A Man Could Stand Up—

Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one hand the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago it had used to have⁠—of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny.

The telephone, for some ingeniously torturing reason, was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection and, called imperatively, at a moment of considerable suspense, out of the asphalte playground where, under her command ranks of girls had stood electrically only just within the margin of control, Valentine with the receiver at her ear was plunged immediately into incomprehensible news uttered by a voice that she seemed half to remember. Right in the middle of a sentence it hit her:

“… that he ought presumably to be under control, which you mightn’t like!”; after that the noise burst out again and rendered the voice inaudible.

It occurred to her that probably at that minute the whole population of the world needed to be under control; she knew she herself did. But she had no male relative that the verdict could apply to in especial. Her brother? But he was on a minesweeper. In dock at the moment. And now⁠ ⁠… safe for good! There was also an aged great uncle that she had never seen. Dean of somewhere⁠ ⁠… Hereford? Exeter?⁠ ⁠… Somewhere.⁠ ⁠… Had she just said safe? She was shaken with joy!

She said into the mouthpiece:

“Valentine Wannop speaking.⁠ ⁠… Physical Instructress at this school, you know!”

She had to present an appearance of sanity⁠ ⁠… a sane voice at the very least!

Months and months before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head⁠—and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs⁠—were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. These waves of conviction recurred continually: he was constantly glancing aside and upwards at that splash: it was in the shape of the comb of a healthy rooster; it gleamed, with five serrations, in the just-beginning light that shone along the thin, unroofed channel in the gravel slope. Wet half-light, just filtering; more visible there than in the surrounding desolation because the deep, narrow channel framed a section of just-illuminated rift in the watery eastwards!

Twice he had stood up on a rifleman’s step enforced by a bully-beef case to look over⁠—in the last few minutes. Each time, on stepping down again, he had been struck by that phenomenon: the light seen from the trench seemed if not brighter, then more definite.

A head in a metal pudding-basin⁠—a Suffolk type of blond head, pushed itself from a withdrawn curtain of sacking in the gravel wall beside him, at his back. A voice said with concern:

“There ain’t no beastly snipers, is there, sir. I did ’ope there would’n be henny beastly snipers ’ere. It gives such a beastly lot of extra trouble warning the men.”

Tietjens said it was a beastly skylark that almost walked into his mouth. The Acting Sergeant-Major said with enthusiasm that them ’ere skylarks could fair scare the guts out of you. He remembered a raid in the dark, crawling on ’is ’ands ’n’ knees wen ’e put ’is ’and on a skylark on its nest. Never left ’is nest till ’is ’and was on ’im! Then it went up and fair scared the wind out of ’im. Cor! Never would ’e fergit that!

With an air of carefully pulling parcels out of a carrier’s cart he produced from the cavern behind the sacking two blinking assemblages of tubular khaki-clad limbs. They wavered to erectness, pink cheeses of faces yawning beside tall rifles and bayonets. The Sergeant said:

“Keep yer ’eds down as you go along. You never knows!”

Tietjens told the Lance-Corporal of that party of two that his confounded gas-mask nozzle was broken. Hadn’t he seen that for himself? The dismembered object bobbed on the man’s chest. He was to go and borrow another from another man and see the other drew a new one at once.

Bully for Perowne.⁠ ⁠… But what about him, Tietjens? Was that the sort of thing that Providence ought to do to one?⁠ ⁠… That’s tempting God!

The Sergeant beside him said:

“Then a man could stand hup on an ill.⁠ ⁠… You really mean to say, sir, that you think a man will be able to stand up on a bleedin’ ill.⁠ ⁠…”

Presumably Tietjens had been putting heart into that acting temporary Sergeant-Major. He could not remember what he had been saying to the N.C.O. because his mind had been so deeply occupied with the image of Perowne.⁠ ⁠… He said:

“You’re a Lincolnshire man, aren’t you? You come from a Fen country. What do you want to stand up on a hill for?”

The man said:

“Ah, but you do, sir!”

He added:

“You want to stand up! Take a look around.⁠ ⁠…” He struggled for expression: “Like as if you wanted to breathe deep after bein’ in a stoopin’ posture for a long time!”

Tietjens said:

“Well, you can do that here. With discretion. I did it just now.⁠ ⁠…”

The man said:

“You, sir.⁠ ⁠… You’re a law hunto yourself!”

It was the most considerable shock that Tietjens received in the course of his military career. And the most considerable reward.

There were all these inscrutable beings: the Other Ranks, a brownish mass, spreading underground, like clay strata in the gravel, beneath all this waving country that the

The Colonel said:

“Look here, Tietjens, lend me two hundred and fifty quid. They say you’re a damn beastly rich fellow. My accounts are all out. I’ve got a loathsome complaint. My friends have all gone back on me. I shall have to face a Court of Enquiry if I go home. But my nerve’s gone. I’ve got to go home.”

He added:

“I daresay you knew all that.”

From the sudden fierce hatred that he felt at the thought of giving money to this man, Tietjens knew that his inner mind based all its calculations on the idea of living with Valentine Wannop⁠ ⁠… when men could stand up on hills.

He had found the Colonel in his cellar⁠—it really, actually was a cellar, the remains of a farm⁠—sitting on the edge of his camp-bed, in his shorts, his khaki shirt very open at the neck. His eyes were a little bloodshot, but his cropped, silver-grey hair was accurately waved, his grey moustache beautifully pointed. His silver-backed hairbrushes and a small mirror were indeed on the table in front of him. By the rays of the lamp that, hung overhead, rendered that damp stone place faintly nauseating, he looked keen, clean and resolute. Tietjens wondered how he would look by daylight. He had remarkably seldom seen the fellow by daylight. Beside the mirror and the brushes lay, limply, an unfilled pipe, a red pencil and the white buff papers from Whitehall that Tietjens had already read.

He had begun by looking at Tietjens with a keen, hard, bloodshot glance. He had said: