She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf . . . A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin . . . He was saying to her:

‘If, ma’am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd . . .

And she had exclaimed:

‘You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails . . . And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes . . .

‘I told him,’ her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, ‘that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes . . . Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer . . .

‘It sounds,’ she said with a little shudder, ‘as if you were all schoolboys playing a game . . . And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things . . . ’

Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years — a splendid bit of leather, that! — answered nevertheless stoutly:

‘Madam! If the brains of an army aren’t, the life of an army is . . . in its feet . . . And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its teeth . . . Your husband, ma’am, is an admirable officer . . . He says that no draft he turns out shall . . .

She said:

‘He spent three hours in . . . You say, foot and kit inspection . . . ’

Second-Lieutenant Cowley said:

‘Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit . . . but he looked at every foot himself . . . ’

She said:

‘That took him from two till five . . . Then he had tea, I suppose . . . And went to . . . What is it? . . . The papers of the draft . . . ’

Second-Lieutenant Cowley said, muffled through his moustache:

‘If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters . . . I have heard . . . You might, madam . . . I’m a married man myself . . . with a daughter . . . And the army is not very good at writing letters . . . You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy, ma’am . . . ’

She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she said handsomely:

‘Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much obliged . . . Of course my husband would not have time to write very full letters . . . He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run after . . .

He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter:

‘The captain run after skirts . . . Why, I can number on my hands the times he’s been out of my sight since he’s had the battalion!’

A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia.

‘Why,’ Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, ‘if we had a laugh against him it was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting on addled eggs . . . For it’s only a ragtime army, as the saying is, when you’ve said the best for it that you can . . . And look at the other commanding officers we’ve had before we had him . . . There was Major Brooks . . . Never up before noon, if then, and out of camp by two-thirty. Get your returns ready for signing before then or never get ’em signed . . . And Colonel Potter . . . Bless my soul . . . ‘e wouldn’t sign any blessed papers at all . . . He lived down here in this hotel, and we never saw him up at the camp at all . . . But the captain . . . We always say that . . . if ‘e was a Chelsea adjutant getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams . . . ’

With her indolent and gracious beauty — Sylvia knew that she was displaying indolent and gracious beauty — Sylvia leaned over the tablecloth listening for items in the terrible indictment that, presently, she was going to bring against Tietjens . . . For the morality of these matters is this: . . . If you have an incomparably beautiful woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her . . . Nature exacts that of you . . . until you are unfaithful to her with a snubnosed girl with freckles: that, of course, being a reaction, is still in a way occupying yourself with your woman! . . . But to betray her with a battalion . . . That is against decency, against Nature . . . And for him, Christopher Tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here! . . .

Tietjens, mooning down the room between tables, had more than his usually aloof air since he had just come out of a telephone box. He slipped, a weary mass, into the polished chair between her and the lieutenant. He said:

‘I’ve got the washing arranged for . . . ’ and Sylvia gave to herself a little hiss between the teeth, of vindictive pleasure! This was indeed betrayal to a battalion. He added: ‘I shall have to be up in camp before four-thirty to-morrow morning . . .

Sylvia could not resist saying:

‘Isn’t there a poem . . . Ah me, the dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon! . . . said of course by lovers in bed? . . . Who was the poet?’

Cowley went visibly red to the roots of his hair and evidently beyond. Tietjens finished his speech to Cowley, who had remonstrated against his going up to the camp so early by saying that he had not been able to get hold of an officer to march the draft. He then said in his leisurely way:

‘There were a great many poems with that refrain in the Middle Ages . . . You are probably thinking of an albade by Arnaut Daniel, which someone translated lately . . . An albade was a song to be sung at dawn when, presumably, no one but lovers would be likely to sing . . . ’

‘Will there,’ Sylvia asked, ‘be anyone but you singing up in your camp to-morrow at four?’

She could not help it . . . She knew that Tietjens had adopted his slow pomposity in order to give the grotesque object at the table with them time to recover from his confusion. She hated him for it. What right had he to make himself appear a pompous ass in order to shield the confusion of anybody?

The second-lieutenant came out of his confusion to exclaim, actually slapping his thigh:

‘There you are, madam . . . Trust the captain to know everything! . . . I don’t believe there’s a question under the sun you could ask him that he couldn’t answer . . . They say up at the camp . . . ’ He went on with long stories of all the questions Tietjens had answered up at the camp . . .

Emotion was going all over Sylvia . . . at the proximity of Tietjens. She said to herself: ‘Is this to go on for ever?’ Her hands were ice-cold. She touched the back of her left hand with the fingers of her right. It was ice-cold. She looked at her hands. They were bloodless . . . She said to herself: ‘It’s pure sexual passion . . . it’s pure sexual passion . . . God! Can’t I get over this?’ She said: ‘Father! . . . You used to be fond of Christopher . . . Get our Lady to get me over this . . . It’s the ruin of him and the ruin of me. But, oh damn, don’t! . . . For it’s all I have to live for . . . ’ She said: ‘When he came mooning back from the telephone I thought it was all right . . . I thought what a heavy wooden-horse he looked . . . For two minutes . . . Then it’s all over me again . . . I want to swallow my saliva and I can’t. My throat won’t work . . .

She leaned one of her white bare arms on the tablecloth towards the walrus-moustache that was still snuffling gloriously:

‘They used to call him Old Sol at school.’ she said. ‘But there’s one question of Solomon’s he could not answer . . . The one about the way of a man with . . . Oh, a maid! . . . Ask him what happened before the dawn ninety-six — no, ninety-eight days ago . . . ’

She said to herself: ‘I can’t help it . . . Oh, I can’t help it . . . ’

The ex-sergeant-major was exclaiming happily:

‘Oh, no one ever said the captain was one of these thought-readers . . . It’s real solid knowledge of men and things he has . . . Wonderful how he knows the men considering he was not born in the service . . . But there, your born gentleman mixes with men all his days and knows them. Down to the ground and inside their puttees . . . ’

Tietjens was looking straight in front of him, his face perfectly expressionless.

