Great Britain -- History -- George V, 1910-1936 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Campion, anyhow, had dispatched his furious note to Tietjens after
receiving, firstly, in the early morning, a letter from Sylvia in which
she said that her ducal second-cousin, the lugubrious Rugeley, highly
disapproved of the fact that Tietjens was in France at all, and after
later receiving, towards four in the afternoon, a telegram, dispatched
by Sylvia herself from Havre, to say that she would be arriving by a
noon train. The general had been almost as much upset at the thought
that his car would not be there to meet Sylvia as by the thought that
she was coming at all. But a strike of French railway civilians had
delayed Sylvia's arrival. Campion had dispatched, within five minutes,
his snorter to Tietjens, who he was convinced knew all about Sylvia's
coming, and his car to Rouen Station with Levin in it.
The general, in fact, was in a fine confusion. He was convinced that
Tietjens, as Man of Intellect, had treated Sylvia badly, even to the
extent of stealing two pair of her best sheets, and he was also
convinced that Tietjens was in close collusion with Sylvia. As Man of
Intellect, Campion was convinced, Tietjens was dissatisfied with his
lowly job of draft-forwarding officer, and wanted a place of an
extravagantly cooshy kind in the general's own entourage. . . . And
Levin had said that it made it all the worse that Campion in his
bothered heart thought that Tietjens really ought to have more exalted
employment. He had said to Levin:
"Damn it all, the fellow ought to be in command of my Intelligence
instead of you. But he's unsound. That's what he is: unsound. He's too
brilliant. . . . And he'd talk both the hind legs off Sweedlepumpkins."
Sweedlepumpkins was the general's favourite charger. The general was
afraid of talk. He practically never talked with anyone except about his
job--certainly never with Tietjens--without being proved to be in the
wrong, and that undermined his belief in himself.
So that altogether he was in a fine fume. And confusion. He was almost
ready to believe that Tietjens was at the bottom of every trouble that
occurred in his immense command.
But, when all that was gathered, Tietjens was not much farther forward
in knowing what his wife's errand in France was.
"She complains," Levin had bleated painfully at some point on the
slippery coastguard path, "about your taking her sheets. And about a
Miss . . . a Miss Wanostrocht, is it? . . . The general is not inclined
to attach much importance to the sheets. . . ."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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