Sylvia had refused to swear by St. Anthony. She definitely was not going to introduce the saint into her amorous affairs, and she definitely was not going to take on any relic an oath that she meant to break at an early opportunity. There was such a thing as playing it too low down; there are dishonours to which death is preferable. So getting hold of his revolver at a time when he was wringing his hands, she dropped it into the water-jug and then felt reasonably safe.
Perowne knew no French and next to nothing about France, but he had discovered that the French did nothing to you for killing a woman who intended to leave you. Sylvia, on the other hand, was pretty certain that, without a weapon, he could not do much to her. If she had had no other training at her very expensive school she had had so much drilling in calisthenics as to be singularly mistress of her limbs, and, in the interests of her beauty she had always kept herself very fit….
She said at last:
“Very well. We will go to Yssingueux-les-Pervenches….”
A rather pleasant French couple in the hotel had spoken of this little place in the extreme west of France as a lonely paradise, they having spent their honeymoon there…. And Sylvia wanted a lonely paradise if there was going to be any scrapping before she got away from Perowne.
She had no hesitation as to what she was going to do. The long journey across half France by miserable trains had caused her an agony of home-sickness! Nothing less!… It was a humiliating disease from which to suffer. But it was unavoidable, like mumps. You had to put up with it. Besides, she even found herself wanting to see her child, whom she imagined herself to hate, as having been the cause of all her misfortunes….
She therefore prepared, after great thought, a letter telling Tietjens that she intended to return to him. She made the letter as nearly as possible like one she would write announcing her return from a country house to which she should have been invited for an indefinite period, and she added some rather hard instructions about her maid, these being intended to remove from the letter any possible trace of emotion. She was certain that, if she showed any emotion at all, Christopher would never take her under his roof again. She was pretty certain that no gossip had been caused by her escapade. Major Thurston had been at the railway station when they had left, but they had not spoken — and Thurston was a very decentish, brown-moustached fellow, of the sort that does not gossip.
It had proved a little difficult to get away, for Perowne during several weeks watched her like an attendant in a lunatic asylum. But at last the idea presented itself to him that she would never go without her frocks, and, one day, in a fit of intense somnolence after a lunch, washed down with rather a large quantity of the local and fiery cordial, he let her take a walk alone….
She was by that time tired of men, or she imagined that she was; for she was not prepared to be certain, considering the muckers she saw women coming all round her over the most unpresentable individuals. Men, at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with any man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before….” You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end….
She remembered, years ago, trying to shock her mother’s spiritual adviser, Father Consett, whom they had lately murdered in Ireland, along with Casement…. The poor saint had not in the least been shocked. He had gone her one better. For when she had said something like that her idea of a divvy life — they used in those days to say divvy — would be to go off with a different man every week-end, he had told her that after a short time she would be bored already by the time the poor dear fellow was buying the railway tickets….
And, by heavens, he had been right…. For when she came to think of it, from the day that poor saint had said that thing in her mother’s sitting-room in the little German spa — Lobscheid, it must have been called — in the candle-light, his shadow denouncing her from all over the walls, to now when she sat in the palmish wickerwork of that hotel that had been new-whitely decorated to celebrate hostilities, never once had she sat in a train with a man who had any right to look upon himself as justified in mauling her about…. She wondered if, from where he sat in heaven, Father Consett would be satisfied with her as he looked down into that lounge…. Perhaps it was really he that had pulled off that change in her.
Never once till yesterday… For perhaps the unfortunate Perowne might just faintly have had the right yesterday to make himself for about two minutes — before she froze him into a choking, pallid snowman with goggle eyes — the perfectly loathsome thing that a man in a railway train becomes…. Much too bold and yet stupidly awkward with the fear of the guard looking in at the window, the train doing over sixty, without corridors…. No, never again for me, father, she addressed her voice towards the ceiling….
Why in the world couldn’t you get a man to go away with you and be just — oh, light comedy — for a whole, a whole blessed week-end. For a whole blessed life… Why not?… Think of it…. A whole blessed life with a man who was a good sort and yet didn’t go all gurgly in the voice, and cod-fish-eyed and all-overish — to the extent of not being able to find the tickets when asked for them…. Father, dear, she said again upwards, if I could find men like that, that would be just heaven… where there is no marrying…. But, of course, she went on almost resignedly, he would not be faithful to you…. And then, one would have to stand it….
She sat up so suddenly in her chair that beside her, too, Major Perowne nearly jumped out of his wickerwork, and asked if he had come back…. She explained:
“No, I’d be damned if I would…. I’d be damned, I’d be damned, I’d be damned if I would…. Never. Never. By the living God!”
She asked fiercely of the agitated major:
“Has Christopher got a girl in this town?… You’d better tell me the truth!”
The major mumbled:
“He… no, he’s too much of a stick…. He never even goes to Suzette’s…. Except once to fetch out some miserable little squit of a subaltern who was smashing up Mother Hardelot’s furniture….”
He grumbled:
“But you shouldn’t give a man the jumps like that!… Be conciliatory, you said….” He went on to grumble that her manners had not improved since she had been at Yssingueux-les-Pervenches, and then went on to tell her that in French the words yeux des pervenches meant eyes of periwinkle blue. And that was the only French he knew, because a Frenchman he had met in the train had told him so and he had always thought that if her eyes had been periwinkle blue… “But you’re not listening…. Hardly polite, I call it,” he had mumbled to a conclusion….