Some Do Not... — Part 2, Chapter 4, Section 3
The old lady, with her dim eyes, looked up at the younger woman towering above her.
"You're Christopher's wife!"
she said.
"I must kiss you for all the kindness he has shown me."
Valentine felt her eyes filling with tears.
She saw her mother stand up, place both her hands on the other woman's shoulders.
She heard her mother say: "You're a most beautiful creature.
I'm sure you're good!"
Sylvia stood, smiling faintly, bending a little to accept the embrace.
Behind the Macmasters, Tietjens and the staff officers, a little crowd of goggle eyes had ranged itself.
Valentine was crying.
She slipped back behind the tea-urns, though she could hardly feel the way.
Beautiful!
The most beautiful woman she had ever seen!
And good!
Kind!
You could see it in the lovely way she had given her cheek to that poor old woman's lips.
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And to live all day, for ever, beside him .
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she, Valentine, ought to be ready to lay down her life for Sylvia Tietjens.
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The voice of Tietjens said, just above her head: "Your mother seems to be having a regular triumph," and, with his good-natured cynicism, he added, "it seems to have upset some apple-carts!"
They were confronted with the spectacle of Macmaster conducting the young celebrity from her deserted arm-chair across the room to be lost in the horseshoe of crowd that surrounded Mrs. Wannop.
Valentine said: "You're quite gay to-day.
Your voice is different.
I suppose you're better?"
She did not look at him.
His voice came: "Yes!
I'm relatively gay!"
It went on: "I thought you might like to know.
A little of my mathematical brain seems to have come to life again.
I've worked out two or three silly problems.
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."
She said: "Mrs. Tietjens will be pleased."
"Oh!"
the answer came.
"Mathematics don't interest her any more than cock-fighting."
With immense swiftness, between word and word, Valentine read into that a hope!
This splendid creature did not sympathise with her husband's activities.
But he crushed it heavily by saying: "Why should she?
She's so many occupations of her own that she's unrivalled at!"
He began to tell her, rather minutely, of a calculation he had made only that day at lunch.
He had gone into the Department of Statistics and had had rather a row with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln.
A pretty title the fellow had taken!
They had wanted him to ask to be seconded to his old department for a certain job.
But he had said he'd be damned if he would.
He detested and despised the work they were doing.
Valentine, for the first time in her life, hardly listened to what he said.
Did the fact that Sylvia Tietjens had so many occupations of her own mean that Tietjens found her unsympathetic?
Of their relationships she knew nothing.
Sylvia had been so much of a mystery as hardly to exist as a problem hitherto.
Macmaster, Valentine knew, hated her.
She knew that through Mrs. Duchemin; she had heard it ages ago, but she didn't know why.
Sylvia had never come to the Macmaster afternoons; but that was natural.
Macmaster passed for a bachelor, and it was excusable for a young woman of the highest fashion not to come to bachelor teas of literary and artistic people.
On the other hand, Macmaster dined at the Tietjens quite often enough to make it public that he was a friend of that family.
Sylvia, too, had never come down to see Mrs. Wannop.
But then it would, in the old days, have been a long way to come for a lady of fashion with no especial literary interests.
And no one, in mercy, could have been expected to call on poor them in their dog kennel in an outer suburb.
They had had to sell almost all their pretty things.
Tietjens was saying that after his tempestuous interview with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln--she wished he would not be so rude to powerful people!
--he had dropped in on Macmaster in his private room, and finding him puzzled over a lot of figures had, in the merest spirit of bravado, taken Macmaster and his papers out to lunch.
And, he said, chancing to look, without any hope at all, at the figures, he had suddenly worked out an ingenious mystification.
It had just come!
His voice had been so gay and triumphant that she hadn't been able to resist looking up at him.
His cheeks were fresh coloured, his hair shining; his blue eyes had a little of their old arrogance--and tenderness!
Her heart seemed to sing with joy!
He was, she felt, her man.
She imagined the arms of his mind stretching out to enfold her.
He went on explaining.
He had rather, in his recovered self-confidence, gibed at Macmaster.
Between themselves, wasn't it easy to do what the Department, under orders, wanted done?
They had wanted to rub into our allies that their losses by devastation had been nothing to write home about--so as to avoid sending reinforcements to their lines!
Well, if you took just the bricks and mortar of the devastated districts, you could prove that the loss in bricks, tiles, woodwork and the rest didn't--and the figures with a little manipulation would prove it!
