Valentine heard herself say:
‘Me!’
She added:
‘Him! Looking after him. I don’t know that he has any … interests!’
He didn’t appear to have any furniture, so how could he have the other things. She wished Miss Wanostrocht would leave off using the word ‘appear’. It was irritating … and infectious. Could the lady not make a direct statement? But then, no one ever made clear statements and this no doubt appeared to that anæmic spinster a singularly tenebrous affair.
As for clear statements … If there had ever been any in precisely this tenebrous mess she, Valentine, would know how she stood with that man’s wife. For it was part of the preposterous way in which she herself and all her friends behaved that they never made clear statements – except for Edith Ethel who had the nature of a female costermonger and could not tell the truth, though she could be clear enough. But even Edith Ethel had never hitherto said anything about the way the wife in this case treated the husband. She had given Valentine very clearly to understand that she ‘sided’ with the wife – but she had never gone as far as to say that the wife was a good wife. If she – Valentine – could only know that.
Miss Wanostrocht was asking:
‘When you say “Me”, do you mean that you would propose to look after that man yourself? I trust not.’
… Because, obviously, if she were a good wife, she, Valentine, couldn’t butt in … not generously. As her father’s and still more her mother’s daughter… . On the face of it you would say that a wife who was always striding along the palings of the Row, or the paths of other resorts of the fashionable could not be a good – a domestic – wife of a Statistician. On the other hand he was a pretty smart man, Governing class, county family, and the rest of it – so he might like his wife to figure in Society; he might even exact it. He was quite capable of that. Why, for all she knew, the wife might be a retiring, shy person whom he thrust out into the hard world. It was not likely, but it was as possible as anything else.
Miss Wanostrocht was asking:
‘Aren’t there Institutions … Military Sanatoria … for cases precisely like that of this Captain Tietjens? It appears to be the war that has broken him down, not merely evil living.’
‘It’s precisely,’ Valentine said, ‘because of that that one should want … shouldn’t one … Because it’s because of the War… .’
The sentence would not finish itself.
Miss Wanostrocht said:
‘I thought … It has been represented to me … that you were a Pacifist. Of an extreme type!’
It had given Valentine a turn – like the breaking out of sweat in a case of fever – to hear the name, coldly, ‘Captain Tietjens’, for it was like a release. She had been irrationally determined that hers should not be the first tongue to utter that name.
And apparently from her tone Miss Wanostrocht was prepared to detest that Captain Tietjens. Perhaps she detested him already.
She was beginning to say:
‘If one is an extreme Pacifist because one cannot bear to think of the sufferings of men isn’t that a precise reason why one should wish that a poor devil, all broken up …’
But Miss Wanostrocht had begun one of her own long sentences. Their voices went on together, like trains dragging along ballast – disagreeably. Miss Wanostrocht’s organ, however, won out with the words:
‘… behaved very badly indeed.’
Valentine said hotly:
‘You ought not to believe anything of the sort – on the strength of anything said by a woman like Lady Macmaster.’
Miss Wanostrocht appeared to have been brought to a complete stop: she leaned forward in her chair; her mouth was a little open. And Valentine said: ‘Thank Goodness!’ to herself.
She had to have a moment to herself to digest what had the air of being new evidence of the baseness of Edith Ethel; she felt herself to be infuriated in regions of her own being that she hardly knew. That seemed to her to be a littleness in herself. She had not thought that she had been as little as that. It ought not to matter what people said of you. She was perfectly accustomed to think of Edith Ethel as telling whole crowds of people very bad things about her, Valentine Wannop. But there was about this a recklessness that was hardly believable. To tell an unknown person, encountered by chance on the telephone, derogatory facts about a third party who might be expected to come to the telephone herself in a minute or two – and, not only that – who must in all probability hear what had been said very soon after, from the first listener… . That was surely a recklessness of evil-speaking that almost outpassed sanity… . Or else it betrayed a contempt for her, Valentine Wannop, and what she could do in the way of reprisals that was extremely hard to bear!
