“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 doing 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. He 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 pair 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 Mountsby. 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 county…. 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 under 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 hair’s breadth…. 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.