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Title: Last Post
Author: Ford, Ford Madox [Hueffer, Ford Madox] (1873-1939)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Duckworth, 1928
   [first U.K. edition]
Date first posted: 31 March 2015
Date last updated: 31 March 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1244

This ebook was produced by
Delphine Lettau, Alex White, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






                               LAST POST

                                   By

                            FORD MADOX FORD

               "_Oh, Rokehope is a pleasant place_
                _If the fause thieves would let it be._"
                                          Border Ballad.

                               DUCKWORTH
                       3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON




                         First published 1928.






  The characters in this story are imaginary and are not portraits of
                          any living persons.




                           DEDICATORY LETTER
                           To Isabel Paterson
Madame et cher Confrre,

I have for some years now had to consider you as being my fairy
godmother in the United States--though how one can have a godmother
junior to oneself I have yet to figure out. Perhaps godmothers of the
kind that can turn pumpkins into glass coaches can achieve miracles in
seniority. Or, when I come to think of it, I seem to remember that, for
a whole tribe of Incas converted who knows how and simultaneously, in
the days of the Conquistadores, an Infanta of Spain went to the font,
she being, whatever her age, of necessity junior to the elders at least
of the tribe. That, however, is all a trifle--except for my
gratitude!--compared with your present responsibility.

For, but for you, this book would only nebularly have existed--in space,
in my brain, where you will, so it be not on paper and between boards.
Save, that is to say, for your stern, contemptuous and almost virulent
insistence on knowing "what became of Tietjens" I never should have
conducted this chronicle to the stage it has now reached. The soldier,
tired of war's alarms, it has always seemed to me, might be allowed to
rest beneath bowery vines. But you would not have it so.

You--and for once you align yourself with the Great Public--demand an
ending: if possible a happy ending. Alas, I cannot provide you with the
end of Tietjens for a reason upon which I will later dwell--but I here
provide you with a slice of one of Christopher's later days so that you
may know how more or less he at present stands. For in this world of
ours though lives may end Affairs do not. Even though Valentine and
Tietjens were dead the Affair that they set going would go rolling on
down the generations--Mark junior and Mrs. Lowther, the unborn child and
the rest will go on beneath the nut-boughs or over the seas--or in the
best Clubs. It is not your day nor mine that shall see the end of them.

And think: How many people have we not known intimately and seen daily
for years! Then they move into another township, and, bad correspondents
as we all are and sit-at-homes as Fate makes most of us, they drop out
of our sights. They may--those friends of yours--go and settle in Paris.
You may see them for fortnights at decennial intervals, or you may not.

So I would have preferred to let it be with Tietjens, but you would not
have it. I have always jeered at authors who sentimentalised over their
characters, and after finishing a book exclaim like, say, Thackeray:
"Roll up the curtains; put the puppets in their boxes; quench the tallow
footlights" ... something like that. But I am bound to say that in
certain moods in Avignon this year it would less have surprised me to go
up to the upper chamber of the mill where I wrote and there to find that
friend of mine than to find you. For you are to remember that for me
Tietjens is the re-creation of a friend I had--a friend so vivid to me
that though he died many years ago I cannot feel that he is yet dead. In
the dedicatory letter of an earlier instalment of this series of books I
said that in these volumes I was trying to project how this world would
have appeared to that friend to-day and how, in it, he would have
acted--or you, I believe, would say re-acted. And that is the exact
truth of the matter.

Do you not find--you yourself, too--that, however it may be with the
mass of humanity, in the case of certain dead people you cannot feel
that they are indeed gone from this world? You can only know it, you can
only believe it. That is, at any rate, the case with me--and in my case
the world daily becomes more and more peopled with such _revenants_ and
less and less with those who still walk this earth. It is only yesterday
that I read of the death of another human being who will for the rest of
time have for me that effect. That person died thousands of miles away,
and yesterday it would have astonished me if she had walked into my room
here in New York. To-day it would no longer. It would have the aspect of
the simplest thing in the world.

So then, for me, it is with Tietjens. With his prototype I set out on
several enterprises--one of them being a considerable periodical
publication of a Tory kind--and for many years I was accustomed as it
were to "set" my mind by his comments on public or other affairs. He
was, as I have elsewhere said, the English Tory--the last English Tory,
omniscient, slightly contemptuous--and sentimental in his human
contacts. And for many years before I contemplated the writing of these
books--before the War even--I was accustomed to ask myself not merely
what he would have said of certain public or private affairs, but how he
would have acted in certain positions. And I do so still. I have only to
say to my mind, as the child on the knees of an adult says to its
senior: "Tell us a fairy tale!"--I have only to say: "Tell us what he
would here have done!" and at once he is there.

So, you see, I cannot tell you the end of Tietjens, for he will end only
when I am beyond pens and paper. For me at this moment he is, oddly
enough, in Avignon, rather disappointed in the quality of the Louis
Seize furniture that he has found there, and seated in front of the
Taverne Riche under the planes he is finding his Harris tweeds
oppressive. Perhaps he is even mopping the whitish brow under his
silver-streaked hair. And I have a strong itch to write to him that if
he wants to find Louis Treize stuff of the most admirable--perfectly
fabulous armoires and chests--for almost nothing, he should go westward
into the Limousin to ... But nothing shall make me here write that
name....

And so he will go jogging along with ups and downs and plenty of worries
and some satisfaction, the Tory Englishman, running his head perhaps
against fewer walls, perhaps against more, until I myself cease from
those pursuits.... Perhaps he will go on even longer if you, as
Marraine, succeed in conferring upon these works that longevity....

But out and alas, now you can never write about me again: for it would,
wouldn't it? look too much like: You scratch my back and I'll scratch
yours!

So don't write about Tietjens: write your own projections of the lives
around you in terms of your delicate and fierce art. Then you will find
me still more

                                           Your grateful and obedient
                                                               F. M. F.
 New York,
   _October 13th, 1927_.




                                PART ONE


                               CHAPTER I

He lay staring at the withy binders of his thatch; the grass was
infinitely green; his view embraced four counties; the roof was
supported by six small oak sapling-trunks, roughly trimmed and brushed
from above by apple boughs. French crab-apple! The hut had no sides.