‘But I bet I got him . . . ’ she said to herself and then to the sergeant-major:

‘I suppose now an army officer — one of your born gentlemen — when a back-from-leave train goes out from any of the great stations — Paddington, say — to the front . . . He knows how all the men are feeling . . . But not what the married women think . . . or the . . . the girl . . . ’

She said to herself: ‘Damn it, how clumsy I am getting! . . . I used to be able to take his hide off with a word. Now I take sentences at a time . . . ’

She went on with her uninterrupted sentence to Cowley: ‘Of course he may never be going to see his only son again, so it makes him sensitive . . . The officer at Paddington, I mean . . . ’

She said to herself: ‘By God, if that beast does not give in to me to-night he never shall see Michael again . . . Ah, but I got him . . . Tietjens had his eyes closed, round each of his high-coloured nostrils a crescent of whiteness was beginning. And increasing . . . She felt a sudden alarm and held the edge of the table with her extended arm to steady herself . . . Men went white at the nose like that when they were going to faint . . . She did not want him to faint . . . But he had noticed the word Paddington . . . Ninety-eight days before . . . She had counted every day since . . . She had got that much information . . . She had said Paddington outside the house at dawn and he had taken it as a farewell. He had . . . He had imagined himself free to do what he liked with the girl . . . Well, he wasn’t . . . That was why he was white about the gills . . .

Cowley exclaimed loudly:

‘Paddington! . . . It isn’t from there that back-from-leave trains go. Not for the front: the B.E.F . . . Not from Paddington . . . The Glamorganshires go from there to the depot . . . And the Liverpools . . . They’ve got a depot at Birkenhead . . . Or is that the Cheshires? . . . ’ He asked of Tietjens: ‘Is it the Liverpools or the Cheshires that have a depot at Birkenhead, sir? . . . You remember we recruited a draft from there when we were at Penhally . . . At any rate, you go to Birkenhead from Paddington . . . I was never there myself . . . They say it’s a nice place . . . ’

Sylvia said — she did not want to say it:

‘It’s quite a nice place . . . but I should not think of staying there for ever . . . ’

Tietjens said:

‘The Cheshires have a training camp — not a depot — near Birkenhead. And of course there are R.G.A.’s there . . . ’ She had been looking away from him . . . Cowley exclaimed:

‘You were nearly off, sir,’ hilariously. ‘You had your peepers shut . . . ’ Lifting a champagne glass, he inclined himself towards her. ‘You must excuse the captain, ma’am,’ he said. ‘He had no sleep last night . . . Largely owing to my fault . . . Which is what makes it so kind of him . . . I tell you, ma’am, there are few things I would not do for the captain . . . ’ He drank his champagne and began an explanation: ‘You may not know, ma’am, this is a great day for me . . . And you and the captain are making it the greatest day of my life . . . ’ Why, at four this morning there hadn’t been a wretcheder man in Ruin town . . . And now . . . He must tell her that he suffered from an unfortunate — a miserable — complaint . . . One that makes one have to be careful of celebrations . . . And to-day was a day that he had to celebrate . . . But he dare not have done it where Sergeant-Major Ledoux is along with a lot of their old mates . . . ‘I dare not . . . I dussn’t!’ he finished . . . ‘So I might have been sitting, now, at this very moment, up in the cold camp . . . But for you and the captain . . . Up in the cold camp . . . You’ll excuse me, ma’am . . . ’

Sylvia felt that her lids were suddenly wavering:

‘I might have been myself,’ she said, ‘in a cold camp, too . . . if I hadn’t thrown myself on the captain’s mercy! . . . At Birkenhead, you know . . . I happened to be there till three weeks ago . . . It’s strange that you mentioned it . . . There are things like signs . . . but you’re not a Catholic! They could hardly be coincidences . . . ’

She was trembling . . . She looked, fumblingly opening it, into the little mirror of her powder-box — of chased, very thin gold with a small blue stone, like a forget-me-not in the centre of the concentric engravings . . . Drake — the possible father of Michael — had given it to her . . . The first thing he had ever given her. She had brought it down to-night out of defiance. She imagined that Tietjens disliked it . . . She said breathlessly to herself: perhaps the damn thing is an ill omen . . . Drake had been the first man who had ever . . . A hot-breathed brute! . . . In the little glass her features were chalk-white . . . She looked like . . . she looked like . . . She had a dress of golden tissue . . . The breath was short between her white set teeth . . . Her face was as white as her teeth . . . And . . . Yes! Nearly! Her lips . . . What was her face like? . . . In the chapel of the convent of Birkenhead there was a tomb all of alabaster . . . She said to herself:

‘He was near fainting . . . I’m near fainting . . . What’s this beastly thing that’s between us? . . . If I let myself faint . . . But it would not make that beast’s face any less wooden! . . . ’

She leaned across the table and patted the ex-sergeantmajor’s black-haired hand:

‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘you’re a very good man . . . ’ She did not try to keep the tears out of her eyes, remembering his words: ‘Up in the cold camp.’ . . . ‘I’m glad the captain, as you call him, did not leave you in the cold camp . . . You’re devoted to him, aren’t you? . . . There are others he does leave . . . up in . . . the cold camp . . . For punishment, you know . . . ’

The ex-sergeant-major, the tears in his eyes too, said: ‘Well, there is men you ‘as to give the C.B. to . . . C.B. means confined to barracks . . . ’

‘Oh, there are!’ she exclaimed. ‘There are! . . . And women, too . . . Surely there are women, too? . . . ’

The sergeant-major said:

Wacks, per’aps . . . I don’t know . . . They say women’s discipline is like ours . . . Founded on hours!’

