England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Social aspects -- England -- Fiction
"You and I are like two people . . ." He paused and began again more
quickly: "Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read
differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read
'Monkey's Soap'; if you look back when you've passed it's 'Needs no
Rinsing.' . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we
both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we
stood side by side we should see yet a third. . . . But I hope we
respect each other. We're both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect
you and I hope you respect me."
She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr. Jegg, across
the room, said: "The failure to co-ordinate . . ." and then dropped his
voice.
Tietjens looked at her attentively.
"You don't respect me?" he asked. She kept obstinately silent.
"I'd have liked you to have said it," he repeated.
"Oh," she cried out, "how can I respect you when there is all this
suffering? So much pain! Such torture . . . I can't sleep . . . Never . . .
I haven't slept a whole night since . . . Think of the immense
spaces, stretching out under the night . . . I believe pain and fear
must be worse at night. . . ." She knew she was crying out like that
because her dread had come true. When he had said: "I'd have liked you
to have said it," using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man,
too, was going.
And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she
confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would
say farewell to her: like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just
occasionally, using the word "we"--and perhaps without intention--he had
let her know that he loved her.
Mr. Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs. Haviland was already at
the door.
"We'll leave you to have your war talk out," Mr. Jegg said. He added:
"For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of
things that's preservable. I can't help saying that."
She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:
"Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He _must_!" The deepest of
her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly
known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils
the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple,
but very faint. "You must! You _must_!" she said to herself. There came
back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the
moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog
into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body
towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden
lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall. . . . She saw the white
disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm
night. . . .
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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