The Italian proverb says: He who allows the boughs of trees to spread
above his roof, invites the doctor daily. Words to that effect. He would
have grinned, but that might have been seen.

For a man who never moved, his face was singularly walnut-coloured; his
head, indenting the skim-milk white of the pillows should have been a
gipsy's, the dark, silvered hair cut extremely close, the whole face
very carefully shaven and completely immobile. The eyes moved, however,
with unusual, vivacity, all the life of the man being concentrated in
them and their lids.

Down the path that had been cut in swathes from the knee-high grass, and
came from the stable to the hut, a heavy elderly peasant rolled in his
gait. His over-long, hairy arms swung as if he needed an axe or a log or
a full sack to make him a complete man. He was broad-beamed, in cord
breeches, very tight in the buttock; he wore black leggings, an
unbuttoned blue waistcoat, a striped flannel shirt, open at the
perspiring neck, and a square, high hat of black felt.

He said:

"Want to be shifted?"

The man in the bed closed his eyelids slowly.

"Ave a droper cider?"

The other again similarly closed his eyes. The standing man supported
himself with an immense hand, gorilla-like, by one of the oaken posts.

"Best droper cider ever I tasted," he said. "Is Lordship give me. Is
Lordship sester me: 'Gunning,' e ses, ... 'the day the vixen got into
keeper's coop enclosure ...'"

He began and slowly completed a very long story, going to prove that
English noble landlords preferred foxes to pheasants. Or should! English
landowners of the right sort.

Is Lordship would no more ave that vixen killed or so much as flurried,
she being gravid like than.... Dreadful work a gravid vixen can do among
encoops with pheasant poults.... Have to eat fer six or seven, she have!
All a-growing.... So is Lordship sester Gunning....

And then the description of the cider.... Ard! Thet cider was arder than
a miser's art or'n ole maid's tongue. Body it ad. Strength it ad. Stans
to reason. Ten year cider. Not a drop was drunk in Lordship's ouse under
ten years in cask. Killed three sheep a week fer his indoor and outdoor
servants. An three hundred pigeons. The pigeon-cotes is a hundred feet
high, an the pigeons' nesteses in oles in the inside walls. Clap-nests a
ole wall at a go an takes the squabs. Times is not what they was, but is
Lordship keeps on. An always will!

The man in the bed--Mark Tietjens--continued his own thought.

Old Gunning lumbered slowly up the path towards the stable, his hands
swinging. The stable was a tile-healed, thatched affair, no real stable
in the North Country sense--a place where the old mare sheltered among
chickens and ducks. There was no tidiness amongst South Country folk.
They hadn't it in them, though Gunning could bind a tidy thatch and trim
a hedge properly. All-round man. Really an all-round man; he could do a
great many things. He knew all about fox-hunting, pheasant-rearing,
wood-craft, hedging, dyking, pig-rearing and the habits of King Edward
when shooting. Smoking endless great cigars! One finished, light
another, throw away the stub....

Fox-hunting, the sport of kings with only twenty per cent. of the danger
of war! He, Mark Tietjens, had never cared for hunting; now he would
never do any more; he had never cared for pheasant-shooting. He would
never do any more. Not couldn't; wouldn't. _From henceforth_.... It
annoyed him that he had not taken the trouble to ascertain what it was
Iago said, before he had taken Iago's resolution.... _From henceforth he
never would speak word_.... Something to that effect: but you could not
get that into a blank verse line.

Perhaps Iago had not been speaking blank verse when he had taken his,
Mark Tietjens', resolution.... _Took by the throat the circumcisd dog
and smote him_.... Good man, Shakespeare! All-round man in a way, too.
Probably very like Gunning. Knew Queen Elizabeth's habits when hunting;
also very likely how to hedge, thatch, break up a deer or a hare or a
hog, and how to serve a writ and write bad French. Lodged with a French
family in Crutched Friars or the Minories. Somewhere.

The ducks were making a great noise on the pond up the hill. Old Gunning
in the sunlight lumbered between the stable-wall and the raspberry
canes, up-hill. The garden was all up-hill. He looked across the grass
up at the hedge. When they turned him round he looked down-hill at the
house. Rough, grey stone!

Half-round, he looked across the famous four counties; half round, the
other way on, he could see up the grass-slope to the hedge on the
roadside. Now he was looking up-hill across the tops of the hay-grass,
over the raspberry canes at the hedge that Gunning was going to trim.
Full of consideration for him, they were, all the lot of them. For ever
thinking of developing his possible interests. He didn't need it. He had
interests enough.

Up the pathway that was above and beyond the hedge on a grass-slope went
the Elliott children, a lanky girl of ten, with very long, corn-coloured
hair, a fat boy of five, unspeakably dirty. The girl too long and thin
in the legs and ankles, her hair limp. War-starvation in early years....
Well, that was not his fault. He had given the nation the transport it
needed; they should have found the stuff. They hadn't, so the children
had long, thin legs and protruding wrists on pipe-stem arms. All that
generation!... No fault of his. He had managed the nation's transport as
it should be managed. His department had. His own Department, made by
himself from junior temporary clerk to senior permanent official, from
the day of his entrance thirty-five years before to the day of his
resolution never more to speak word.

Nor yet stir a finger. He had to be in this world, in this nation. Let
them care for him; he was done with them.... He knew the sire and dam of
every horse from Eclipse to Perlmutter. That was enough for him. They
let him read all that could be read about racing. He had interests
enough!

The ducks on the pond up the hill continued to make a great noise,
churning boisterously the water with their wings and squawking. If they
had been hens there would have been something the matter--a dog chasing
them. Ducks did not signify; they went mad, contagiously. Like nations
and all the cattle of a county.

Gunning, lumbering past the raspberry canes, took a bud or so and
squeezed the pale things between finger and thumb, then examined his
thumb. Looking for maggots, no doubt. Pale green leaves the raspberry
had; a fragile plant amongst the robuster rosace. That was not
war-starvation but race. _Their_ commissariat was efficient enough, but
they were presumably not gross feeders. Gunning began to brush the
hedge, sharp, brushing blows with his baggin hook. There was still far
too much bramble amongst the quickset; in a week the hedge would be
unsightly again.