She said:

‘Do you know what they used to say of the captain? . . . ’ She said to herself: ‘I pray to God the stiff, fatuous beast likes sitting here listening to this stuff . . . Blessed Virgin, mother of God, make him take me . . . Before midnight. Before eleven . . . As soon as we get rid of this . . . No, he’s a decent little man . . . Blessed Virgin!’ . . . ‘Do you know what they used to say of the captain? . . . I heard the warmest banker in England say it of him . . . ’

The sergeant-major, his eyes enormously opened, said: ‘Did you know the warmest banker in England? . . . ’ But there, we always knew the captain was well connected . . . ’ She went on:

‘They said of him . . . He was always helping people.’ . . . ‘Holy Mary, mother of God! . . . He’s my husband . . . It’s not a sin . . . Before midnight . . . Oh, give me a sign . . . Or before . . . the termination of hostilities . . . If you give me a sign I could wait.’ . . . ‘He helped virtuous Scotch students, and broken-down gentry . . . And women taken in adultery . . . All of them . . . Like . . . You know Who . . . That is his model . . . ’ She said to herself: ‘Curse him! . . . I hope he likes it . . . You’d think the only thing he thinks about is the beastly duck he’s wolfing down.’ . . . And then aloud: ‘They used to say: “He saved others; himself he could not save . . . "’

The ex-sergeant-major looked at her gravely:

‘Ma’am,’ he said, we couldn’t say exactly that of the captain . . . For I fancy it was said of our Redeemer . . . But we ‘ave said that if ever there was a poor bloke the captain could ‘elp, ‘elp ’im ‘e would . . . Yet the unit was always getting ‘ellish strafe from headquarters . . . ’

Suddenly Sylvia began to laugh . . . As she began to laugh she had remembered . . . The alabaster image in the nun’s chapel at Birkenhead the vision of which had just presented itself to her, had been the recumbent tomb of an honourable Mrs Tremayne-Warlock . . . She was said to have sinned in her youth . . . And her husband had never forgiven her . . . That was what the nuns said . . . She said aloud:

‘A sign . . . ’ Then to herself: ‘Blessed Mary! . . . You’ve given it me in the neck . . . Yet you could not name a father for your child, and I can name two . . . I’m going mad . . . Both I and he are going to go mad . . . ’

She thought of dashing an enormous patch of red upon either cheek. Then she thought it would be rather melodramatic . . .

She made in the smoking-room, whilst she was waiting for both Tietjens and Cowley to come back from the telephone, another pact . . . This time with Father Consett in heaven! She was fairly sure that Father Consett — and quite possibly other of the heavenly powers — wanted Christopher not to be worried, so that he could get on with the war — or because he was a good sort of dullish man such as the heavenly authorities are apt to like . . . Something like that . . .

She was by that time fairly calm again. You cannot keep up fits of emotion by the hour: at any rate, with her, the fits of emotion were periodical and unexpected, though her colder passion remained always the same . . . Thus, when Christopher had come into Lady Sachse’s that afternoon, she had been perfectly calm. He had mooned through a number of officers, both French and English, in a great octagonal, bluish salon where Lady Sachse gave her teas, and had come to her side with just a nod — the merest inflexion of the head! . . . Perowne had melted away somewhere behind the disagreeable duchess. The general, very splendid and white-headed and scarlet-tipped and gilt, had also borne down upon her at that . . . At the sight of Perowne with her he had been sniffing and snorting whilst he talked to the young nobleman — a dark fellow in blue with a new belt who seemed just a shade too theatrical, he being chauffeur to a marshal of France and first cousin and nearest relative, except for parents and grandparents, of the prospective bride . . .

The general had told her that he was running the show pretty strong on purpose because he thought it might do something to cement the Entente Cordiale. But it did not seem to be doing it. The French — officers, soldiers and women — kept pretty well all on the one side of the room — the English on the other. The French were as a rule more gloomy than men and women are expected to be. A marquis of sorts — she understood that these were all Bonapartist nobility — having been introduced to her had distinguished himself no more than by saying that, for his part, he thought the duchess was right, and by saying that to Perowne who, knowing no French, had choked exactly as if his tongue had suddenly got too big for his mouth . . .

She had not heard what the duchess — a very disagreeable duchess who sat on a sofa and appeared savagely careworn — had been saying, so that she had inclined herself, in the courtly manner that at school she had been taught to reserve for the French legitimist nobility, but that she thought she might expend upon a rather state function even for the Bonapartists, and had replied that without the least doubt the duchess had the right of the matter . . . The marquis had given her from dark eyes one long glance, and she had returned it with a long cold glance that certainly told him she was meat for his masters. It extinguished him . . .

Tietjens had staged his meeting with herself remarkably well. It was the sort of lymphatic thing he could do, so that, for the fifth of a minute, she wondered if he had any feelings or emotions at all. But she knew that he had . . . The general, at any rate, bearing down upon them with satisfaction, had remarked:

‘Ah, I see you’ve seen each other before to-day . . . I thought perhaps you wouldn’t have found time before, Tietjens . . . Your draft must be a great nuisance . . . ’

Tietjens said without expression:

‘Yes, we have seen each other before . . . I made time to call at Sylvia’s hotel, sir.’

It was at Tietjens’ terrifying expressionlessness, at that completely being up to a situation, that the first wave of emotion had come over her . . . For, till that very moment, she had been merely sardonically making the constatation that there was not a single presentable man in the room . . . There was not even one that you could call a gentleman . . . for you cannot size up the French . . . ever! . . . But, suddenly, she was despairing! . . . How, she said to herself, could she ever move, put emotion into, this lump! It was like trying to move an immense mattress filled with feathers. You pulled at one end, but the whole mass sagged down and remained immobile until you seemed to have no strength at all . . . Until virtue went out from you . . .