She said suddenly to Miss Wanostrocht:
‘Look here! Are you speaking to me as a friend to my father’s daughter or as a Headmistress to a Physical Instructor?’
A certain amount of blood came into the lady’s pinkish features. She had certainly been ruffled when Valentine had permitted her voice to sound so long alongside her own; for, although Valentine knew next to nothing about the Head’s likes or dislikes she had once or twice before seen her evince marked distaste on being interrupted in one of her formal sentences.
Miss Wanostrocht said with a certain coldness:
‘I’m speaking at present … I’m allowing myself the liberty – as a much older woman – in the capacity of a friend of your father. I have been, in short, trying to recall to you all that you owe to yourself as being an example of his training!’
Involuntarily Valentine’s lips formed themselves for a low whistle of incredulity. She said to herself:
‘By Jove! I am in the middle of a nasty affair… . This is a sort of professional cross-examination.’
‘I am in a way glad,’ the lady was now continuing, ‘that you take that line… . I mean of defending Mrs. Tietjens with such heat against Lady Macmaster. Lady Macmaster appears to dislike Mrs. Tietjens, but I am bound to say that she appears to be in the right of it. I mean of her dislike. Lady Macmaster is a serious personality and, even on her public record Mrs. Tietjens appears to be very much the reverse. No doubt you wish to be loyal to your … friends, but …’
‘We appear,’ Valentine said, ‘to be getting into an extraordinary muddle.’
She added:
‘I haven’t, as you seem to think, been defending Mrs. Tietjens. I would have. I would at any time. I have always thought of her as beautiful and kind. But I heard you say the words: ‘has been behaving very badly,’ and I thought you meant that Captain Tietjens had. I denied it. If you meant that his wife has, I deny it, too. She’s an admirable wife … and mother … that sort of thing, for all I know… .’
She said to herself:
‘Now why do I say that? What’s Hecuba to me?’ and then:
‘It’s to defend his honour, of course … I’m trying to present Captain Tietjens as English Country Gentleman complete with admirably arranged establishment, stables, kennels, spouse, offspring… . That’s a queer thing to want to do!’
Miss Wanostrocht who had breathed deeply said now:
‘I’m extremely glad to hear that. Lady Macmaster certainly said that Mrs. Tietjens was – let us say – at least a neglectful wife… . Vain, you know; idle; overdressed… . All that… . And you appeared to defend Mrs. Tietjens.’
‘She’s a smart woman in smart Society,’ Valentine said, ‘but it’s with her husband’s concurrence. She has a right to be… .’
‘We shouldn’t,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘be in the extraordinary muddle to which you referred if you did not so continually interrupt me. I was trying to say that, for you, an inexperienced girl, brought up in a sheltered home, no pitfall could be more dangerous than a man with a wife who neglected her duties!’
Valentine said:
‘You will have to excuse my interrupting you. It is, you know, rather more my funeral than yours.’
M
iss Wanostrocht said quickly:
‘You can’t say that. You don’t know how ardently …’
Valentine said:
‘Yes, yes… . Your schwaerm for my father’s memory and all. But my father couldn’t bring it about that I should lead a sheltered life… . I’m about as experienced as any girl of the lower classes… . No doubt it was his doing, but don’t make any mistakes.’
She added:
‘Still, it’s I that’s the corpse. You’re conducting the inquest. So it’s more fun for you.’
Miss Wanostrocht had grown slightly pale:
‘If; if …’ she stammered slightly, ‘by “experience” you mean …’
‘I don’t,’ Valentine exclaimed, ‘and you have no right to infer that I do on the strength of a conversation you’ve had, but shouldn’t have had, with one of the worst tongues in London… . I mean that my father left us so that I had to earn my and my mother’s living as a servant for some months after his death. That was what his training came to. But I can look after myself… . In consequence …’
Miss Wanostrocht had thrown herself back in her chair.