That was part of their consideration again! They kept the hedge low so
that he should be amused by passers-by on the path, though they would
have preferred to let it grow high so that the passers-by should not see
into the orchard.... Well, he had seen passers-by. More than they
knew.... What the hell was Sylvia's game? And that old ass Edward
Campion's?... Well, _he_ was not going to interfere. There was, however,
undoubtedly something up!... Marie Lonie--formerly Charlotte!--knew
neither of them by sight, though she had undoubtedly seen them peering
over the hedge!

They--it was more of their considerateness--had contrived a shelf on the
left corner-post of his shelter. So that birds should amuse him! A
hedge-sparrow, noiseless and quaker-grey, ghostlike, was on this shelf.
A thin, under-vitalized being that you never saw. It flitted, hiding
itself deep in hedge-rows. He had always thought of it as an American
bird: a voiceless nightingale, thin, long, thin-billed, almost without
markings as becomes a bird that seldom sees the sun but lives in the
twilight of deep hedges. American because it ought to wear a scarlet
letter. He only knew of Americans because of a book he had once read--a
woman like a hedge-sparrow, creeping furtive in shadows and getting into
trouble with a priest.

This desultory, slim bird, obviously Puritan, inserted its thin bill
into the dripping that Gunning had put on the shelf for the tom-tits.
The riotous tom-tit, the bottle-tit, the great-tit, all that family love
dripping. The hedge-sparrow obviously did not; the dripping on that
warmish June day had become oleaginous; the hedge-sparrow, its bill all
greased, mumbled its upper and lower mandible but took no more dripping.
It looked at Mark's eyes. Because these regarded it motionlessly, it
uttered a long warning note and flitted, noiseless, into invisibility.
All hedge things ignore you whilst you move on and do not regard them.
The moment you stay still and fix your eyes on them they warn the rest
of the hedge and flit off. This hedge-sparrow no doubt had its young
within earshot. Or the warning might have been just co-operative.

Marie Lonie, _ne_ Riotor, was coming up the steps and then the path.
He could hear her breathing. She stood beside him, shapeless in her long
pinafore of figured cotton, and breathed heavily, holding a plate of
soup and saying:

"_Mon pauvre homme! Mon pauvre homme! Ce qu'ils ont fait de toi!_"

She began a breathless discourse in French. She was of the large, blond,
Norman type; in the middle forties, her extremely fair hair very
voluminous and noticeable. She had lived with Mark Tietjens for twenty
years now, but she had always refused to speak a word of English, having
an invincible scorn for both language and people of her adopted country.

Her discourse poured on. She had set the little tray with the plate of
reddish-yellowish soup on a flat shelf of wood that turned out on a
screw from underneath the bed; in the soup was a shining clinical
thermometer that she moved and regarded from time to time, beside the
plate a glass syringe, graduated. She said that Ils--_They_--had
combined to render her soup of vegetables uneatable. They would not give
her _navets de Paris_ but round ones, like buttons; they contrived that
the carrots should be _pourris_ at their bottom ends; the leeks were of
the consistency of wood. They were determined that he should not have
vegetable soup because they wanted him to have meat juice. They were
anthropophagi. Nothing but meat, meat, meat! That girl!...

She had always in the Gray's Inn Road had Paris turnips from Jacopo's in
Old Compton Street. There was no reason why you should not grow _navets
de Paris_ in this soil. The Paris turnip was barrel-shaped, round,
round, round like an adorable little pig till it turned into its funny
little tail. That was a turnip to amuse you; to change and employ your
thoughts. _Ils_--he and she--were incapable of having their thoughts
changed by a turnip.

Between sentences she ejaculated from time to time:

"My poor man! What they have made of you!"

Her volubility flowed over Mark like a rush of water over a grating,
only a phrase or so now and then coming to his attention. It was not
unpleasant; he liked his woman. She had a cat that she made abstain from
meat on Friday. In the Gray's Inn Road that had been easier, in a large
room decorated with innumerable miniatures and silhouettes representing
members of the Riotor family and its branches. Mme Riotor _mre_ and Mme
Riotor _grand'mre_ too had been miniature painters, and Marie Lonie
possessed some astonishingly white statuary by the distinguished
sculptor Monsieur Casimir-Bar, a lifelong friend of her family who had
only never been decorated because of a conspiracy. So he had a great
contempt for decorations and the decorated. Marie Lonie had been
accustomed to repeat the voluminous opinions of Monsieur Casimir-Bar on
the subject of decorations at great length on occasion. Since he, Mark,
had been honoured by his sovereign she had less frequently recited them.
She admitted that the democracy of to-day had not the sterling value
that had distinguished democrats of the day of her parents, so it might
be better to _caser_ oneself--to find a niche amongst those whom the
State distinguished.

The noise of her voice, which was deep-chested and not unpleasing, went
on. Mark regarded her with the ironic indulgence that you accord to a
child, but indeed, when he had been still in harness, it had rested him
always to come home to her as he had done every Thursday and Monday, and
not infrequently on a Wednesday when there had been no racing. It had
rested him to come home from a world of incompetent imbeciles and to
hear this brain comment on that world. She had views on virtue, pride,
downfalls, human careers, the habits of cats, fish, the clergy,
diplomats, soldiers, women of easy virtue, Saint Eustachius, President
Grvy, the purveyors of comestibles, custom-house officers, pharmacists,
Lyons silk weavers, the keepers of boarding-houses, garotters,
chocolate-manufacturers, sculptors other than M. Casimir-Bar, the lovers
of married women, housemaids.... Her mind, in fact, was like a cupboard,
stuffed, packed with the most incongruous materials, tools, vessels and
debris. Once the door was opened you never knew what would tumble out or
be followed by what. That was restful to Mark as foreign travel might
have been--only he had never been abroad except when his father, before
his accession to Groby, had lived in Dijon for his children's education.
That was how he knew French.

