She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water.
“Oh,” she said, “it isn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true.” She began to cry.
Christopher said:
“Come along. I’ve been answering tomfool questions all day. I’ve got another tomfool to see here, then I’m through.”
She said:
“I can’t come with you, crying like this.”
He answered:
“Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry.” He added: “Besides there’s Mark. He’s a comforting ass.”
He delivered her over to Mark.
“Here, look after Miss Wannop,” he said. “You want to talk to her anyhow, don’t you?” and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shopwalker into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn’t come soon to an unemotional ass in red, green, blue or pink tabs, who would have fish-like eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was a place where men cried, too!
He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair, not dustbins.
The dark man said to him at once:
“Look here! What’s the matter with the Command Depots? You’ve been lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies about? Is it the rotten old colonels in command?”
Tietjens said amiably:
“Look here! I’m not a beastly spy, you know? I’ve had hospitality from the rotten old colonels.”
The dark man said:
“I daresay you have. But that’s what you were sent round for. General Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He’s gone out now, worse luck…. What’s the matter with the Command Depots? Is it the men? Or is it the officers? You needn’t mention names.”
Tietjens said:
“Kind of Campion. It isn’t the officers and it isn’t the men. It’s the foul system. You get men who think they’ve deserved well of their country — and they damn well have! — and you crop their heads….”
“That’s the M.O.s.” the dark man said. “They don’t want lice.”
“If they prefer mutinies…” Tietjens said. “A man wants to walk with his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don’t like being regarded as convicts. That’s how they are regarded.”
The dark man said:
“All right. Go on. Why don’t you sit down?”
“I’m a little in a hurry,” Tietjens said. “I’m going out to-morrow and I’ve got a brother and people waiting below.”
The dark man said:
“Oh, I’m sorry…. But damn. You’re the sort of man we want at home. Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don’t.”
Tietjens hesitated for a moment.
“Yes!” he said eventually. “Yes, I want to go.”
For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; but, whether or no, the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night with the girl who was crying downstairs….
He heard in his ear, perfectly distinctly, the lines:
The voice that never yet…
Made answer to my word…
He said to himself:
“That was what Sylvia wanted! I’ve got that much!”
The dark man had said something. Tietjens repeated:
“I’d take it very unkindly if you stopped my going… I want to go.”
The dark man said:
“Some do. Some do not. I’ll make a note of your name in case you come back… You won’t mind going on with your cinder-sifting, if you do?… Get on with your story as quick as you can. And get what fun you can before you go. They say it’s rotten out there. Damn awful! There’s a hell of a strafe on. That’s why they want all you.”
For a moment Tietjens saw the grey dawn at rail-head with the distant sound of a ceaselessly boiling pot, from miles away! The army feeling redescended upon him. He began to talk about Command Depots, at great length and with enthusiasm. He snorted with rage at the way men were treated in these gloomy places. With ingenious stupidity!
Every now and then the dark man interrupted him with:
“Don’t forget that a Command Depot is a place where sick and wounded go to get made fit. We’ve got to get ’em back as soon as we can.”
“And do you?” Tietjens would ask.
“No, we don’t,” the other would answer. “That’s what this enquiry is about.”
“You’ve got,” Tietjens would continue, “on the north side of a beastly clay hill nine miles from Southampton three thousand men from the Highlands, North Wales, Cumberland…. God knows where, as long as it’s three hundred miles from home to make them rather mad with nostalgia…. You allow ’em out for an hour a day during the pub’s closing time. You shave their heads to prevent ’em appealing to local young women who don’t exist, and you don’t let ’em carry the swagger-canes! God knows why! To prevent their poking their eyes out, if they fall down, I suppose. Nine miles from anywhere, with chalk down roads to walk on and not a bush for shelter or shade… And, damn it, if you get two men, chums, from the Seaforths or the Argylls you don’t let them sleep in the same hut, but shove ’em in with a lot of fat Buffs or Welshmen, who stink of leeks and can’t speak English….”
“That’s the infernal medicals’ orders to stop ’em talking all night.”
“To make ’em conspire all night not to turn out for parade,” Tietjens said. “And there’s a beastly mutiny begun…. And, damn it, they’re fine men. They’re first-class fellows. Why don’t you — as this is a Christian land — let ’em go home to convalesce with their girls and pubs and friends and a little bit of swank, for heroes? Why in God’s name don’t you? Isn’t there suffering enough?”
“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘you,’” the dark man said. “It isn’t me. The only A.C.I. I’ve drafted was to give every Command Depot a cinema and a theatre. But the beastly medicals got it stopped… for fear of infection. And, of course, the parsons and Nonconformist magistrates…”
“Well, you’ll have to change it all,” Tietjens said, “or you’ll just have to say: thank God we’ve got a navy. You won’t have an army. The other day three fellows — Warwicks — asked me at question time, after a lecture, why they were shut up there in Wiltshire whilst Belgian refugees were getting bastards on their wives in Birmingham. And when I asked how many men made that complaint over fifty stood up. All from Birmingham….”
The dark man said:
“I’ll make a note of that…. Go on.”
Tietjens went on; for as long as he stayed there he felt himself a man, doing work that befitted a man, with the bitter contempt for fools that a man should have and express. It was a letting up, a real last leave.
IV
MARK TIETJENS, his umbrella swinging sheepishly, his bowler hat pushed firmly down on to his ears to give him a sense of stability, walked beside the weeping girl in the quadrangle.
“I say,” he said, “don’t give it to old Christopher too beastly hard about his militarist opinions…. Remember, he’s going out to-morrow and he’s one of the best.”