One or two voices said that they did not know. The majority said gutturally:
“Waiting for our mates, sir….”
“I should have thought you could have waited under cover,” Tietjens said caustically. “But never mind; it’s your funeral, if you like it….” This getting together… a strong passion. There was a warmed recreation-hut for waiting drafts not fifty yards away. But they stood, teeth chattering and mumbling “Hoo… Hooo…” rather than miss thirty seconds of gabble…. About what the English sergeant-major said and about what the officer said and how many dollars did they give you…. And of course about what you answered back…. Or perhaps not that. These Canadian troops were husky, serious fellows, without the swank of the Cockney or the Lincolnshire Moonrakers. They wanted, apparently, to learn the rules of war. They discussed anxiously information that they received in orderly rooms, and looked at you as if you were expounding the gospels….
But damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what he had answered back… to Destiny!… What was the fellow in the Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline. Always a bit of a swine, Dante… Rather like… like whom?… Oh, Sylvia Tietjens…. A good hater!… He imagined hatred coming to him in waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself…. Gone into retreat…. He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said she was going. For the rest of the war…. For the duration of hostilities or life, whichever were the longer…. He imagined Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed…. Hating… Her certainly glorious hair all round her…. Hating… Slowly and coldly… Like the head of a snake when you examined it…. Eyes motionless, mouth closed tight…. Looking away into the distance and hating…. She was presumably in Birkenhead…. A long way to send your hatred…. Across a country and a sea in an icy night! Over all that black land and water… with the lights out because of air-raids and U-boats…. Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment. She was well out of it….
It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on…. Even that ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of white stones…. In spite of his boasting about not wearing an overcoat; to catch women’s eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was carrying on like a leopard at feeding time.
Tietjens said:
“Sorry to keep you waiting, old man…. Or rather your lady…. But there were some men to see to. And, you know… ‘The comfort and — what is it? — of the men comes before every — is it “consideration”? — except the exigencies of actual warfare’… My memory’s gone phut these days…. And you want me to slide down this hill and wheeze back again…. To see a woman!”
Levin screeched: “Damn you, you ass! It’s your wife who’s waiting for you at the bottom there.”
III
THE one thing that stood out sharply in Tietjens’ mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his officer’s pocket-book complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability for giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a cheap French novel on a camp chair beside him he sat in his flea-bag with six army blankets over him — the one thing that stood out as sharply as Staff tabs was that that ass Levin was rather pathetic. His unnailed bootsoles very much cramping his action on the frozen hillside, he had alternately hobbled a step or two, and, reduced to inaction, had grabbed at Tietjens’ elbow, while he brought out breathlessly puzzled sentences.
There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright-coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then hobbled back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia’s activities, without any sequence, and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens himself… All sorts of singular things seemed to have been going on round him in the vague zone, outside all this engrossed and dust-coloured world — in the vague zone that held… Oh, the civilian population, tea-parties short of butter!…
And as Tietjens, seated on his hams, his knees up, pulled the soft woolliness of his flea-bag under his chin and damned the paraffin heater for letting out a new and singular stink, it seemed to him that this affair was like coming back after two months and trying to get the hang of battalion orders…. You come back to the familiar, slightly battered mess ante-room. You tell the mess orderly to bring you the last two months’ orders, for it is as much as your life is worth not to know what is or is not in them…. There might be an A.C.I. ordering you to wear your helmet back to the front, or a battalion order that Mills bombs must always be worn in the left breast pocket. Or there might be the detail for putting on a new gas helmet!… The orderly hands you a dishevelled mass of faintly typewritten matter, thumbed out of all chance of legibility, with the orders for November 16 fastened inextricably into the middle of those for the 1st of December, and those for the 10th, 15th and 29th missing altogether…. And all that you gather is that headquarters has some exceedingly insulting things to say about A Company; that a fellow called Hartopp, whom you don’t know, has been deprived of his commission; that at a court of inquiry held to ascertain deficiencies in C Company Captain Wells — poor Wells! — has been assessed at £27 11s. 4d., which he is requested to pay forthwith to the adjutant….
So, on that black hillside, going and returning, what stuck out for Tietjens was that Levin had been taught by the general to consider that he, Tietjens, was an extraordinarily violent chap who would certainly knock Levin down when he told him that his wife was at the camp gates; that Levin considered himself to be the descendant of an ancient Quaker family…. (Tietjens had said Good God! at that); that the mysterious “rows” to which in his fear Levin had been continually referring had been successive letters from Sylvia to the harried general… and that Sylvia had accused him, Tietjens, of stealing two pairs of her best sheets…. There was a great deal more. But, having faced what he considered to be the worst of the situation, Tietjens set himself coolly to recapitulate every aspect of his separation from his wife. He had meant to face every aspect, not that merely social one upon which, hitherto, he had automatically imagined their disunion to rest. For, as he saw it, English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions, is the maxim: No scenes. Obviously for the sake of the servants — who are the same thing as the public. No scenes, then, for the sake of the public. And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy — as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives — was as strong as the instinct of life itself. He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.
And, until that afternoon, he had imagined that his wife, too, would rather be dead than have her affairs canvassed by the other ranks. But that assumption had to be gone over. Revised… Of course he might say she had gone mad. But, if he said she had gone mad he would have to revise a great deal of their relationships, so it would be as broad as it was long….