Her conversation had another quality that continually amused him: she
always ended it with the topic with which she had chosen to begin. Thus,
to-day having chosen to begin with _navets de Paris_, with Paris turnips
she would end, and it amused him to observe how on each occasion she
would bring the topic back. She might be concluding a long comment on
ironclads and have to get back suddenly to custards because the
door-bell rang while her maid was out, but accomplish the transition she
would before she answered the bell. Otherwise she was frugal, shrewd,
astonishingly cleanly and healthy.

Whilst she was giving him his soup, inserting the glass syringe in his
lips at half minute intervals which she timed by her wrist-watch, she
was talking about furniture.... _Ils_ would not let her apply to the
species of rabbit-hutches in the salon a varnish that she imported from
Paris; Monsieur her brother-in-law had really exhibited when she had
actually varnished a truly discreditable chair--had exhibited a
distraction that had really filled her with amusement. It was possible
that the fashion of the day was for furniture of decrepitude, or gross
forms. That _they_ would not let her place in the salon the newly-gilt
arm-chair of her late mother or the sculptural group representing Niobe
and some of her offspring by the late Monsieur Casimir-Bar, or the
overmantel clock that was an exact reproduction in bronze of the
Fountain of the Mdicis in the gardens of the Luxembourg at Paris--that
was a matter of taste. _Elle_ might very well feel umbrage that she,
Marie Lonie, should possess articles of such acknowledged prestige. For
what could be more unapproachable than a Second Empire fauteuil newly
gilt and maintained, she could assure the world, at such a pitch of
glitter as dazzled the eyes? _Elle_ might very well feel umbrage when
you considered that the skirt that she wore when gardening was ... Well,
in short was what it was! Nevertheless, in that skirt she allowed
herself to be seen by the clergyman. But why did _Il_, who was
admittedly a man of honour and sensibility and reputed to know all the
things of this world and perhaps of the next--why did _He_ join in the
infinitely stupid conspiracy against the work of the great genius
Casimir-Bar? She, Marie Lonie, could understand that He, in his
difficult situation, would not wish to give permission to install in the
salon works at which Elle took umbrage because her possessions did not
include objects of art which all the world acknowledged to be of classic
rank, not to mention the string of pearls which she, Marie Lonie,
Riotor by birth, owed to the generosity of him, Mark, and her own
economies. And other objects of value and taste. That was reasonable. If
your woman is poorly _dot_-ed ... Let us call it _dot_-ed ... because
certainly she, Marie Lonie, was not one to animadvert upon those in
situations of difficulty.... It would ill become her so to do.
Nevertheless, a great period of years of honesty, frugality, regularity
of life and cleanliness.... And she asked Mark if he had ever seen in
_her_ parlour traces of mud such as on wet days she had certainly
observed in the salon of a certain person.... And certain revelations
she could make as to the condition of a cupboard under the stairs and
the state to be observed behind certain presses in the kitchen. But if
you have not had experience in the control of domestics, what would
you?... Nevertheless, a stretch of years passed in the state of
housewifeliness such as she had already adumbrated upon gave one the
right to comment--of course with delicacy--upon the _mnage_ of a young
person even though her delicate situation might avert from her comment
of an unchristian nature as to certain other facts. It did, however,
seem to her, Marie Lonie, that to appear before a clergyman in a skirt
decorated with no less than three visible _taches_ of petrol, wearing
gloves encrusted with mud as you encrust a truffle with paste before
baking it under the cinders--and holding, of all implements, a common
gardening-trowel.... And to laugh and joke with him!... Surely the
situation called for a certain--let them call it, retirement of
demeanour. She was far from according to the Priest as such the
extravagant privileges to which he laid claim. The late Monsieur
Casimir-Bar was accustomed to say that, if we accorded to our
_soi-disant_ spiritual advisers all that they would take, we should lie
upon a bed that had neither sheets, _eidredons_, pillows, bolsters, nor
settle. And she, Marie Lonie, was inclined to agree with Monsieur
Casimir-Bar, though, as one of the heroes of the barricades in 1848, he
was apt to be a little extreme in his tenets. Still a vicar is in
England a functionary of the State and as such should be received with a
certain modesty and reserve. Yet she, Marie Lonie, formerly Riotor, her
mother having been born Lavigne-Bourdreau and having in consequence a
suspicion of Huguenot blood, so that she, Marie Lonie, might be
expected to know how the Protestant clergy should be received--she then,
Marie Lonie, from the little window on the side of the stairs, had
distinctly seen _Elle_ lay one hand on the shoulder of that clergyman
and point--point, mind you, with the _trowel_--to the open front door
and say--she had distinctly heard the words: "Poor man, if you have
hunger you will find Mr. Tietjens in the dining-room. He is just eating
a sandwich. It's hungry weather!"... That was six months ago, but Marie
Lonie's ears still tingled at the words and the gesture. A trowel! To
point with a _trowel_; _pensez y_! If a trowel why not a _main de fer_,
a dust-pan? Or a vessel even more homely!... And Marie Lonie chuckled.

Her grandmother Bourdreau remembered a crockery-merchant of the
ambulating sort who had once filled one of those implements--a _vase de
nuit_--but of course new, with milk and had offered the whole
gratuitously to any passer-by who would drink the milk. A young woman
called Laborde accepted his challenge there in the market-place of
Noisy-Lebrun. She had lost her fianc, who found the gesture
exaggerated. But he was a farceur, that crockery-dealer!

She drew from the pocket of her pinafore several folded pages of a
newspaper and from under the bed a double picture-frame--two frames
hinged together so that they would close. She inserted a sheet of the
paper between the two frames and then hung the whole on a piece of
picture wire that depended from the roof-tree beneath the thatch. Two
braces of picture-wire, too, came from the supporting posts, to right
and left. They held the picture-frames motionless and a little inclined
towards Mark's face. She was agreeable to look at, stretching up her
arms. She lifted his torso with great strength and infinite solicitude,
propped it a little with the pillows and looked to see that his eyes
fell on the printed sheet. She said:

"You can see well, like that?"

His eyes took in the fact that he was to read of the Newbury Summer
Meeting and the one at Newcastle. He closed them twice to signify Yes!
The tears came into hers. She murmured:

"Mon pauvre homme! Mon pauvre homme! What they have done to you!" She
drew from another pocket in her pinafore a flask of eau-de-Cologne and a
wad of cotton wool. With that, moistened, she wiped even more
solicitously his face and then his thin, mahogany hands, which she
uncovered. She had the air of women in France when they change the white
satin clothes and wash the faces of favourite Virgins at the church
doors in August.

