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移除书签No More Parades · Part II · Chapter 2 1 (3/3)
At the time when he had said it her mind—she had been just then hating him a good deal—had seemed to take no notice of the utterance. But now that it presented itself forcibly to her again it brought with it the thought: Supposing he wasn’t really only talking through his hat! … She dragged the wretched Perowne off his bed where he had been lost in an after-lunch slumber and told him that they must both leave that place at once, and, that as soon as they reached Paris or some larger town where he could find waiters and people to understand his French, she herself was going to leave him for good. They did not, in consequence, get away from the air-resort until the six o’clock train next morning. Perowne’s passion of rage and despair at the news that she wished to leave him took an inconvenient form, for instead of announcing any intention of committing suicide, as might have been expected, he became gloomily and fantastically murderous. He said that unless Sylvia swore on a little relic of St. Anthony she carried that she had no intention of leaving him he would incontinently kill her. He said, as he said for the rest of his days, that she had ruined his life and caused great moral deterioration in himself. But for her he might have married some pure young thing. Moreover, influencing him against his mother’s doctrines, she had forced him to drink wine, by an effect of pure scorn. Thus he had done harm, he was convinced, both to his health and to his manly proportions … It was indeed for Sylvia one of the most unbearable things about this man—the way he took wine. With every glass he put to his lips he would exclaim with an unbearable titter some such imbecility as: “Here is another nail in my coffin.” And he had taken to wine, and even to stronger liquor, very well.
Sylvia had refused to swear by St. Anthony. She definitely was not going to introduce the saint into her amorous affairs, and she definitely was not going to take on any relic an oath that she meant to break at an early opportunity. There was such a thing as playing it too low down: there are dishonours to which death is preferable. So, getting hold of his revolver at a time when he was wringing his hands, she dropped it into the water-jug and then felt reasonably safe.
Perowne knew no French and next to nothing about France, but he had discovered that the French did nothing to you for killing a woman who intended to leave you. Sylvia, on the other hand, was pretty certain that, without a weapon, he could not do much to her. If she had had no other training at her very expensive school she had had so much drilling in calisthenics as to be singularly mistress of her limbs, and, in the interests of her beauty she had always kept herself very fit …
She said at last:
“Very well. We will go to Yssingueux-les-Pervenches …”
A rather pleasant French couple in the hotel had spoken of this little place in the extreme west of France as a lonely paradise, they having spent their honeymoon there … And Sylvia wanted a lonely paradise if there was going to be any scrapping before she got away from Perowne …
She had no hesitation as to what she was going to do: the long journey across half France by miserable trains had caused her an agony of homesickness! Nothing less! … It was a humiliating disease from which to suffer. But it was unavoidable, like mumps. You had to put up with it. Besides, she even found herself wanting to see her child, whom she imagined herself to hate, as having been the cause of all her misfortunes …
She therefore prepared, after great thought, a letter telling Tietjens that she intended to return to him. She made the letter as nearly as possible like one she would write announcing her return from a country house to which she should have been invited for an indefinite period, and she added some rather hard instructions about her maid, these being intended to remove from the letter any possible trace of emotion. She was certain that, if she showed any emotion at all, Christopher would never take her under his roof again … She was pretty certain that no gossip had been caused by her escapade. Major Thurston had been at the railway station when they had left, but they had not spoken—and Thurston was a very decentish, brown-moustached fellow, of the sort that does not gossip.
It had proved a little difficult to get away, for Perowne during several weeks watched her like an attendant in a lunatic asylum. But at last the idea presented itself to him that she would never go without her frocks, and, one day, in a fit of intense somnolence after a lunch, washed down with rather a large quantity of the local and fiery cordial, he let her take a walk alone …
She was by that time tired of men … or she imagined that she was; for she was not prepared to be certain, considering the muckers she saw women coming all round her over the most unpresentable individuals. Men, at any rate never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with any man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before …” You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end …
She remembered, years ago, trying to shock her mother’s spiritual adviser, Father Consett, whom they had lately murdered in Ireland, along with Casement … The poor saint had not in the least been shocked. He had gone her one better. For when she had said something like that her idea of a divvy life—they used in those days to say “divvy”—would be to go off with a different man every weekend, he had told her that after a short time she would be bored already by the time the poor dear fellow was buying the railway ticket …
And, by heavens, he had been right … For when she came to think of it, from the day that poor saint had said that thing in her mother’s sitting-room in the little German spa—Lobscheid, it must have been called—in the candlelight, his shadow denouncing her from all over the walls, to now when she sat in the palmish brickwork of that hotel that had been new-whitely decorated to celebrate hostilities, never once had she sat in a train with a man who had any right to look upon himself as justified in mauling her about … She wondered if, from where he sat in heaven, Father Consett would be satisfied with her as he looked down into that lounge … Perhaps it was really he that had pulled off that change in her …
Never once till yesterday … For perhaps the unfortunate Perowne might just faintly have had the right yesterday to make himself for about two minutes—before she froze him into a choking, pallid snowman with goggle eyes—the perfectly loathsome thing that a man in a railway train becomes … Much too bold and yet stupidly awkward with the fear of the guard looking in at the window, the train doing over sixty, without corridors … No, never again for me, father, she addressed her voice towards the ceiling …
Why in the world couldn’t you get a man to go away with you and be just—oh, light comedy—for a whole, a whole blessed weekend. For a whole blessed life … Why not? … Think of it … A whole blessed life with a good sort and yet didn’t go all gurgly in the voice, and codfish-eyed and all-overish—to the extent of not being able to find the tickets when asked for them … Father, dear, she said again upwards, if I could find men like that, that would be just heaven … where there is no marrying … But, of course, she went on almost resignedly, he would not be faithful to you … And then: one would have to stand it …
She sat up so suddenly in her chair that beside her, too, Major Perowne nearly jumped out of his wickerwork, and asked if he had come back … She exclaimed:
“No, I’d be damned if I would … I’d be damned, I’d be damned, I’d be damned if I would … Never. Never. By the living God!”
She asked fiercely of the agitated major:
“Has Christopher got a girl in this town? … You’d better tell me the truth!”
The major mumbled:
“He … No … He’s too much of a stick … He never even goes to Suzette’s … Except once to fetch out some miserable little squit of a subaltern who was smashing up Mother Hardelot’s furniture …”
He grumbled:
“But you shouldn’t give a man the jumps like that! … Be conciliatory, you said …” He went on to grumble that her manners had not improved since she had been at Yssingueux-les-Pervenches … and then went on to tell her that in French the words yeux des pervenches meant eyes of periwinkle blue. And that was the only French he knew, because a Frenchman he had met in the train had told him so and he had always thought that if her eyes had been periwinkle blue … “But you’re not listening … Hardly polite, I call it,” he had mumbled to a conclusion …
She was sitting forward in her chair still clenching her hand under her chin at the thought that perhaps Christopher had Valentine Wannop in that town. That was perhaps why he elected to remain there. She asked:
“Why does Christopher stay on in this Godforsaken hole? … The inglorious base, they call it …”
“Because he’s jolly well got to …” Major Perowne said. “He’s got to do what he’s told …”
She said: “Christopher! … You mean to say they’d keep a man like Christopher anywhere he didn’t want to be …”
“They’d jolly well knock spots off him if he went away,” Major Perowne exclaimed … “What the deuce do you think your blessed fellow is? … The King of England? …” He added with a sudden sombre ferocity: “They’d shoot him like anybody else if he bolted … What do you think?”
She said: “But all that wouldn’t prevent his having a girl in this town?”
“Well, he hasn’t got one,” Perowne said. “He sticks up in that blessed old camp of his like a blessed she-chicken sitting on addled eggs … That’s what they say of him … I don’t know anything about the fellow …”
Listening vindictively and indolently, she thought she caught in his droning tones a touch of the homicidal lunacy that had used to underlie his voice in the bedroom at Yssingueux. The fellow had undoubtedly about him a touch of the dull, mad murderer of the police-courts. With a sudden animation she thought:
“Suppose he tried to murder Christopher …” And she imagined her husband breaking the fellow’s back across his knee, the idea going across her mind as fire traverses the opal. Then, with a dry throat, she said to herself:
“I’ve got to find out whether he has that girl in Rouen …” Men stuck together. The fellow Perowne might well be protecting Tietjens. It would be unthinkable that any rules of the service could keep Christopher in that place. They could not shut up the upper classes. If Perowne had any sense he would know that to shield Tietjens was the way not to get her … But he had no sense … Besides, sexual solidarity was a terribly strong thing … She knew that she herself would not give a woman’s secrets away in order to get her man. Then … how was she to ascertain whether the girl was not in that town? How? … She imagined Tietjens going home every night to her … But he was going to spend that night with herself … She knew that … Under that roof … Fresh from the other …
She imagined him there, now … In the parlour of one of the little villas you see from the tram on the top of the town … They were undoubtedly, now, discussing her … Her whole body writhed, muscle on muscle, in her chair … She must discover … But how do you discover? Against a universal conspiracy … This whole war was an agapemone … You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women … It was what war was for … All these men, crowded in this narrow space … She stood up:
“I’m going,” she said, “to put on a little powder for Lady Sachse’s feast … You needn’t stay if you don’t want to …” She was going to watch every face she saw until it gave up the secret of where in that town Christopher had the Wannop girl hidden … She imagined her freckled, snubnosed faced pressed—squashed was the word—against his cheek … She was going to investigate …
