There occurred to her irreverent mind a sentence of one of the Duchess of Marlborough's letters to Queen Anne. The duchess had visited the general during one of his campaigns in Flanders. "My Lord," she wrote, "did me the honour three times in his boots!" . . . The sort of thing she would remember. . . . She would—she would—have tried it on the sergeant-major, just to see Tietjens' face, for the sergeant-major would not have understood. . . . And who cared if he did! . . . He was bibulously skirting round the same idea. . . .
But the tumult increased to an incredible volume: even the thrillings of the near-by gramophone of two hundred horse-power, or whatever it was, became mere shimmerings of a gold thread in a drab fabric of sound. She screamed blasphemies that she was hardly aware of knowing. She had to scream against the noise: she was no more responsible for the blasphemy than if she had lost her identity under an anæsthetic. She had lost her identity. . . . She was one of this crowd!
The general woke in his chair and gazed malevolently at their group as if they alone were responsible for the noise. It dropped. Dead! You only knew it, because you caught the tail end of a belated woman's scream from the hall and the general shouting: "For God's sake don't start that damned gramophone again!" In the blessed silence, after preliminary wheezings and guitar noises an astonishing voice burst out:
"Less than the dust . . .
Before thy char . . ."
And then, stopping after a murmur of voices, began:
"Pale hands I loved . . ."
The general sprang from his chair and rushed to the hall. . . . He came back crestfallenly.
"It's some damned civilian big-wig. . . . A novelist, they say. . . . I can't stop him. . . ." He added with disgust: "The hall's full of young beasts and harlots. . . . Dancing!". . . The melody had indeed, after a buzz, changed to a languorous and interrupted variation of a waltz. "Dancing in the dark!" the general said with enhanced disgust. . . . "And the Germans may be here at any moment. ... If they knew what I know! . . ."
Sylvia called across to him:
"Wouldn't it be fun to see the blue uniform with the silver buttons again and some decently set-up men? . . ."