Then she stood back and apostrophized him. He took in that the King's
filly had won the Berkshire Foal plate and the horse of a friend the
Seaton Delaval Handicap, at Newcastle. Both might have been expected. He
had meant to go to the Newcastle meeting this year and give Newbury a
by. The last year he had gone racing he had done rather well at Newbury,
so he had then thought he would try Newcastle for a change, and, whilst
he was there, take a look at Groby and see what that bitch Sylvia was
doing with Groby. Well, that was done with. They would presumably bury
him at Groby.

She said in deep, rehearsed tones:

"My Man!"--she might almost have well said: "My Deity!"--"What sort of
life is this we lead here? Was there ever anything so singular and
unreasonable? If we sit to drink a cup of tea, the cup may at any moment
be snatched from our mouths; if we recline upon a divan--at any moment
the divan may go. I do not comment on this that you lie by night as by
day for ever here in the open air, for I understand that it is by your
desire and consent that you lie here and I will never exhibit aversion
from that which you desire and that to which you consent. But cannot you
bring it about that we should inhabit a house of some reason, one more
suited to human beings of this age, and one that is less of a procession
of goods and chattels? You can bring that about. You are all-powerful
here. I do not know what are your resources. It was never your habit to
tell me. You kept me in comfort. Never did I express a desire that you
did not satisfy, though it is true that my desires were always
reasonable. So I know nothing, though I read once in a paper that you
were a man of extravagant riches, and that can hardly all have vanished,
for there can have been fewer men of as great a frugality, and you were
always fortunate and moderate in your wagers. So I know nothing and I
would scorn to ask of these others, for that would imply doubt of your
trust in me. I do not doubt that you have made arrangements for my
future comfort, and I am in no uncertainty of the continuance of those
arrangements. It is not material fears that I have. But all this appears
to be a madness. Why are we here? What is the meaning of all this? Why
do you inhabit this singular erection? It may be that the open air is of
necessity for your malady. I do not believe that you lived in perpetual
currents of air in your chambers, though I never saw them. But on the
days you gave to me you had everything of the most comfortable and you
seemed contented with my arrangements. And your brother and his woman
appear so mad in all the other affairs of life that they may well be mad
in this also. Why then will you not end it? You have the power. You are
all-powerful here. Your brother will spring from one corner to the other
of this lugubrious place in order to anticipate your slightest wish.
Elle, too!"

Stretching out her hands, she had the air of a Greek woman who invoked a
deity, she was so large and fair and her hair was so luxuriantly blond.
And indeed, to her, in his mystery and silence he had the air of a deity
who could discharge unthinkable darts and vouchsafe unimaginable
favours. Though all their circumstances had changed, that had not
changed, so that even his immobility enhanced his mystery. In all their
life together, not merely here, he had been silent whilst she had
talked. On the two regular days of the week on which he had been used to
visit her, from the moment when she would open her door exactly at seven
in the evening and see him in his bowler hat with his carefully rolled
umbrella and with his racing glasses slung diagonally across him to the
moment when, next morning at half-past ten, she would brush his bowler
and hand him that and his umbrella, he would hardly speak a word--he
would speak such few words as to give the idea of an absolute
taciturnity, whilst she entertained him with an unceasing flow of talk
and of comments on the news of the Quartier--of the French colonists of
that part of London, or on the news in the French papers. He would
remain seated on a hard chair, bending slightly forward, with, round the
corners of his mouth, little creases that suggested an endless,
indulgent smile. Occasionally he would suggest that she should put half
a sovereign upon a horse; occasionally he would bring her an opulent
present, heavy gold bangles floridly chased and set with large emeralds,
sumptuous furs, expensive travelling trunks for when she had visited
Paris or went to the seaside in the autumn. That sort of thing. Once he
had bought her a complete set of the works of Victor Hugo bound in
purple morocco and all the works that had been illustrated by Gustave
Dor, in green calf; once a hoof of a racehorse, trained in France, set
in silver in the form of an inkstand. On her forty-first
birthday--though she had no idea how he had ascertained that it was her
forty-first birthday--he had given her a string of pearls and had taken
her to a hotel at Brighton kept by an ex-prize-fighter. He had told her
to wear the pearls at dinner, but to be careful of them because they had
cost five hundred pounds. He asked her once about her investment of her
saving, and when she had told him that she was investing in French
_rentes viagres_ he had told her that he could do better than that for
her, and afterwards from time to time he had told her of odd but very
profitable ways of investing small sums.

In this way, because his gifts filled her with rapture on account of
their opulence and weightiness, he had assumed for her the aspect by
degrees of a godhead who could bless--and possibly blast--inscrutably.
For many years after he had first picked her up in the Edgware Road
outside the old Apollo she had regarded him with suspicion, since he was
a man and it is the nature of men to treat women with treachery, lust
and meanness. Now she regarded herself as the companion of a godhead,
secure and immune from the evil workings of Fortune--as if she had been
seated on the shoulder of one of Jove's eagles, beside his throne. The
Immortals had been known to choose human companions: when they had so
done fortunate indeed had been the lot of the chosen. Of them she felt
herself to be one.

Even his seizure had not deprived her of her sense of his wide-spreading
and inscrutable powers, and she could not rid herself of the conviction
that if he would, he could talk, walk and perform the feats of strength
of a Hercules. It was impossible not to think so; the strength of his
glance was undiminished, and it was the dark glance of a man, proud,
vigorous, alert and commanding. And the mysterious nature and occurrence
of the seizure itself only confirmed her subconscious conviction. The
fit had come so undramatically that although the several pompous and,
for her, nearly imbecile, English physicians who had been called in to
attend on him, agreed that some sort of fit must have visited him as he
lay in his bed, that had done nothing to change her mind. Indeed, even
when her own Doctor, Drouant-Rouault, asserted with certitude and
knowledge that this was a case of fulminant hemiplegia of a
characteristic sort, though her reason accepted his conclusion, her
subconscious intuition remained the same. Doctor Drouant-Rouault was a
sensible man; that he had proved by pointing out the anatomical
excellence of the works of sculpture by Monsieur Casimir-Bar and
agreeing that only a conspiracy of rivals could have prevented his
arriving at the post of President of the cole des Beaux Arts. He was,
then, a man of sense and his reputation amongst the French tradesmen of
the Quarter stood very high: she had never herself needed the attentions
of a doctor. But if you needed a doctor, obviously you went to a
Frenchman and acquiesced in what he said.