--amount to more than a normal year's dilapidations spread over the whole country in peace time.
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House repairs in a normal year had cost several million sterling.
The enemy had only destroyed just about so many million sterling in bricks and mortar.
And what was a mere year's dilapidations in house property!
You just neglected to do them and did them next year.
So, if you ignored the lost harvests of three years, the lost industrial output of the richest industrial region of the country, the smashed machinery, the barked fruit trees, the three years' loss of four and a half-tenths of the coal output for three years--and the loss of life!
--we could go to our allies and say: "All your yappings about losses are the merest bulls.
You can perfectly well afford to reinforce the weak places of your own lines.
We intend to send our new troops to the Near East, where lies our true interest!"
And, though they might sooner or later point out the fallacy, you would by so much have put off the abhorrent expedient of a single command.
Valentine, though it took her away from her own thoughts, couldn't help saying: "But weren't you arguing against your own convictions?"
He said: "Yes, of course I was.
In the lightness of my heart!
It's always a good thing to formulate the other fellow's objections."
She had turned half round in her chair.
They were gazing into each other's eyes, he from above, she from below.
She had no doubt of his love: he, she knew, could have no doubt of hers.
She said: "But isn't it dangerous?
To show these people how to do it?"
He said: "Oh, no, no. No!
You don't know what a good soul little Vinnie is.
I
don't think you've ever been quite just to Vincent Macmaster!
He'd as soon think of picking my pocket as of picking my brains.
The soul of honour!"
Valentine had felt a queer, queer sensation.
She was not sure afterwards whether she had felt it before she had realised that Sylvia Tietjens was looking at them.
She stood there, very erect, a queer smile on her face.
Valentine could not be sure whether it was kind, cruel, or merely distantly ironic; but she was perfectly sure it showed, whatever was behind it, that its wearer knew all that there was to know of her, Valentine's, feelings for Tietjens and for Tietjens' feelings for her.
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It was like being a woman and man in adultery in Trafalgar Square.
Behind Sylvia's back, their mouths agape, were the two staff officers.
Their dark hairs were too untidy for them to amount to much, but, such as they were, they were the two most presentable males of the assembly--and Sylvia had snaffled them.
Mrs. Tietjens said: "Oh, Christopher!
I'm going on to the Basil's." Tietjens said: "All right.
I'll pop Mrs. Wannop into the tube as soon as she's had enough of it, and come along and pick you up!"
Sylvia had just drooped her long eyelashes, in sign of salutation, to Valentine Wannop, and had drifted through the door, followed by her rather unmilitary military escort in khaki and scarlet.
From that moment Valentine Wannop never had any doubt.
She knew that Sylvia Tietjens knew that her husband loved her, Valentine Wannop, and that she, Valentine Wannop, loved her husband--with a passion absolute and ineffable.
The one thing she, Valentine, didn't know, the one mystery that remained impenetrable, was whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to her husband!
A long time afterwards Edith Ethel had come to her beside the tea-cups and had apologised for not having known, earlier than Sylvia's demonstration, that Mrs. Wannop was in the room.
She hoped that they might see Mrs. Wannop much more often.
She added after a moment that she hoped Mrs. Wannop wouldn't, in future, find it necessary to come under the escort of Mr. Tietjens.
They were too old friends for that, surely.
Valentine said: "Look here, Ethel, if you think that you can keep friends with mother and turn on Mr. Tietjens after all he's done for you, you're mistaken.
You are really.
And mother's a great deal of influence.
I don't want to see you making any mistakes: just at this juncture.
It's a mistake to make nasty rows.
And you'd make a very nasty one if you said anything against Mr. Tietjens to mother.
She knows a great deal.
Remember.
She lived next door to the rectory for a number of years.
And she's got a dreadfully incisive tongue.
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."
Edith Ethel coiled back on her feet as if her whole body were threaded by a steel spring.
Her mouth opened, but she bit her lower lip and then wiped it with a very white handkerchief.
She said: "I hate that man!
I detest that man!
I shudder when he comes near me."
"I know you do!"
Valentine Wannop answered.
"But I wouldn't let other people know it if I were you.
It doesn't do you any real credit.
He's a good man."
Edith Ethel looked at her with a long, calculating glance.
Then she went to stand before the fireplace.
That had been five--or at most six--Fridays before Valentine sat with Mark Tietjens in the War Office waiting hall, and, on the Friday immediately before that again, all the guests being gone, Edith Ethel had come to the tea-table and, with her velvet kindness, had placed her right hand on Valentine's left.
