did you love him?”
“Yes! I loved him.”
“And did he love you?”
“Yes! In a way, he loved me.”
“Tell me about him.”
“What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army. And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.”
“And did you mind very much when he died?”
“I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All things do, as far as that goes.”
She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.
“You seem to have such a lot behind you,” she said.
“Do I? It seems to me I’ve died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble.”
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
“And weren’t you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?”
“No! They were a mingy lot.” He laughed suddenly. “The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They’re the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their bootlaces aren’t correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That’s what finishes me up. Kowtow, kowtow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they’re always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each.”
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
“He hated them!”
“No,” said he. “He didn’t bother. He just disliked them. There’s a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It’s the fate of mankind, to go that way.”
“The common people too, the working people?”
“All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motorcars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It’s all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They’re all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking!—It’s all alike. Pay ’em money to cut off the world’s cock. Pay money, money, money