It was as if he had the evil eye; or some special protector. He was so appallingly competent, so appallingly always in the centre of his own picture.

The general said, rather joyfully:

‘Then you can spare a minute, Tietjens, to talk to the duchess! About coal! . . . For goodness’ sake, man, save the situation! I’m worn out . . . ’

Sylvia bit the inside of her lower lip — she never bit her lip itself! — to keep herself from exclaiming aloud. It was just exactly what should not happen to Tietjens at that juncture . . . She heard the general explaining to her, in his courtly manner, that the duchess was holding up the whole ceremony because of the price of coal. The general loved her desperately. Her, Sylvia! In quite a proper manner for an elderly general . . . But he would go to no small extremes in her interests! So would his sister!

She looked hard at the room to get her senses into order again. She said:

‘It’s like a Hogarth picture . . . ’

The undissolvable air of the eighteenth century that the French contrive to retain in all their effects kept the scene singularly together. On a sofa sat the duchess, relatives leaning over her. She was a duchess with one of those impossible names: Beauchain-Radigutz or something like it. The bluish room was octagonal and vaulted, up to a rosette in the centre of the ceiling. English officers and V.A.D.’s of some evident presence opened out to the left, French military and very black-clothed women of all ages, but all apparently widows, opened out to the right, as if the duchess shone down a sea at sunset. Beside her on the sofa you did not see Lady Sachse: leaning over her you did not see the prospective bride. This stoutish, unpresentable, coldly venomous woman, in black clothes so shabby that they might have been grey tweed, extinguished other personalities as the sun conceals planets. A fattish, brilliantined personality, in mufti, with a scarlet rosette, stood sideways to the duchess’s right, his hands extended forward as if in an invitation to a dance; an extremely squat lady, also apparently a widow, extended, on the left of the duchess, both her black-gloved hands, as if she too were giving an invitation to the dance . . .

The general, with Sylvia beside him, stood glorious in the centre of the clearing that led to the open doorway of a much smaller room. Through the doorway you could see a table with a white damask cloth; a silver-gilt inkpot, fretted, like a porcupine with pens, a fat, flat leather case for the transportation of documents and two notaries: one in black, fat, and bald-headed; one in blue uniform, with a shining monocle, and a brown moustache that he continued to twirl . . .

Looking round that scene Sylvia’s humour calmed her and she heard the general say:

‘She’s supposed to walk on my arm to that table and sign the settlement . . . We’re supposed to be the first to sign it together . . . But she won’t. Because of the price of coal. It appears that she has hothouses in miles. And she thinks the English have put up the price of coal as if . . . damn it you’d think we did it just to keep her hothouse stoves out.’

The duchess had delivered, apparently, a vindictive, cold, calm, and uninterruptible oration on the wickedness of her country’s allies as people who should have allowed France to be devastated and the flower of her youth slain in order that they might put up the price of a comestible that was absolutely needed in her life. There was no arguing with her. There was no British soul there who both knew anything about economics and spoke French. And there she sat, apparently immovable. She did not refuse to sign the marriage contract. She just made no motion to go to it and, apparently, the resulting marriage would be illegal if that document were brought to her!

The general said:

Now, what the deuce will Christopher find to say to her? He’ll find something because he could talk the hind legs off anything. But what the deuce will it be? . . . ’

It almost broke Sylvia’s heart to see how exactly Christopher did the right thing. He walked up that path to the sun and made in front of the duchess a little awkward nick with his head and shoulders that was rather more like a curtsy than a bow. It appeared that he knew the duchess quite well . . . as he knew everybody in the world quite well. He smiled at her and then became just suitably grave. Then he began to speak an admirable, very old-fashioned French with an atrocious English accent. Sylvia had no idea that he knew a word of the language — that she herself knew very well indeed. She said to herself that upon her word it was like hearing Chateaubriand talk — if Chateaubriand had been brought up in an English hunting country . . . Of course Christopher would cultivate an English accent: to show that he was an English country gentleman. And he would speak correctly — to show that an English Tory can do anything in the world if he wants to . . .

The British faces in the room looked blank: the French faces turned electrically upon him. Sylvia said:

‘Who would have thought . . .?’ The duchess jumped to her feet and took Christopher’s arm. She sailed with him imperiously past the general and past Sylvia. She was saying that that was just what she would have expected of a milor Anglais . . . Avec un spleen tel que vous l’avez!

Christopher, in short, had told the duchess that as his family owned almost the largest stretch of hot-house coal-burning land in England and her family the largest stretch of hothouses in the sister-country of France, what could they do better than make an alliance? He would instruct his brother’s manager to see that the duchess was supplied for the duration of hostilities and as long after as she pleased with all the coal needed for her glass at the pithead prices of the Middlesbrough-Cleveland district as the prices were on the 3rd of August, nineteen fourteen . . . He repeated: ‘The pit-head price . . . livrable au prix de l’houillemaigre dans l’enceinte des puits de ma campagne.’ . . . Much to the satisfaction of the duchess, who knew all about prices . . . A triumph for Christopher was at that moment so exactly what Sylvia thought she did not want that she decided to tell the general that Christopher was a Socialist. That might well take him down a peg or two in the general’s esteem . . . for the general’s arm-patting admiration for Tietjens, the man who did not argue but acted over the price of coal, was as much as she could bear . . . But, thinking it over in the smoking-room after dinner, by which time she was a good deal more aware of what she did want, she was not so certain that she had done what she wanted . . . Indeed, even in the octagonal room during the economical festivities that followed the signatures, she had been far from certain that she had not done almost exactly what she did not want . . .

