Even when he, Tietjens, had slipped away from the party — to go to his good fortune! — Macmaster had come panting down the stairs, running after him, through guests coming up. He had said:
“Wait… You’re not going…. I want to…” With a miserable and appalled glance he had looked up the stairs; Lady Macmaster might have come out too. His black, short beard quivering and his wretched eyes turned down, he had said:
“I wanted to explain…. This miserable knighthood….”
Tietjens patted him on the shoulder, Macmaster being on the stairs above him.
“It’s all right, old man,” he had said — and with real affection: “We’ve powlered up and down enough for a little thing like that not to… I’m very glad…”
Macmaster had whispered:
“And Valentine…. She’s not here to-night….”
He had exclaimed:
“By God!… If I thought…” Tietjens had said: “It’s all right. It’s all right. She’s at another party…. I’m going on…”
Macmaster had looked at him doubtingly and with misery, leaning over and clutching the clammy banisters.
“Tell her…” he said… “Good God! You may be killed…. I beg you… I beg you to believe… I will… Like the apple of my eye….” In the swift glance that Tietjens took of his face he could see that Macmaster’s eyes were full of tears.
They both stood looking down at the stone stairs for a long time.
Then Macmaster had said: “Well…”
Tietjens had said: “Well…” But he hadn’t been able to look at Macmaster’s eyes, though he had felt his friend’s eyes pitiably exploring his own face…. “A backstairs way out of it,” he had thought; a queer thing that you couldn’t look in the face a man you were never going to see again!
“But by God,” he said to himself fiercely, when his mind came back again to the girl in front of him, “this isn’t going to be another backstairs exit…. I must tell her…. I’m damned if I don’t make an effort….”
She had her handkerchief to her face.
“I’m always crying,” she said…. “A little bubbling spring that can be trusted to keep on….”
He looked to the right and to the left. Ruggles or General Someone with false teeth that didn’t fit must be coming along. The street with its sooty boskage was clean empty and silent. She was looking at him. He didn’t know how long he had been silent, he didn’t know where he had been; intolerable waves urged him towards her.
After a long time he said:
“Well…”
She moved back. She said:
“I won’t watch you out of sight…. It is unlucky to watch anyone out of sight…. But I will never… I will never cut what you said then out of my memory…” She was gone; the door shut. He had wondered what she would never cut out of her memory. That he had asked her that afternoon to be his mistress?
He had caught, outside the gates of his old office, a transport lorry that had given him a lift to Holborn.
No More Parades
For two things my heart is grieved:
A man of war that suffereth from poverty
and men of intelligence
that are counted as refuse.
PROVERBS
Part One
WHEN YOU CAME IN the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws. Three groups of brown limbs spotted with brass took dim high-lights from shafts that came from a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke and covered in with a sheet of iron in the shape of a funnel. Two men, as if hierarchically smaller, crouched on the floor beside the brazier; four, two at each end of the hut, drooped over tables in attitudes of extreme indifference. From the eaves above the parallelogram of black that was the doorway fell intermittent drippings of collected moisture, persistent, with glass-like intervals of musical sound. The two men squatting on their heels over the brazier — they had been miners — began to talk in a low sing-song of dialect, hardly audible. It went on and on, monotonously, without animation. It was as if one told the other long, long stories to which his companion manifested his comprehension or sympathy with animal grunts….
An immense tea-tray, august, its voice filling the black circle of the horizon, thundered to the ground. Numerous pieces of sheet-iron said, “Pack. Pack. Pack.” In a minute the clay floor of the hut shook, the drums of ears were pressed inwards, solid noise showered about the universe, enormous echoes pushed these men — to the right, to the left, or down towards the tables, and crackling like that of flames among vast underwood became the settled condition of the night. Catching the light from the brazier as the head leaned over, the lips of one of the two men on the floor were incredibly red and full and went on talking and talking….
The two men on the floor were Welsh miners, of whom the one came from the Rhondda Valley and was unmarried; the other, from Pontardulais, had a wife who kept a laundry, he having given up going underground just before the war. The two men at the table to the right of the door were sergeants-major; the one came from Suffolk and was a time-serving man of sixteen years’ seniority as a sergeant in a line regiment. The other was Canadian of English origin. The two officers at the other end of the hut were captains, the one a young regular officer born in Scotland but educated at Oxford; the other, nearly middle-aged and heavy, came from Yorkshire, and was in a militia battalion. The one runner on the floor was filled with a passionate rage because the elder officer had refused him leave to go home and see why his wife, who had sold their laundry, had not yet received the purchase money from the buyer; the other was thinking about a cow. His girl, who worked on a mountainy farm above Caerphilly, had written to him about a queer cow: a black-and-white Holstein — surely to goodness a queer cow. The English sergeant-major was almost tearfully worried about the enforced late-ness of the draft. It would be twelve midnight before they could march them off. It was not right to keep men hanging about like that. The men did not like to be kept waiting, hanging about. It made them discontented. They did not like it. He could not see why the depot quartermaster could not keep up his stock of candles for the hooded lamps. The men had no call to be kept waiting, hanging about. Soon they would have to be having some supper. Quarter would not like that. He would grumble fair. Having to indent for suppers. Put his accounts out, fair, it would. Two thousand nine hundred and thirty-four suppers at a penny half-penny. But it was not right to keep the men hanging about till midnight and no suppers. It made them discontented and them going up the line for the first time, poor devils.