But although she acquiesced in words to others, and indeed to herself,
she could not convince herself in her _for intrieur_, nor indeed had
she arrived at that amount of exterior conviction without some argument
at least. She had pointed out, not only to Doctor Drouant-Rouault, but
she had even conceived it to be her duty to point out to the English
practitioners to whom she would not otherwise have spoken, that the man
lying there in her bed was a North-countryman, from Yorkshire, where men
were of an inconceivable obstinacy. She had asked them to consider that
it was not unusual for Yorkshire brothers and sisters or other relatives
to live for decades together in the same house and never address a word
to each other, and she had pointed out that she knew Mark Tietjens to be
of an unspeakable determination. She knew it from their lifelong
intimacy. She had never, for instance, been able to make him change his
diet by an ounce in weight, or the shaking of a pepper-pot as to
flavour--not once in twenty years during which she had cooked for him.
She pleaded with these gentlemen to consider as a possibility that the
terms of the Armistice were of such a nature as to make a person of
Mark's determination and idiosyncrasies resolve to withdraw himself for
ever from all human contacts, and that if he did so determine nothing
would cause him to change his determination. The last word he had spoken
had been whilst one of his colleagues at the Ministry had been
telephoning to tell her, for Mark's information, what the terms of the
Armistice were. At the news, which she had had to give him over her
shoulder, he had made from the bed some remark.--He had been recovering
from double pneumonia at the time.--What the remark had been she could
not exactly repeat; she was almost certain that it had been to the
effect--in English--that he would never speak again. But she was aware
that her own predilection was sufficient to bias her hearing. She had
felt herself, at the news that the Allies did not intend to pursue the
Germans into their own country--she had felt herself as if she could say
to the High Permanent Official at the other end of the telephone that
she would never speak word to him and his race again. It was the first
thing that had come into her mind, and no doubt it had been the first
thing to come into Mark's.

So she had pleaded with the doctors. They had paid practically no
attention to her, and she was aware that that was very likely due to her
ambiguous position as the companion for long, without any legal
security, of a man whom they considered as now in no position to
continue his protection of her. That she in no way resented; it was in
the nature of English male humanity. The Frenchman had naturally
listened with deference, bowing even a little. But he had remarked with
a sort of deaf obstinacy: Madame must consider that the occasion of the
stroke only made more certain that it _was_ a stroke. And that argument
to her, as Frenchwoman, must seem almost incontrovertible. For the
betrayal of France by her Allies at the supreme moment of triumph had
been a crime, the news of which might well cause the end of the world to
seem desirable.


                               CHAPTER II

She continued to stand beside him and to apostrophize him until it
should be time to turn round the framed newspaper so that he could read
the other side of the sheet. What he read first contained the remarks of
various writers on racing. That he took in rapidly, as if it were a mere
_bonne bouche_. She knew that he regarded with contempt the opinions of
all writers on racing, but the two who wrote in this particular sheet
with less contempt than the others. But the serious reading began when
she turned the page. Here were endless, serried columns of the names of
race-horses, their jockeys and entrants at various race-meetings, their
ages, ancestries, former achievements. That he would peruse with minute
attention that would cost him just under an hour. She would have liked
to stay with him whilst he read it, for the intensive study of matters
connected with race-horses had always been their single topic of
communion. She had spent almost sentimental hours leaning over the back
of his arm-chair reading news of the turf simultaneously with himself,
and the compliments he had been used to pay her over her predictions of
Form, if they were the only compliments he ever paid her, had filled her
with the warm pleasure and confusion that she might have felt had he
addressed the same compliments to her on the subject of her person. She
did not indeed need compliments from him as to her person; his complete
contentment with her sufficed--but she had rejoiced in, and now missed,
those long, quiet times of communing. She remarked to him indeed that
Seattle had won her race as she had several days ago predicted because
there had been no other competitors in any way of the same class as the
filly, but there had been no answering, half-contemptuous grunt of
acquiescence such as in the old days had been hers.

An aeroplane had droned overhead and she had stepped out to look up at
the bright toy that, shone upon by the sun, progressed slowly across the
pellucid sky. When she went in, in answer to the double closing of his
lids that meant that he acquiesced in the turning of his news-sheet, she
unhitched one brace from the oaken post to his right and, walking round
his bed, attached the brace on the post to his left, doing the reverse
with the brace that had gone to the left. In that way the picture-frames
turned completely round and exhibited the other side of the
newspaper-frame.

It was a contrivance that daily excited her annoyance and, as usual, she
expressed herself. This was another instance of the madness of They--of
her brother-in-law and his woman. Why had they not obtained one of those
ingenious machines, like an arm of bright brass supporting a
reading-shelf of agreeably varnished mahogany, that you clamped to a
bedstead and could adjust at any angle? Why indeed had They not procured
one of those huts for the tuberculous that she had seen depicted in a
catalogue. Such huts could be painted in agreeable stripes of green and
vermilion, thus presenting a gay appearance, and they could be turned
upon a pivot so as to meet the rays of the sun or avoid the currents of
air caused by the wind? What could be the explanation of this mad and
gross structure? A thatched roof supported on posts without walls? Did
they desire him to be blown out of his bed by the draughts? Did They
merely desire to enrage her? Or could it be that their resources were of
such exiguity that they could not afford the conveniences of modern
civilization?