It had begun with the general’s exclaiming to her:

‘You know your man’s the most unaccountable fellow . . . He wears the damn-shabbiest uniform of any officer I ever have to talk to. He’s said to be unholily hard up . . . I even heard he had a cheque sent back to the club . . . Then he goes and makes a princely gift like that — just to get Levin out of ten minutes’ awkwardness . . . I wish to goodness I could understand the fellow . . . He’s got a positive genius for getting all sorts of things out of the most beastly muddles . . . Why, he’s even been useful to me . . . And then he’s got a positive genius for getting into the most disgusting messes . . . You’re too young to have heard of Dreyfus . . . But I always say that Christopher is a regular Dreyfus . . . I shouldn’t be astonished if he didn’t end by being drummed out of the army . . . which heaven forfend!’

It had been then that Sylvia had said:

‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that Christopher was a Socialist?’

For the first time in her life Sylvia saw her husband’s godfather look grotesque . . . His jaw dropped down, his white hair became disarrayed, and he dropped his pretty cap with all the gold oakleaves and the scarlet. When he rose from picking it up his thin old face was purple and distorted. She wished she hadn’t said it: she wished she hadn’t said it. He exclaimed:

‘Christopher! . . . A So . . . ’ He gasped as if he could not pronounce the word. He said: ‘Damn it all! . . . I’ve loved that boy . . . He’s my only godson . . . His father was my best friend . . . I’ve watched over him . . . I’d have married his mother if she would have had me . . . Damn it all, he’s down in my will as residuary legatee after a few small things left to my sister and my collection of horns to the regiment I commanded . . . ’

Sylvia — they were sitting on the sofa the duchess had left — patted him on the forearm and said:

‘But general . . . godfather . . . ’

‘It explains everything,’ he said with a mortification that was painful. His white moustache drooped and trembled. ‘And what makes it all the worse — he’s never had the courage to tell me his opinions.’ He stopped, snorted and exclaimed: ‘By God, I will have him drummed out of the service . . . By God, I will. I can do that much . . . ’

His grief so shut him in on himself that she could say nothing to him . . .

‘You tell me he seduced the little Wannop girl . . . The last person in the world he should have seduced . . . Ain’t there millions of other women? . . . He got you sold up, didn’t he? . . . Along with keeping a girl in a tobacco-shop . . . By jove, I almost lent him . . . offered to lend him money on that occasion . . . You can forgive a young man for going wrong with women . . . We all do . . . We’ve all set up girls in tobacco-shops in our time . . . But, damn it all, if the fellow’s a Socialist it puts a different complexion . . . I could forgive him even for the little Wannop girl, if he wasn’t . . . But . . . Good God, isn’t it just the thing that a dirty-minded Socialist would do? . . . To seduce the daughter of his father’s oldest friend, next to me . . . Or perhaps Wannop was an older friend than me . . . ’

He had calmed himself a little — and he was not such a fool. He looked at her now with a certain keenness in his blue eyes that showed no sign of age. He said:

‘See here, Sylvia . . . You aren’t on terms with Christopher for all the good game you put up here this afternoon . . . I shall have to go into this. It’s a serious charge to bring against one of His Majesty’s officers . . . Women do say things against their husbands when they are not on good terms with them . . . ’ He went on to say that he did not say she wasn’t justified. If Christopher had seduced the little Wannop girl it was enough to make her wish to harm him. Had always found her the soul of honour, straight as a die, straight as she rode to hounds. And if she wished to nag against her husband, even if in little things it wasn’t quite the truth, she was perhaps within her rights as a woman. She had said, for instance, that Tietjens had taken two pairs of her best sheets. Well, his own sister, her friend, raised Cain if he took anything out of the house they lived in. She had made an atrocious row because he had taken his own shaving-glass out of his own bedroom at Mounts-by. Women liked to have sets of things. Perhaps she, Sylvia, had sets of pairs of sheets. His sister had linen sheets with the date of the battle of Waterloo on them . . . Naturally you would not want a set spoiled . . . But this was another matter. He ended up very seriously:

‘I have not got time to go into this now . . . I ought not to be another minute away from my office. These are very serious days . . . ’ He broke off to utter against the Prime Minister and the Cabinet at home a series of violent imprecations. He went on:

‘But this will have to be gone into . . . It’s heart-breaking that my time should be taken up by matters like this in my own family . . . But these fellows aim at sapping the heart of the army . . . They say they distribute thousands of pamphlets recommending the rank and file to shoot their officers and go over to the Germans . . . Do you seriously mean that Christopher belongs to an organization? What is it you are going on? What evidence have you? . . . ’

She said:

‘Only that he is heir to one of the biggest fortunes in England, for a commoner, and he refuses to touch a penny . . . His brother Mark tells me Christopher could have . . . Oh, a fabulous sum a year . . . But he has made over Groby to me . . . ’

The general nodded his head as if he were ticking off ideas.

‘Of course, refusing property is a sign of being one of these fellows. By jove, I must go . . . But as for his not going to live at Groby: if he is setting up house with Miss Wannop . . . Well, he could not flaunt her in the face of the country . . . And, of course, those sheets! . . . As you put it it looked as if he’d beggared himself with his dissipations . . . But of course, if he is refusing money from Mark, it’s another matter . . . Mark would make up a couple of hundred dozen pairs of sheets without turning a hair . . . Of course there are the extraordinary things Christopher says . . . I’ve often heard you complain of the immoral way he looks at the serious affairs of life . . . You said he once talked of lethal-chambering unfit children.’

He exclaimed:

‘I must go. There’s Thurston looking at me . . . But what then is it that Christopher has said? . . . Hang it all: what is at the bottom of that fellow’s mind? . . . ’

‘He desires,’ Sylvia said, and she had no idea when she said it, ‘to model himself upon our Lord . . . ’

The general leant back in the sofa. He said almost indulgently:

‘Who’s that . . . our Lord?‘

Sylvia said:

‘Upon our Lord Jesus Christ . . . ’

He sprang to his feet as if she had stabbed him with a hatpin.