‘But …’ she exclaimed; she had grown completely pale – like discoloured wax. ‘There was a subscription… . We …’ she began: ‘We knew that he hadn’t …’
‘You subscribed,’ Valentine said, ‘to purchase his library and presented it to his wife … who had nothing to eat but what my wages as a tweeny maid got for her.’ But before the pallor of the other lady she tried to add a touch of generosity: ‘Of course the subscribers wanted, very naturally, to preserve as much as they could of his personality. A man’s books are very much himself. That was all right.’ She added: ‘All the same I had that training: in a suburban basement. So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In Ealing.’
Miss Wanostrocht said faintly:
‘This is very dreadful!’
‘It isn’t really!’ Valentine said. ‘I wasn’t badly treated as tweeny maids go. It would have been better if the Mistress hadn’t been a constant invalid and the cook constantly drunk… . After that I did a little office work. For the suffragettes. That was after old Mr. Tietjens came back from abroad and gave mother some work on a paper he owned. We scrambled along then, somehow. Old Mr. Tietjens was father’s greatest friend, so father’s side, as you might say, turned up trumps – if you like to think that to console you… .’
Miss Wanostrocht was bending her face down over her table, presumably to hide a little of it from Valentine or to avoid the girl’s eyes.
Valentine went on:
‘One knows all about the conflict between a man’s private duties and his public achievements. But with a very little less of the flamboyant in his life my father might have left us very much better off. It isn’t what I want – to be a cross between a sergeant in the army and an upper housemaid. Any more than I wanted to be an under one.’
Miss Wanostrocht uttered an ‘Oh!’ of pain. She exclaimed rapidly:
‘It was your moral rather than your mere athletic influence that made me so glad to have you here… . It was because I felt that you did not set such a high value on the physical… .’
‘Well, you aren’t going to have me here much longer,’ Valentine said. ‘Not an instant more than I can in decency help. I’m going to …’
She said to herself:
‘What on earth am I going to do? … What do I want?’
She wanted to lie in a hammock beside a blue, tideless sea and think about Tibullus … There was no nonsense about her. She did not want to engage in intellectual pursuits herself. She had not the training. But she intended to enjoy the more luxurious forms of the intellectual products of others… . That appeared to be the moral of the day!
And, looking rather minutely at Miss Wanostrocht’s inclined face, she wondered if, in the history of the world, there had ever been such another day. Had Miss Wanostrocht, for instance, ever known what it was to have a man come back. Ah, but amid the tumult of a million other men coming back! A collective impulse to slacken off! Immense! Softening!
Miss Wanostrocht had apparently loved her father. No doubt in company with fifty damsels. Did they ever get a collective kick out of that affair? It was even possible that she had spoken as she had … pour cause. Warning her, Valentine, against the deleterious effect of being connected with a man whose wife was unsatisfactory… . Because the fifty damsels had all, in duty bound, thought that her mother was an unsatisfactory wife for the brilliant, grey-black-haired Eminence with the figure of a stripling that her father had been… . They had probably thought that, without the untidy figure of Mrs. Wannop as a weight upon him, he might have become … Well, with one of them! … anything! Any sort of figure in the councils of the nation. Why not Prime Minister? For along with his pedagogic theories he had had political occupations. He had certainly had the friendship of Disraeli. He supplied – it was historic! – materials for eternally famous, meretricious speeches. He would have been head-trainer of the Empire’s pro-consuls if the other fellow, at Balliol, had not got in first… . As it was he had had to specialise in the Education of Women. Building up Primrose Dames… .
So Miss Wanostrocht warned her against the deleterious effect of neglected wives upon young, attached virgins! It probably was deleterious. Where would she, Valentine Wannop, have been by now if she had thought that Sylvia Tietjens was really a bad one?
Miss Wanostrocht said, as if with sudden anxiety:
‘You are going to do what? You propose to do what?’
