• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3789 0

was too much to think about...so that nothing at all stood out to be thought of. The sun was glowing. The valley of the Seine was blue-grey, like a Gobelin tapestry. Over it all hung the shadow of a deceased Welsh soldier. An odd skylark was declaiming over an empty field behind the incinerators' headquarters...An odd lark. For as a rule larks do not sing in December. Larks sing only when courting, or over the nest...The bird must be oversexed. 0 Nine Morgan was the other thing, that accounting for the prize-fighter!

They dropped down a mud lane between brick walls into the town...

PART TWO

I

In the admirably appointed, white-enamelled, wicker-worked, bemirrored lounge of the best hotel of that town Sylvia Tietjens sat in a wickerwork chair, not listening rather abstractedly to a staff-major who was lachrymosely and continuously begging her to leave her bedroom door unlocked that night. She said:

'I don't know...Yes, perhaps...I don't know...And looked distantly into a bluish wall-mirror that, like all the rest, was framed with white-painted cork bark. She stiffened a little and said:

'There's Christopher!'

The staff-major dropped his hat, his stick and his gloves. His black hair, which was without parting and heavy with some preparation of a glutinous kind, moved agitatedly on his scalp. He had been saying that Sylvia had ruined his life. Didn't Sylvia know that she had ruined his life? But for her he might have married some pure young thing. Now he exclaimed:

'But what does he want?...Good God!...what does he want?'

'He wants,' Sylvia said, 'to play the part of Jesus Christ.'

Major Perowne exclaimed:

'Jesus Christ!...But he's the most foul-mouthed officer in the general's command...

'Well,' Sylvia said, 'if you had married your pure young thing she'd have...What is it?...cuckolded you within nine months...

Perowne shuddered a little at the word. He mumbled:

'I don't see...It seems to be the other way...'

'Oh, no, it isn't,' Sylvia said. 'Think it over...Morally, you're the husband...Immorally, I should say...Because he's the man I want...He looks ill...Do hospital authorities always tell wives what is the matter with their husbands?'

From his angle in the chair from which he had half-emerged Sylvia seemed to him to be looking at a blank wall. 'I don't see him,' Perowne said.

'I can see him in the glass,' Sylvia said. 'Look! From here you can see him.'

Perowne shuddered a little more.

'I don't want to see him...I have to see him sometimes in the course of duty...I don't like to...

Sylvia said:

'You,' in a tone of very deep contempt. 'You only carry chocolate boxes to flappers...How can he come across you in the course of duty?...You're not a soldier!'

Perowne said:

'But what are we going to do? What will he do?'

'I,' Sylvia answered, 'shall tell the page-boy when he comes with his card to say that I'm engaged...I don't know what he'll do. Hit you, very likely...He's looking at your back now...

Perowne became rigid, sunk into his deep chair.

'But he couldn't!' he exclaimed agitatedly. 'You said that he was playing the part of Jesus Christ. Our Lord wouldn't hit people in an hotel lounge...

'Our Lord!' Sylvia said contemptuously. 'What do you know about our Lord?...Our Lord was a gentleman...Christopher is playing at being our Lord calling on the woman taken in adultery...He's giving me the social backing that his being my husband seems to him to call for.'

A one-armed, bearded maitre d'hôtel approached them through groups of arm-chairs arranged for tête-à-tête. He said:

'Pardon.. I did not see madame at first...' And displayed a card on a salver. Without looking at it, Sylvia said:

'Dites à ce monsieur...that I am occupied.' The maitre d'hôtel moved austerely away.

'But he'll smash me to pieces...' Perowne exclaimed. 'What am I to do?...What the deuce am I to do?' There would have been no way of exit for him except across Tietjens' face.

With her spine very rigid and the expression of a snake that fixes a bird, Sylvia gazed straight in front of her and said nothing until she exclaimed: