Listening to that conversation had extraordinarily cleared Sylvia’s mind. She said, almost sorrowfully:
‘I suppose that that’s why you don’t seduce that girl.’ And she knew—she knew at once from the suddenly changed inflection of Tietjens’ voice when he had said ‘a decent Tommie thinks twice before leaving his girl in trouble!’—that Tietjens himself had thought twice.
She looked at him now almost incredulously, but with great coolness. Why shouldn’t he, she asked herself, give himself a little pleasure with his girl before going to almost certain death . . . She felt a real, sharp pain at her heart . . . A poor wretch in such a devil of a hole . . .
She had moved to a chair close beside the fireplace and now sat looking at him, leaning interestedly forward, as if at a garden party she had been finding—par impossible!—a pastoral play not so badly produced. Tietjens was a fabulous monster . . .
He was a fabulous monster not because he was honourable and virtuous. She had known several very honourable and very virtuous men. If she had never known an honourable or virtuous woman except among her French or Austrian friends, that was, no doubt, because virtuous and honourable women did not amuse her or because, except just for the French and Austrians, they were not Roman Catholics . . . But the honourable and virtuous men she had known had usually prospered and been respected. They weren’t the great fortunes, but they were well-offish: well spoken of: of the country gentleman type . . . Tietjens . . .
She arranged her thoughts. To get one point settled in her mind, she asked:
‘What really happened to you in France? What is really the matter with your memory? Or your brain, is it?’ He said carefully:
‘It’s half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale. Without a proper blood supply . . . So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone.’
She said:
‘But you! . . . without a brain! . . . ’ As this was not a question, he did not answer.
His going at once to the telephone, as soon as he was in the possession of the name ‘Metternich,’ had at last convinced her that he had not been, for the last four months, acting the hypochondriac or merely lying to obtain sympathy or extended sick leave. Amongst Sylvia’s friends a wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival of lying, lechery, drink, and howling that this affair was, to pretend to a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous. At any rate if a man passed his time at garden parties—or, as for the last months Tietjens had done, passed his time in a tin hut amongst dust heaps, going to tea every afternoon in order to help Mrs Wannop with her newspaper articles—when men were so engaged they were, at least, not trying to kill each other.
She said now:
‘Do you mind telling me what actually happened to you?’ He said:
‘I don’t know that I can very well . . . Something burst—or “exploded” is probably the right word—near me, in the dark. I expect you’d rather not hear about it? . . . ’
‘I want to!’ Sylvia said.
He said:
‘The point about it is that I don’t know what happened and I don’t remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life dead . . . What I remember is being in a C.C.S. and not being able to remember my own name.’
‘You mean that?’ Sylvia asked. ‘It’s not just a way of talking?’
‘No, it’s not just a way of talking,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I lay in bed in the C.C.S . . . Your friends were dropping bombs on it.’
‘You might not call them my friends,’ Sylvia said. Tietjens said:
‘I beg your pardon. One gets into a loose way of speaking. The poor bloody Huns, then, were dropping bombs from aeroplanes on the hospital huts . . . I’m not suggesting they knew it was a C.C.S.; it was, no doubt, just carelessness . . .
‘You needn’t spare the Germans for me!’ Sylvia said. ‘You needn’t spare any man who has killed another man.’
‘I was, then, dreadfully worried,’ Tietjens went on. ‘I was composing a preface for a book on Arminianism . . . ’
‘You haven’t written a book! ‘ Sylvia exclaimed eagerly, because she thought that if Tietjens took to writing a book there might be a way of his earning a living. Many people had told her that he ought to write a book.
‘No, I hadn’t written a book,’ Tietjens said, ‘and I didn’t know what Arminianism was . . .
‘You know perfectly well what the Arminian heresy is,’ Sylvia said sharply; ‘you explained it all to me years ago.’
‘Yes,’ Tietjens exclaimed. ‘Years ago I could have, but I couldn’t then. I could now, but I was a little worried about it then. It’s a little awkward to write a preface about a subject of which you know nothing. But it didn’t seem to me to be discreditable in an army sense . . . Still it worried me dreadfully not to know my own name. I lay and worried and worried, and thought how discreditable it would appear if a nurse came along and asked me and I didn’t know. Of course my name was on a luggage label tied to my collar; but I’d forgotten they did that to casualties . . . Then a lot of people carried pieces of a nurse down the hut: the Germans’ bombs had done that of course. They were still dropping about the place.’
‘But good heavens,’ Sylvia cried out, ‘do you mean they carried a dead nurse past you? . . . ’
The poor dear wasn’t dead,’ Tietjens said. ‘I wish she had been. Her name was Beatrice Carmichael . . . the first name I learned after my collapse. She’s dead now of course . . . That seemed to wake up a fellow on the other side of the room with a lot of blood coming through the bandages on his head . . . He rolled out of his bed and, without a word, walked across the hut and began to strangle me . . . ’
‘But this isn’t believable,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t believe it . . . You were an officer: they couldn’t have carried a wounded nurse under your nose. They must have known your sister Caroline was a nurse and was killed . . . ’
‘Carrie,’ Tietjens said, ‘was drowned on a hospital ship. I thank God I didn’t have to connect the other girl with her . . . But you don’t suppose that in addition to one’s name, rank, unit, and date of admission they’d put that I’d lost a sister and two brothers in action and a father—of a broken heart, I dare say . . . ’
‘But you only lost one brother,’ Sylvia said. ‘I went into mourning for him and your sister . . .
‘No, two,’ Tietjens said; ‘but the fellow who was strangling me was what I wanted to tell you about. He let out a number of ear-piercing shrieks and lots of orderlies came and pulled him off me and sat all over him. Then he began to shout ”Faith!“ He shouted: “Faith! . . . Faith! . . . Faith!’ . . . ” at intervals of two seconds, as far as I could tell by my pulse, until four in the morning, when he died . . . I don’t know whether it was a religious exhortation or a woman’s name, but I disliked him a good deal because he started my tortures, such as they were . . . There had been a girl I knew called Faith. Oh, not a love affair: the daughter of my father’s head gardener, a Scotsman. The point is that every