No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [33]
It was difficult for Tietjens to make out exactly what she had said. His channel of information had been Levin, who was too gentlemanly ever to say anything direct at all. Too gentlemanly, too implicitly trustful of Tietjens' honour...and too bewildered by the charms of Sylvia, who had obviously laid herself out to bewilder the poor Staff-wallah...But she had gone pretty far, either in her letters or in her conversation since she had been in that city, to which--it was characteristic--she had come without any sort of passports or papers, just walking past gentlemen in their wooden boxes at pierheads and the like, in conversation with--of all people in the world!--with Perowne, who had been returning from leave with King's dispatches, or something glorified of the Staff sort! In a special train very likely. That was Sylvia all over.
Levin said that Campion had given Perowne the most frightful dressing down he had ever heard mortal man receive. And it really was damn hard on the poor general, who, after happenings to one of his predecessors, had been perfectly rabid to keep skirts out of his headquarters. Indeed it was one of the crosses of Levin's worried life that the general had absolutely refused him, Levin, leave to marry Miss de Bailly if he would not undertake that that young woman should leave France by the first boat after the ceremony. Levin, of course, was to go with her, but the young woman was not to return to France for the duration of hostilities. And a fine row all her noble relatives had raised over that. It had cost Levin another hundred and fifty thousand francs in the marriage settlements. The married wives of officers in any case were not allowed in France, though you could not keep out their unmarried ones...
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 cushy 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 to 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...'