‘Our . . . ’ he exclaimed. ‘Good God! . . . I always knew he had a screw loose . . . But . . . ’ He said briskly: ‘Give all his goods to the poor! . . . But He wasn’t a . . . Not a Socialist! What was it He said: Render unto Caesar . . . It wouldn’t be necessary to drum Him out of the Army . . . ’ He said: ‘Good Lord! . . . Good Lord! . . . Of course his poor dear mother was a little . . . But, hang it! . . . The Wannop girl! . . . ’ Extreme discomfort overcame him . . . Tietjens was half-way across from the inner room, coming towards them.

He said:

‘Major Thurston is looking for you, sir. Very urgently . . . ’ The general regarded him as if he had been the unicorn of the royal arms, come alive. He exclaimed:

‘Major Thurston! . . . Yes! Yes! . . . ’ and, Tietjens saying to him:

‘I wanted to ask you, sir . . . ’ he pushed Tietjens away as if he dreaded an assault and went off with short, agitated steps.

So sitting there, in the smoking-lounge of the hotel which was cram-jam full of officers, and no doubt perfectly respectable, but over-giggling women — the sort of place and environment which she had certainly never expected to be called upon to sit in; and waiting for the return of Tietjens and the ex-sergeant-major — who again was certainly not the sort of person that she had ever expected to be asked to wait for, though for long years she had put up with Tietjens’ protégé, the odious Sir Vincent Macmaster, at all sorts of meals and all sorts of places . . . but of course that was only Christopher’s rights . . . to have in his own house, which, in the circumstances, wasn’t morally hers, any snuffling, nervous, walrus-moustached or orientally obsequious protégé that he chose to patronize . . . And she quite believed that Tietjens, when he had invited the sergeant-major to celebrate his commission with himself at dinner, hadn’t expected to dine with her . . . It was the sort of obtuseness of which he was disconcertingly capable, though at other times he was much more disconcertingly capable of reading your thoughts to the last hairsbreadth . . . And, as a matter of fact, she objected much less to dining with the absolute lower classes than with merely snuffly little official critics like Macmaster, and the sergeant-major had served her turn very well when it had come to flaying the hide off Christopher . . . So, sitting there, she made a new pact, this time with Father Consett in heaven . . .

Father Consett was very much in her mind, for she was very much in the midst of the British military authorities who had hanged him . . . She had never seemed before to be so in the midst of these negligible, odious, unpresentable, horse-laughing schoolboys. It antagonized her, and it was a weight upon her, for hitherto she had completely ignored them: in this place they seemed to have a coherence, a mass . . . almost a life . . . They rushed in and out of rooms occupied, as incomprehensibly, as unpresentably, with things like boots, washing, vaccination certificates . . . Even with old tins! . . . A man with prematurely white hair and a pasty face, with a tunic that bulged both above and below his belt, would walk into the drawing-room of a lady who superintended all the acid-drop and cigarette stalls of that city and remark to a thin-haired, deaf man with an amazingly red nose — a nose that had a perfectly definite purple and scarlet diagonal demarcation running from the bridge to the upper side of the nostrils — that he had got his old tins off his hands at last. He would have to repeat it in a shout because the red-nosed man, his head hanging down, would have heard nothing at all. The deaf man would say Humph! Humph! Snuffle. The woman giving the tea — a Mrs Hemmerdine, of Tarbolton, whom you might have met at home, would be saying that at last she had got twelve reams of notepaper with forget-me-nots in the top corners when the deaf-faced man would begin, gruffly and uninterruptedly, a monologue on his urgent need for twenty thousand tons of sawdust for the new slow-burning stoves in the men’s huts . . .

It was undeniably like something moving . . . All these things going in one direction . . . A disagreeable force set in motion by gawky schoolboys — but schoolboys of the Sixth Form, sinister, hobbledehoy, waiting in the corners of playgrounds to torture someone, weak and unfortunate . . . In one or other corner of their world-wide playground they had come upon Father Consett and hanged him. No doubt they tortured him first. And, if he made an offering of his sufferings, then and there to Heaven, no doubt he was already in paradise . . . Or, if he was not yet in heaven, certain of these souls in purgatory were yet listened to in the midst of their torments . . .

So she said:

‘Blessed and martyred father, I know that you loved Christopher and wish to save him from trouble. I will make this pact with you. Since I have been in this room I have kept my eyes in the boat — almost in my lap. I will agree to leave off torturing Christopher and I will go into retreat in a convent of Ursuline Dames Nobles — for I can’t stand the nuns of that other convent — for the rest of my life . . . And I know that will please you, too, for you were always anxious for the good of my soul . . . ’ She was going to do that if when she raised her eyes and really looked round the room she saw in it one man that looked presentable. She did not ask that he should more than look presentable, for she wanted nothing to do with the creature. He was to be a sign: not a prey!

She explained to the dead priest that she could not go all the world over to see if it contained a presentable man, but she could not bear to be in a convent for ever, and have the thought that there wasn’t, for other women, one presentable man in the world . . . For Christopher would be no good to them. He would be mooning for ever over the Wannop girl. Or her memory. That was all one . . . He was content with LOVE . . . If he knew that the Wannop girl was loving him in Bedford Park, and he in the Khyber States with the Himalayas between them, he would be quite content . . . That would be correct in its way, but not very helpful for other women . . . Besides, if he were the only presentable man in the world, half the women would be in love with him . . . And that would be disastrous, because he was no more responsive than a bullock in a fatting pen.

‘So, father,’ she said, ‘work a miracle . . . It’s not very much of a little miracle . . . Even if a presentable man doesn’t exist you could put him there . . . I’ll give you ten minutes before I look . . . ’

She thought it was pretty sporting of her, for, she said to herself, she was perfectly in earnest. If in that long, dim, green-lamp-shaded, and of course be-palm-leaved, badly-proportioned, glazed, ignoble public room, there appeared one decentish man, as decentish men went before this beanfeast began, she would go into retreat for the rest of her life . . .

