Sylvia gets her comeuppance

It had been obvious to her for a long time that God would one day step in and intervene for the protection of Christopher. After all Christopher was a good man—a rather sickeningly good man. It is, in the end, she reluctantly admitted, the function of God and the invisible powers to see that a good man shall eventually be permitted to settle down to a stuffy domestic life…even to chaffering over old furniture.

Ah, Sylvia, how the mighty have fallen! By The Last Post Sylvia’s schemes are hanging on by a thread; she’s still obsessed with tormenting Christopher of course but knows she is pushing her luck by this time. Her stories about him are no longer as easy to believe, though she still hopes to convince the Earl of Fittleworth with her charms to push Tietjens and his brother out of the county: “Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin; and it is true that no man knows what another man is doing when he is out of sight.”

She has after all successfully convinced many people that Tietjens’s older brother Mark is suffering not the effects of a stroke but of late-stage syphilis. But convincing other people is not really her game&dmash;she is obsessed with her husband and must know for her own satisfaction that he is miserable. She is determined to find even the tiniest detail to support her, and goes to the cottage he and Valentine now live in hoping to find her housekeeping poor and to bring back some nice nasty detail to scandalize the neighbors. But she’s mostly scandalizing herself, drifting out of her own social circle to try to get dirt on the Tietjens’s and making her desperation more and more apparent. Even her own son sees her as a sex-obsessed bitch when it comes to his father, though he does seem to be a mama’s boy all the same.

In The Last Post we spend some more solid time with Mark, and also with his wife, and they are really of the right sort: “He was the English Milor with le Spleen. She had read of him in the novels of Alexander Dumas, Paul de Kock, Eugene Sue and Ponson du Terrail. He represented the England that the Continent applauded—the only England that the Continent applauded. Silent, obstinate, inscrutable, insolent, but immensely wealthy and uncontrollably generous.” He has never spoken since hearing the terms of the Armistice, whether from a stroke or from his obstinacy. His mind is amazingly sharp though, and he has Sylvia’s number:

Obviously it taxed her mind to invent what she invented. You could not invent that sort of sex-cruelty stuff without having your mind a little affected. She could not, for instance, have invented the tale that he, Mark, was suffering for the sins of his youth without its taking it out of her. That is the ultimate retribution of Providence on those who invent gossip frequently.

Sylvia’s mind is affected, but she hasn’t lost it or anything like that. Rather she is haunted by the things she’s done and what she’s become. It’s not so much that society is turning on her, because it isn’t really, not yet anyway, but that she has seen herself and doesn’t like what she sees. One of her more recent shower-bath-string-pulling episodes was initiating divorce proceedings, only to drag Tietjens’s name through the papers.

Anyhow the case had been a fiasco and for the first time in her life Sylvia had felt mortification; in addition she had felt a great deal of religious fear. It had come into her mind in Court—and it came with additional vividness there above that house, that, years ago in her mother’s sitting-room in a place called Lobscheid, Father Consett had predicted that if Christopher fell in love with another woman, she, Sylvia, would perpetrate acts of vulgarity. And there she had been, not only toying with the temporal courts in a matter of marriage, which is a sacrament, but led undoubtedly into a position that she had to acknowledge was vulgar.

More mistakes, and for the same reasons as before—Sylvia is not as good at controlling things as she needs to be. It’s her own lawyer who turned the case into a fiasco, in a way she wouldn’t have wanted. But she can only set things in motion, unable to direct them with any exactitude once they’ve begun. And by the end of her scene at the cottage it’s clear she didn’t direct that last afternoon very well at all. She helped perpetrate what Christopher would consider the worst offense possible against him, but she’s absolutely defeated by the presence and uncontrollable actions of the people she’s brought to the cottage to hurt him and Valentine.

This whole volume is really one great scene like yesterday’s. Half a dozen swirling perspectives building to a surprisingly affecting (because how could it be more affecting than everything else, after so much?) close to the whole thing.