Valentine said:
‘Obviously after your conversation with Edith Ethel you won’t be so glad to have me here. My moral influence has not been brightened in aspect!’ A wave of passionate resentment swept over her.
‘Look here,’ she said, ‘if you think that I am prepared to …’
She stopped however. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not going to introduce the housemaid note. But you will probably see that this is irritating.’ She added: ‘I would have the case of Pettigul One looked into, if I were you. It might become epidemic in a big school like this. And we’ve no means of knowing where we stand nowadays!’
PART TWO
MONTHS AND MONTHS before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head – and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs – were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. These waves of conviction recurred continually: he was constantly glancing aside and upwards at that splash; it was in the shape of the comb of a healthy rooster; it gleamed, with five serrations, in the just-beginning light that shone along the thin, unroofed channel in the gravel slope. Wet half-light, just flickering; more visible there than in the surrounding desolation because the deep, narrow channel framed a section of just-illuminated rift in the watery eastwards!
Twice he had stood up on a rifleman’s step enforced by a bully-beef case to look over – in the last few minutes. Each time, on stepping down again, he had been struck by that phenomenon: the light seen from the trench seemed if not brighter, then more definite. So, from the bottom of a pit-shaft in broad day you can see the stars. The wind was light, but from the north-west. They had there the weariness of a beaten army, the weariness of having to begin always new days again… .
He glanced aside and upwards: that cockscomb of phosphorescence… . He felt waves of some X force propelling his temples towards it. He wondered if perhaps the night before he had not observed that that was a patch of reinforced concrete, therefore more resistant. He might of course have observed that and then forgotten it. He hadn’t! It was therefore irrational.
If you are lying down under fire – flat under pretty smart fire – and you have only a paper bag in front of your head for cover you feel immea
surably safer than you do without it. You have a mind at rest. This must be the same thing.
It remained dark and quiet. It was forty-five minutes. It became forty-four … Forty-three … Forty-two minutes and thirty seconds before a crucial moment and the slate grey cases of miniature metal pineapples had not come from the bothering place… . Who knew if there was anyone in charge there?
Twice that night he had sent runners back. No results yet. That bothering fellow might quite well have forgotten to leave a substitute. That was not likely. A careful man. But a man with a mania might forget. Still it was not likely! …
Thoughts menaced him as clouds threaten the heads of mountains, but for the moment they kept away. It was quiet; the wet cool air was agreeable. They had autumn mornings that felt like that in Yorkshire. The wheels of his physique moved smoothly; he was more free in the chest than he had been for months.
A single immense cannon, at a tremendous distance, said something. Something sulky. Aroused in its sleep and protesting. But it was not a signal to begin anything. Too heavy. Firing at something at a tremendous distance. At Paris, maybe, or the North Pole, or the moon! They were capable of that, those fellows!
It would be a tremendous piece of frightfulness to hit the moon. Great gain in prestige. And useless. There was no knowing what they would not be up to, as long as it was stupid and useless. And, naturally, boring… . And it was a mistake to be boring. One went on fighting to get rid of those bores – as you would to get rid of a bore in a club.
It was more descriptive to call what had spoken a cannon than a gun – though it was not done in the best local circles. It was all right to call 75s or the implements of the horse artillery ‘guns’; they were mobile and toy-like. But those immense things were cannons; the sullen muzzles always elevated. Sullen, like cathedral dignitaries or butlers. The thickness of barrel compared to the bore appeared enormous as they pointed at the moon, or Paris, or Nova Scotia.
Well, that cannon had not announced anything except itself! It was not the beginning of any barrage; our own fellows were not pooping off to shut it up. It had just announced itself, saying protestingly, ‘CAN … NON’, and its shell soaring away to an enormous height caught the reflection of the unrisen sun on its base. A shining disc, like a halo in flight… . Pretty! A pretty motive for a decoration, tiny pretty planes up on a blue sky amongst shiny, flying haloes! Dragonflies amongst saints… . No, ‘with angels and archangels!’ … Well, one had seen it!