He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He had thought Tietjens was going mad: that he was mad. It had passed. Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful—and quite rude—lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from the official figures of population movements in the western territories. Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a speech of the Colonial Minister—or an answer to a question—and Sir Reginald had promised to put Tietjens' views before the great man. That was the sort of thing to do a young fellow good—because it got kudos for the office. They had to work on figures provided by the Colonial Governments, and if they could correct those fellows by sheer brain work—that scored.
But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blonde, high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn't tell what in the world he was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips in some one's article on Arminianism. For, absurd as it seemed, Macmaster knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend's feelings. As to them, practically no confidences had passed between them. Just two:
On the night before his starting for his wedding in Paris Tietjens had said to him:
"Vinny, old fellow, it's a back door way out of it. She's bitched me."
And once, rather lately, he had said:
"Damn it! I don't even know if the child's my own!"
This last confidence had shocked Macmaster so irremediably—the child had been a seven months' child, rather ailing, and Tietjens' clumsy tenderness towards it had been so marked that, even without this nightmare, Macmaster had been affected by the sight of them together—that confidence then had pained Macmaster so frightfully, it was so appalling, that Macmaster had regarded it almost as an insult. It was the sort of confidence a man didn't make to his equal, but only to solicitors, doctors, or the clergy who are not quite men. Or, at any rate, such confidences are not made between men without appeals for sympathy, and Tietjens had made no appeal for sympathy. He had just added sardonically:
"She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she's as good as said as much to Marchant"—Marchant had been Tietjens' old nurse.
Suddenly—and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his head—Macmaster remarked:
"You can't say the man wasn't a poet!"