She fell into a sort of dim trance after she had looked at her watch. Often she went into these dim trances . . . ever since she had been a girl at school with Father Consett for her spiritual adviser! . . . She seemed to be aware of the father moving about the room, lifting up a book and putting it down . . . Her ghostly friend! . . . Goodness, he was unpresentable enough, with his broad, open face that always looked dirtyish, his great dark eyes, and his great mouth . . . But a saint and a martyr . . . She felt him there . . . What had they murdered him for? Hanged at the word of a half-mad, half-drunk subaltern, because he had heard the confession of some of the rebels the night before they were taken . . . He was over in the far corner of the room . . . She heard him say: they had not understood, the men that had hanged him. That is what you would say, father . . . Have mercy on them, for they know not what they do . . .

Then have mercy on me, for half the time I don’t know what I’m doing! . . . It was like a spell you put on me. At Lobscheid. Where my mother was, when I came back from that place without my clothes . . . You said, didn’t you, to mother, but she told me afterwards: The real hell for that poor boy, meaning Christopher, will come when he falls in love with some young girl — as, mark me, he will . . . For she, meaning me, will tear the world down to get at him . . . And when mother said she was certain I would never do anything vulgar you obstinately did not agree . . . You knew me . . .

She tried to rouse herself and said: He knew me . . . Damn it he knew me! . . . What’s vulgarity to me, Sylvia Tietjens, born Satterthwaite? I do what I want and that’s good enough for anyone. Except a priest. Vulgarity! I wonder mother could be so obtuse. If I am vulgar I’m vulgar with a purpose. Then it’s not vulgarity. It may be vice. Or viciousness . . . But if you commit a mortal sin with your eyes open it’s not vulgarity . . . You chance hell fire for ever . . . Good enough!

The weariness sank over her again and the sense of the father’s presence . . . She was back again in Lobscheid, thirty-six hours free of Perowne with the father and her mother in the dim sitting-room, all antlers, candle-lit, with the father’s shadow waving over the pitchpine walls and ceilings . . . It was a bewitched place, in the deep forest of Germany. The father himself said it was the last place in Europe to be Christianized. Or perhaps it was never Christianized . . . That was perhaps why those people, the Germans, coming from those deep, devil-infested woods, did all these wickednesses. Or maybe they were not wicked . . . One would never know properly . . . But maybe the father had put a spell on her . . . His words had never been out of her mind, much . . . At the back of her brain, as the saying was . . .

Some man drifted near her and said:

‘How do you do, Mrs Tietjens? Who would have thought of seeing you here?’

She answered:

‘I have to look after Christopher now and then.’ He remained hanging over her with a schoolboy grin for a minute, then he drifted away as an object sinks into deep water . . . Father Consett again hovered near her. She exclaimed:

‘But the real point is, father . . . Is it sporting? . . . Sporting or whatever it is?’ And Father Consett breathed: ‘Ah! . . . ’ with his terrible power of arousing doubts . . . She said:

‘When I saw Christopher . . . Last night? . . . Yes, it was last night . . . Turning back to go up that hill . . . And I had been talking about him to a lot of grinning private soldiers . . . To madden him . . . You mustn’t make scenes before the servants . . . A heavy man, tired . . . come down the hill and lumbering up again . . . There was a searchlight turned on him just as he turned . . . I remembered the white bulldog I thrashed on the night before it died . . . A tired, silent beast . . . with a fat white behind . . . Tired out . . . You couldn’t see its tail because it was turned down, the stump . . . A great, silent beast . . . The vet said it had been poisoned with red lead by burglars . . . It’s beastly to die of red lead . . . It eats up the liver . . . And you think you’re getting better for a fortnight. And you’re always cold . . . freezing in the blood-vessels . . . And the poor beast had left its kennel to try and be let in to the fire . . . And I found it at the door when I came in from a dance without Christopher . . . And got the rhinoceros whip and lashed into it . . . There’s a pleasure in lashing into a naked white beast . . . Obese and silent . . . Like Christopher . . . I thought Christopher might . . . That night . . . It went through my head . . . It hung down its head . . . A great head, room for a whole British encyclopaedia of mis-information, as Christopher used to put it . . . It said: “What a hope!” . . . As I hope to be saved, though I never shall be, the dog said: “What a hope!” . . . Snow-white in quite black bushes . . . And it went under a bush . . . They found it dead there in the morning . . . You can’t imagine what it looked like, with its head over its shoulder, as it looked back and said: What a hope to me . . . Under a dark bush. An eu . . . eu . . . euonymus, isn’t it? . . . In thirty degrees of frost with all the blood-vessels exposed on the naked surface of the skin . . . It’s the seventh circle of hell, isn’t it? the frozen one . . . The last stud-white bulldog of that breed . . . As Christopher is the last stud-white hope of the Groby Tory breed . . . Modelling himself on our Lord . . . But our Lord was never married. He never touched on topics of sex. Good for Him . . .

She said: ‘The ten minutes is up, father . . . ’ and looked at the round, starred surface between the diamonds of her wrist watch. She said: ‘Good God! . . . Only one minute . . . I’ve thought all that in only one minute . . . I understand how hell can be an eternity . . . ’

Christopher, very weary, and ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, very talkative by now, loomed down between palms. Cowley was saying: ‘It’s infamous! . . . It’s past bearing . . . To re-order the draft at eleven . . . ’ They sank into chairs . . . Sylvia extended towards Tietjens a small packet of letters. She said: ‘You had better look at these . . . I had your letters sent to me from the flat as there was so much uncertainty about your movements . . . ’ She found that she did not dare, under Father Consett’s eyes, to look at Tietjens as she said that. She said to Cowley: ‘We might be quiet for a minute or two while the captain reads his letters . . . Have another liqueur? . . . ’

She then observed that Tietjens just bent open the top of the letters from Mrs Wannop and then opened that from his brother Mark.

‘Curse it,’ she said, ‘I’ve given him what he wants! . . . He knows . . . He’s seen the address . . . that they’re still in Bedford Park . . . He can think of the Wannop girl as there . . . He has not been able to know, till now, where she is . . . He’ll be imagining himself in bed with her there . . . ’

Father Consett, his broad, unmodelled dark face full of intelligence and with the blissful unction of the saint and martyr, was leaning over Tietjens’ shoulder . . . He must be breathing down Christopher’s back as, her mother said, he always did when she held a hand at auction and he could not play because it was between midnight and his celebrating the holy mass . . .

She said:

‘No, I am not going mad . . . This is an effect of fatigue on the optic nerves . . . Christopher has explained that to me . . . He says that when his eyes have been very tired with making one of his senior wrangler’s calculations he has often seen a woman in an eighteenth-century dress looking into a drawer in his bureau . . . Thank God, I’ve had Christopher to explain things to me . . . I’ll never let him go . . . Never, never, let him go . . . ’

It was not, however, until several hours later that the significance of the father’s apparition came to her and those intervening hours were extraordinarily occupied — with emotions, and even with action. To begin with, before he had read the fewest possible words of his brother’s letter, Tietjens looked up over it and said:

‘Of course you will occupy Groby . . . With Michael . . . Naturally the proper business arrangements will be made . . . ’ He went on reading the letter, sunk in his chair under the green shade of a lamp . . .

The letter, Sylvia knew, began with the words: ‘Your —— of a wife has been to see me with the idea of getting any allowance I might be minded to make you transferred to herself. Of course she can have Groby, for I shan’t let it, and could not be bothered with it myself. On the other hand, you may want to live at Groby with that girl and chance the racket. I should if I were you. You would probably find the place worth the . . . what is it? ostracism, if there was any . . . But I’m forgetting that the girl is not your mistress unless anything has happened since I saw you . . . And you probably would want Michael to be brought up at Groby, in which case you couldn’t keep the girl there, even if you camouflaged her as governess. At least I think that kind of arrangement always turns out badly: there’s bound to be a stink, though Crosby of Ulick did it and nobody much minded . . . But it was mucky for the Crosby children. Of course if you want your wife to have Groby she must have enough to run it with credit, and expenses are rising damnably. Still, our incomings rise not a little, too, which is not the case with some. The only thing I insist on is that you make plain to that baggage that whatever I allow her, even if it’s no end of a hot income, not one penny of it comes out of what I wish you would allow me to allow you. I mean I want you to make plain to that rouged piece — or perhaps it’s really natural, my eyes are not what they were — that what you have is absolutely independent of what she sucks up as the mother of our father’s heir and to keep our father’s heir in the state of life that is his due . . . I hope you feel satisfied that the boy is your son, for it’s more than I should be, looking at the party . . . But even if he is not he is our father’s heir all right and must be so treated . . .

‘But be plain about that, for the trollop came to me, if you please, with the proposal that I should dock you of any income I might propose to allow you — and to which of course you are absolutely entitled under our father’s will, though it is no good reminding you of that! — as a token from me that I disapproved of your behaviour when, damn it, there is not an action of yours that I would not be proud to have to my credit. At any rate in this affair, for I cannot help thinking that you could be of more service to the country if you were anywhere else but where you are. But you know what your conscience demands of you better than I, and I dare say these hell-cats have so mauled you that you are glad to be able to get away into any hole. But don’t let yourself die in your hole. Groby will have to be looked after, and even if you do not live there you can keep a strong hand on Sanders, or whoever you elect to have as manager. That monstrosity you honour with your name — which is also mine, thank you! — suggested that if I consented to let her live at Groby she would have her mother to live with her, in which case her mother would be good to look after the estate. I dare say she would, though she has had to let her own place. But then almost everyone else has. She seems anyhow a notable woman, with her head screwed on the right way. I did not tell the discreditable daughter that she — her mother — had come to see me at breakfast immediately after seeing you off, she was so upset. And she keawert ho down i’ th’ ingle and had a gradely pow. You remember how Gobbles the gardener used to say that. A good chap, though he came from Lancasheere! . . . The mother has no illusions about the daughter and is heart and soul for you. She was dreadfully upset at your going, the more so as she believes that it’s her offspring has driven you out of the country and that you purpose . . . isn’t stopping one the phrase? Don’t do that.

‘I saw your girl yesterday . . . She looked peaky. But of course I have seen her several times, and she always looks peaky. I do not understand why you do not write to them. The mother is clamorous because you have not answered several letters and have not sent her military information she wants for some article she is writing for a Swiss magazine . . . ’

Sylvia knew the letter almost by heart as far as that because in the unbearable white room of the convent near Birkenhead she had twice begun to copy it out, with the idea of keeping the copies for use in some sort of publicity. But, at that point, she had twice been overcome by the idea that it was not a very sporting thing to do, if you really think about it. Besides, the letter after that — she had glanced through it — occupied itself almost entirely with the affairs of Mrs Wannop. Mark, in his nave way, was concerned that the old lady, although now enjoying the income from the legacy left her by their father, had not immediately settled down to write a deathless novel; although, as he added, he knew nothing about novels . . .

Christopher was reading away at his letters beneath the green-shaded lamp; the ex-quartermaster had begun several sentences and dropped into demonstrative silence at the reminder that Tietjens was reading. Christopher’s face was completely without expression; he might have been reading a return from the office of statistics in the old days at breakfast. She wondered, vaguely, if he ............