Tietjens muttered: “Good God!” beneath his breath. He said:
“The captain has had another nervous breakdown….” The orderly accepted the phrase with gratitude. That was it. A nervous breakdown. They say he had been very queer at mess. About divorce. Or the captain’s uncle. A barrow-night! Tietjens said: “Yes, yes.” He half rose in his chair and looked at Sylvia. She exclaimed painfully.
“You can’t go. I insist that you can’t go.” He sank down again and muttered wearily that it was very worrying. He had been put in charge of this officer by General Campion. He ought not to have left the camp at all, perhaps. But McKechnie had seemed better. A great deal of the calmness of her insolence had left her. She had expected to have the whole night in which luxuriously to torment the lump opposite her. To torment him and to allure him. She said:
“You have settlements to come to now and here that will affect your whole life. Our whole lives! You propose to abandon them because a miserable little nephew of your miserable little friend….” She added in French: “Even as it is you cannot pay any attention to these serious matters, because of these childish preoccupations of yours. That is to be intolerably insulting to me!” She was breathless.
Tietjens asked the orderly where Captain McKechnie was now. The orderly said he had left the camp. The colonel of the depot had sent a couple of officers as a search-party. Tietjens told the orderly to go and find a taxi. He could have a ride himself up to camp. The orderly said taxis would not be running on account of the air-raid. Could he order the G.M.P. to requisition one on urgent military service? The exhilarated air-gun pooped off thereupon three times from the garden. For the next hour it went off every two or three minutes. Tietjens said: “Yes! Yes!” to the orderly. The noises of the air-raid became more formidable. A blue express letter of French civilian make was handed to Tietjens. It was from the duchess to inform him that coal for the use of greenhouses was forbidden by the French Government. She did not need to say that she relied on his honour to ensure her receiving her coal through the British military authority, and she asked for an immediate reply. Tietjens expressed real annoyance while he read this. Distracted by the noise, Sylvia cried out that the letter must be from Valentine Wannop in Rouen. Did not the girl intend to let him have an hour in which to settle the whole business of his life? Tietjens moved to the chair next to hers. He handed her the duchess’s letter.
He began a long, slow, serious explanation with a long, slow, serious apology. He said he regretted very much that when she should have taken the trouble to come so far in order to do him the honour to consult him about a matter which she would have been perfectly at liberty to settle for herself, the extremely serious military position should render him so liable to interruption. As far as he was concerned Groby was entirely at her disposal with all that it contained. And of course a sufficient income for the upkeep.
She exclaimed in an access of sudden and complete despair:
“That means that you do not intend to live there.” He said that that must settle itself later. The war would no doubt last a good deal longer. While it lasted there could be no question of his coming back. She said that that meant that he intended to get killed. She warned him that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the south-west corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal drawing-room and the bed-rooms above it…. He winced; he certainly winced at that. She regretted that she had said it. It was along other lines that she desired to make him wince.
He said that, apart from his having no intention of getting himself killed, the matter was absolutely out of his hands. He had to go where he was ordered to go and do what he was told to do.
She exclaimed:
“You! You! Isn’t it ignoble. That you should be at the beck and call of these ignoramuses. You!”
He went on explaining seriously that he was in no great danger — in no danger at all unless he was sent back to his battalion. And he was not likely to be sent back to his battalion unless he disgraced himself or showed himself negligent where he was. That was unlikely. Besides his category was so low that he was not eligible for his battalion, which, of course, was in the line. She ought to understand that everyone that she saw employed there was physically unfit for the line. She said:
“That’s why they’re such an awful lot…. It is not to this place that one should come to look for a presentable man…. Diogenes with his lantern was nothing to it.”
He said:
“There’s that way of looking at it…. It is quite true that most of… let’s say your friends… were killed off during the early days, or if they’re still going they’re in more active employments.” What she called presentableness was very largely a matter of physical fitness…. The horse, for instance, that he rode was rather a crock…. But though it was German and not thoroughbred it contrived to be up to his weight…. Her friends, more or less, of before the war were professional soldiers or of the type. Well, they were gone: dead or snowed under. But on the other hand, this vast town full of crocks did keep the thing going, if it could be made to go. It was not they that hindered the show; if it was hindered, that was done by her much less presentable friends, the ministry who, if they were professionals at all were professional boodlers.
She exclaimed with bitterness:
“Then why didn’t you stay at home to check them, if they are boodlers.” She added that the only people at home who kept social matters going at all with any life were precisely the more successful political professionals. When you were with them you would not know there was any war. And wasn’t that what was wanted? Was the whole of life to be given up to ignoble horseplay?… She spoke with increased rancour because of the increasing thump and rumble of the air-raid…. Of course the politicians were ignoble beings that, before the war, you would not have thought of having in your house…. But whose fault was that, if not that of the better classes, who had gone away leaving England a dreary wilderness of fellows without consciences or traditions or manners? And she added some details of the habits at a country house of a member of the Government whom she disliked. “And,” she finished up, “it’s your fault. Why aren’t you Lord Chancellor, or Chancellor of the Exchequer, instead of whoever is, for I am sure I don’t know? You could have been, with your abilities and your interests. Then things would have been efficiently and honestly conducted. If your brother Mark, with not a tithe of your abilities can be a permanent head of a department, what could you not have risen to with your gifts, and your influence… and your integrity?” And she ended up: “Oh, Christopher!” on almost a sob.
Ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, who had come back from the telephone, and during an interval in the thunderings, had heard some of Sylvia’s light cast on the habits of members of the home Government, so that his jaw had really hung down, now, in another interval, exclaimed:
“Hear, hear! Madam!… There is nothing the captain might not have risen to…. He is doing the work of a brigadier now on the pay of an acting captain…. And the treatment he gets is scandalous…. Well, the treatment we all get is scandalous, tricked and defrauded as we are all at every turn…. And look at this new start with the draft….” They had ordered the draft to be ready and countermanded it, and ordered it to be ready and countermanded it, until no one knew whether he stood on ’is ’ed or ’is ’eels…. It was to have gone off last night: when they’d ’ad it marched down to the station they ’ad it marched back and told them all it would not be wanted for six weeks…. Now it was to be got ready to go before daylight to-morrow morning in motor-lorries to the rail Ondekoeter way, the rail here ’aving been sabotaged!… Before daylight so that the enemy aeroplanes should not see it on the road…. Wasn’t that a thing to break the ’earts of men and horderly rooms? It was outrageous. Did they suppose the ’Uns did things like that?