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By Root 3170 0

Mid-Victorians had had to loosen the bonds. Her mother, to be in the van of Mid-Victorian thought, had had to allow virtue to 'irregular unions'. As long as they were high-minded. But the high-minded do not consummate irregular unions. So all her books had showed you high-minded creatures contracting irregular unions of the mind or of sympathy; but never carrying them to the necessary conclusion. They would have been ethically at liberty but they didn't. They ran with the ethical hare, but hunted with the ecclesiastical hounds...Still, of course, she could not go back on her premises just because it was her own daughter!

She said:

'I beg your pardon!' to that fellow. He had been saying:

'They're too damn cunning. They overreach themselves!'

Her mind spun. She did not know what he had been talking about. Her mind retained his words, but she did not understand what they meant. She had been sunk in the contemplation of Early Victorian Thought. She remembered the long--call it liaison'--of Edith Ethel Duchemin and little Vincent Macmaster. Edith Ethel, swathed in opaque crepe, creeping widow-like along the very palings she could see across the square, to her high-minded adulteries, amidst the whispered applause of Mid-Victorian England. So circumspect and right!...She had her thoughts to keep, all right. Well under control!...Well, she had been patient.

The man said agonizedly:

'My filthy, bloody, swinish uncle, Vincent Macmaster. Sir Vincent Macmaster! And this fellow Tietjens. All in a league against me...Campion too...But he overreached himself...A man got into Tietjens' wife's bedroom. At the Base. And Campion sent him to the front. To get him killed. Her other lover, you see?'

She listened. She listened with all her attention straining. She wanted to be able to...She did not know what she wanted to be able to do! The man said:

'Major-General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., K.C.M.G., tantivy turn tum, etcetera. Too cunning. Too b----y cunning by half. Sent Tietjens to the front too to get him killed. Me too. We all three went up to Division in a boxcar--Tietjens, his wife's lover, and me. Tietjens confessed that bleedin' swab. Like a beastly monk. Told him that when you die--in articulo mortis, but you won't understand what that means!--your faculties are so numbed that you feel neither pain nor fear. He said that death was no more than an anaesthetic. And that trembling, whining pup drank it in...I can see them now. In a box-car. In a cutting.'

She said:

'You've had shell-shock? You've got shell-shock now!'

He said, like a badger snapping:

'I haven't. I've got a bad wife. Like Tietjens. At least she isn't a bad wife. She's a woman with appetites. She satisfies her appetites. That's why they're hoofing me out of the Army. But at least, I don't sell her to Generals. To Major-General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., K.C.M.G., etc. I got divorce leave and didn't divorce her. Then I got second divorce leave. And didn't divorce her. It's against my principles. She lives with a British Museum Palaeontologist and he'd lose his job. I owe that fellow Tietjens a hundred and seventy quid. Over my second divorce leave. I can't pay him. I didn't divorce, but I've spent the money. Going about with my wife and her friend. On principle!'

He spoke so inexhaustibly and fast, and his topics changed so quickly that she could do no more than let the words go into her ears. She listened to the words and stored them up. One main line of topic held her; otherwise she could not think. She only let her eyes run over the friezes of the opposite houses. She gathered that Tietjens had been unjustly dismissed by Campion, whilst saving two lives under fire. McKechnie grudgingly admitted heroism to Tietjens in order to blacken the General. The General wanted Sylvia Tietjens. So as to get her he had sent Tietjens into the hottest part of the line. But Tietjens had refused to get killed. He had a charmed life. That was Provvy spiting the General. All the same, Providence could not like Tietjens, a cully who comforted his wife's lover. A dirty thing to