Admiring the gesture with a deep fervour, Valentine knew that that was the end.
Three days before, on the Monday, Valentine, in her school uniform, in a great store to which she had gone to buy athletic paraphernalia, had run into Mrs. Duchemin, who was buying flowers.
Mrs. Duchemin had been horribly distressed to observe the costume.
She had said: "But do you go _about_ in that?
It's really dreadful."
Valentine had answered: "Oh, yes.
When I'm doing business for the school in school hours I'm expected to wear it.
And I wear it if I'm going anywhere in a hurry after school hours.
It saves my dresses.
I haven't got too many."
"But _any_ one might meet you," Edith Ethel said in a note of agony.
"It's very inconsiderate.
Don't you _think_ you've been very inconsiderate?
You might meet any of the people who come to our Fridays!"
"I frequently do," Valentine said.
"But they don't seem to mind.
Perhaps they think I'm a Waac officer.
That would be quite respectable.
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Mrs. Duchemin drifted away, her arms full of flowers and real agony upon her face.
Now, beside the tea-table she said, very softly: "My dear, we've decided not to have our usual Friday afternoon next week."
Valentine wondered whether this was merely a lie to get rid of her.
But Edith Ethel went on: "We've decided to have a little evening festivity.
After a great deal of thought we've come to the conclusion that we ought, now, to make our union public."
She paused to await comment, but Valentine making none she went on: "It coincides very happily--I can't help feeling it coincides very happily!
--with another event.
Not that we set much store by these things.
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But it has been whispered to Vincent that next Friday.
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Perhaps, my dear Valentine, you, too, will have heard .
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Valentine said: "No, I haven't. I suppose he's got the O. B.
E.
I'm very glad."
"The Sovereign," Mrs. Duchemin said, "is seeing fit to confer the honour of knighthood on him."
"Well!"
Valentine said.
"He's had a quick career.
I've no doubt he deserves it.
He's worked very hard.
I do sincerely congratulate you.
It'll be a great help to you."
"It's," Mrs. Duchemin said, "not for mere plodding.
That's what makes it so gratifying.
It's for a special piece of brilliance, that has marked him out.
It's, of course, a secret.
But .
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"Oh, I know!"
Valentine said.
"He's worked out some calculations to prove that losses in the devastated districts, if you ignore machinery, coal output, orchard trees, harvests, industrial products and so on, don't amount to more than a year's household dilapidations for the .
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Mrs. Duchemin said with real horror: "But how did you know?
How on _earth_ did you know?
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She paused.
"It's such a _dead_ secret.
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That fellow must have told you.
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But how on earth could _he_ know?"
"I haven't seen Mr. Tietjens to speak to since the last time he was here," Valentine said.
She saw, from Edith Ethel's bewilderment, the whole situation.
The miserable Macmaster hadn't even confided to his wife that the practically stolen figures weren't his own.
He desired to have a little prestige in the family circle; for once a little prestige!
Well!
Why shouldn't he have it?
Tietjens, she knew, would wish him to have all he could get.
She said therefore: "Oh, it's probably in the air.
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It's known the Government want to break their claims to the higher command.
And anyone who could help them to that would get a knighthood.
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Mrs. Duchemin was more calm.
"It's certainly," she said, "Burke'd, as you call it, those beastly people."
She reflected for a moment.
"It's probably that," she went on.
"It's in the air.
Anything that can help to influence public opinion against those horrible people is to be welcomed.
That's known pretty widely.
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No!
It could hardly be Christopher Tietjens who thought of it and told you.
It wouldn't enter his head.
He's their friend!
He would be .
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"He's certainly," Valentine said, "not a friend of his country's enemies.
I'm not myself."
Mrs. Duchemin exclaimed sharply, her eyes dilated.
"What do you mean?
What on earth do you dare to mean?
I thought you were a pro-German!"
Valentine said: "I'm not!
I'm not!
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I hate men's deaths.
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I hate any men's deaths.
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Any men .
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She calmed herself by main force.
"Mr. Tietjens says that the more we hinder our allies the more we drag the war on and the more lives are lost.
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More lives, do you understand?
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Mrs. Duchemin assumed her most aloof, tender and high air: "My poor child," she said, "what possible concern can the opinions of that broken fellow cause anyone?
You can warn him from me that he does himself no good by going on uttering these discredited opinions.
He's a marked man.