She might well have thought that to be the case. But how could it, in
face of the singular behaviour of Monsieur her _beau-frre_ in the
matter of the statuary of Casimir-Bar the great sculptor. She had
offered to contribute to the expenses of the establishment even at the
cost of the sacrifice of what she held most dear, and how singular had
been his behaviour. During their absence on the occasion of the great
sale at Wingham Priory she had ordered the amiable if gross Gunning and
the semi-imbecile carpenter to descend from her room to the salon that
admirable _Niobe_ and the admittedly incomparable _Thetis informing
Neptune of the death of a Son-in-law_, not to mention her newly re-gilt
Second Empire fauteuil. And in that gloomy wilderness how had they not
shone in their respective whiteness and auriference! The pose of the
_Niobe_ how passionate, the action of the _Thetis_ how spirited and how
at the same time pathetic! And she had seized the opportunity to varnish
with a special preparation imported from the City of the Arts the only
chair in the salon that was not too rough to be susceptible of varnish
even though it came from Paris herself. A clumsy affair at that--of the
epoch of Louis the Thirteenth of France, though heaven knew whose epoch
that was here. Without doubt that of Cromwell the regicide!

And Monsieur must needs seize the moment of his entry on this thus
enlivened scene to exhibit the only display of emotion that she had ever
known him vouchsafe. For otherwise Monsieur had the pose of being at
least as self-contained if not as absolutely taciturn as Mark himself.
She asked Mark: was that the moment for what was after all if you
analysed it a manifestation of attachment for his young woman? What else
could it be? _Il_--Monsieur their relative, passed for a man of
unbounded knowledge. He knew all knowledge. He could not but be aware of
the supreme value of the work of Casimir-Bar who, but for the
machinations of his rival Monsieur Rodin and his confrres, must have
attained to the highest honours in France. But not only had Monsieur
with hisses and tut-tuts of anger ordered Gunning and the carpenter at
once to remove the statuary and the fauteuil from the salon where she
had exhibited them--with heaven knew how much reluctance--with a view to
their attracting the attention of a chance customer--for chance
customers did come in Their absence without rendezvous.... Not only
that, but Monsieur, to gratify the perhaps not unnatural envy of Elle,
had cast meretricious doubts on the pecuniary value of the works of
Casimir-Bar themselves. Every one knew how the Americans to-day were
stripping the unfortunate land of France of her choicest art treasures;
the enormous prices they paid; the avidity they showed. Yet that man had
tried to persuade her that her statues were worth no more than a few
shillings apiece. It was incomprehensible. He was in want of money to
the extent of turning their house into a mere depot for dilapidated
objects in rough wood and battered brass. He had contrived to obtain
singular prices for these forlorn objects from insane Yankees who came
great distances to purchase these debris from him. Yet when he was
offered pieces of the utmost beauty in the most perfect condition he
just simply turned the objects down with scoffing.

For herself, she respected passion--though she could have imagined an
object of passion more calculated to excite that feeling than Elle, whom
for convenience she would call her _belle-soeur_. She at least was
broad-minded, and moreover she understood the workings of the human
heart. It was creditable for a man to ruin himself for the object of his
affections. But this at least she found exaggerated.

And what, then, was this determination to ignore the developments of
modern genius? Why would they not purchase for Mark a reading-desk with
a brass arm that should indicate to the neighbours and dependents that
at least he was a person of condition? Why no revolving hut? There were
certain symptoms of that age that were disquieting. She would be the
first to acknowledge that. They had only to read in the papers of the
deeds of assassins, highway robbers, of the subversive and the ignorant
who everywhere seized the reins of power. But what was to be said
against such innocent things as the reading-desk, the revolving hut and
the aeroplane. Yes, the aeroplane!

Why did they ignore the aeroplane? They had told her that the reason why
they had been unable to provide her with _navets de Paris_ was that the
season was becoming too advanced for the sowing of the seeds of those
admirable and amusing vegetables which, seen advancing through the pale
electric lights of the early hours of the morning, piled symmetrically
as high as the first floors of the hotels, on the market-carts, provided
one of the gayest spectacles of the night-life of la Ville Lumire. They
had said that to procure the seeds from Paris would demand at least a
month. But supposing they had sent a letter by aeroplane, requesting the
dispatch of the seeds equally by aeroplane, to procure them, as all the
world knew, would be a matter merely of a few hours. And, having thus
brought the matter back to turnips again, she concluded:

"Yes, mon pauvre homme, they have singular natures, our relatives--for I
will include the young woman in that category. I, at least, am
broad-minded enough for that. But they have singular natures. It is a
singular affair!"

She departed up the path towards the stable, speculating on the nature
of her man's relatives. They were the relatives of a godhead--but
godheads had relatives of a singular nature. Let Mark figure as Jupiter;
well, Jupiter had a son called Apollo who could not be regarded as
exactly _fils de famille_. His adventures had been of the most
irregular. Was it not known that he had spent a long space of time with
the shepherds of King Admetus, singing and carousing? Well, Monsieur
Tietjens might for convenience be regarded as a sort of Apollo, now
amongst the shepherds of Admetus and complete with female companion. If
he did not often sing, he also concealed the tendencies that had brought
about his downfall. He was quiet enough about the house, extraordinary
as the house might be. Elle also. If their relationship was irregular it
presented no aspects of reprehensible festivity. It was a sufficiently
serious _collage_. That at least ran in the family.

She came round the rough balks of the side of the stable upon Gunning,
seated on the stone-sill of the door, cutting with a broad-bladed
clasp-knife considerable chunks out of a large meat pasty. She surveyed
his extended leggings, his immense bemired boots and his unshaven
countenance and remarked in French that the shepherds of Admetus were
probably differently dressed. They certainly were in all the
performances of the _Alceste_ that she had seen. But perhaps he served
his turn.

Gunning said that he supposed he had to go on duty again. She, he
supposed, was going to bottle off the cider or she would not have had
him bring down that ere cask. She was to be careful to tie the carks
tight; it would get itself a ed proper.

She said that if she, a Norman of a hundred generations, did not know
how to handle cider it would be a strange thing, and he said that it
would be a pity if that cider went wrong after all the trouble they ad
ad.

He brushed the crumbs of his demolished pie off the cords of his
breeches, carefully picking up the larger fragments of crust and
inserting them into his mouth between his broad red lips. He asked if er
Ladyship knew whether the Cahptn wanted the mare that afternoon. If not
e might's well turn er on the Common. She said that she did not know;
the Captain had said nothing to her about it. He said he supposed e
might's well. Cramp said e would not have the settee ready to go to the
station fore mornin. If she would wait there he would go git some tepid
water and they would moisten the eggs. She did not ask better.

He scrambled to his feet and lumbered down the stone path towards the
house. She stood in the bright day regarding the long grass of the
orchard, the gnarled, whitened trunks of the fruit trees, the little
lettuces like aligned rosettes in the beds, and the slope of the land
towards the old stones of the house that the boughs of the apple-trees
mostly hid. And she acknowledged that, in effect, she did not ask
better. A Norman, if Mark had died in the ordinary course, she would no
doubt have gone back to the neighbourhood either of Falaise or Bayeux,
from which places came the families of her grandfather and grandmother
respectively. She would probably have married a rich farmer or a rich
grazier, and, by choice, she would have pursued a life of bottling off
cider and moistening the eggs of sitting hens. She had had her training
as a _coryphe_ at the Paris opera, and no doubt if she had not made her
visit to London with the Paris opera troupe and if Mark had not picked
her up in the Edgware Road where her lodgings had been, she would have
lived similarly with some man in Clichy or Auteuil until with her
economies she would have been able, equally, to retire to one or other
of the _pays_ of her families, and marry a farmer, a butcher, or a
grazier. She acknowledged, for the matter of that, that she would
probably not have raised more succulent _poulets au grain_ or more
full-bodied cider than came from the nest-boxes and the presses here,
and that she was leading no other life than that which she had always
contemplated. Nor, indeed, would she have wanted any other henchman than
Gunning who, if you had given him a blue blouse with stitchery and a
_casquette_ with a black leather peak, would have passed for any peasant
in Caen market.

He swung up the path, carrying gingerly a large blue bowl, just as if
his blouse bellied out round him; he had the same expression of the
mouth; the same intonation. It was nothing that she obstinately spoke
French to him. On his subjects he could tell by intuition what her
answers to his questions were and she understood him well enough.

He said that he had better take the ens off the nesteses fer fear they
peck er ands, and giving her the bowl, brought out from the shadows a
protesting, ruffled and crooning hen, before which he dropped a handful
of bran paste and a lettuce leaf. He came out with another and yet
others. Then he said she could go in and sprinkle the eggs. He said that
it always bothered him to turn the eggs; his clumsy ol ands bruk em 's
often as not. He said:

"Wait whilst I brings out ol mare. Bit o grass wunt do er much
mischief."

The hens, swollen to an enormous size, paraded hostilely against one
another about her feet; they clucked; crooned; pecked at lumps of paste;
drank water eagerly from an iron dog-trough. With an exaggerated clatter
of hoofs old mare emerged from the stable. She was aged nineteen,
obstinate, bitter, very dark bay, extremely raw-boned. You might fill
her with oats and mash five times a day but she would not put on flesh.
She emerged into the light from the door with the trot of a prima-donna,
for she knew she had once been a famous creature. The hens fled; she bit
into the air, showing immense teeth. Gunning opened the orchard gate,
just at hand; she went out at a canter; checked; crumpled her knees
together; fell on her side and rolled and rolled; her immense lean legs
were incongruous, up in the air.

"Yes," Marie Lonie said, "pour moi-mme je ne demanderais pas mieux!"

Gunning remarked:

"Don't show er age, do she? Gambolling like a five day lamb!" His voice
was full of pride, his grey face joyful. Is Lordship once sed that ol
mare had orter be put in the Orse Show up to Lunnon. Some yeers ago that
was!

She went into the dark, warm, odorous depths of the hen-house-stable
shed; the horse-box being divided off from the hen half by wire netting,
nest-boxes, blankets extended on use-poles. She had to bend down to get
into the hen-half. The cracks of light between the uprights of the walls
blinked at her. She carried the bowl of tepid water gingerly, and thrust
her hand into the warm hay hollows. The eggs were fever-heat or
thereabouts; she turned them and sprinkled in the tepid water; thirteen,
fourteen, fourteen, eleven--That hen was a breaker!--and fifteen. She
emptied out the tepid water and from other nests took out egg after egg.
The acquisition gratified her.

In an upper box a hen brooded low. It crooned menacingly, then screamed
with the voice of poultry disaster as her hand approached it. The
sympathetic voices of other hens outside came to her, screaming with
poultry disaster--and other hens on the Common. A rooster crowed.

She repeated to herself that she did not demand a better life than this.
But was it not self-indulgence to be so contented? Ought she not to be,
still, taking steps for her future--near Falaise or Bayeux? Did one not
owe that to oneself? How long would this life last here? And, still
more, when it broke up, _how_ would it break up? What would _Ils_--the
strange people, do to her, her savings, her furs, trunks, pearls,
turquoises, statuary, and newly-gilt Second Empire chairs and clocks?
When the Sovereign died what did the Heir, his concubines, courtiers and
sycophants do to the Maintenon of the day? What precautions ought she
not to be taking against that wrath to come? There must be French
lawyers in London....

Was it to be thought that _Il_--Christopher Tietjens, clumsy, apparently
slow-witted but actually gifted with the insight of the supernatural....
Gunning would say: The Captain, he never says anything, but who knows
what he thinks? He perceives everything.... Was it to be thought then
that, once Mark was dead and the actual owner of the place called Groby
and the vast stretch of coal-bearing land that the newspaper had spoken
of, Christopher Tietjens would maintain his benevolent and frugal
dispositions of to-day? It was truly thinkable. But, just as he appeared
slow-witted and was actually gifted with the insight of the
supernatural, so he might well now maintain this aspect of despising
wealth and yet develop into a true Harpagon as soon as he held the reins
of power. The rich are noted for hardness of heart, and brother will
prey upon brother's widow sooner than on another.

So that, certainly, she ought to put herself under the protection of the
Authorities. But then, what Authorities? The long arm of France would no
doubt protect one of her nationals even in this remote and uncivilized
land. But would it be possible to put that machinery in motion without
the knowledge of Mark--and what dreadful steps might Mark not take in
his wrath if he thought that she had set machinery in motion?

There appeared nothing for it but to wait, and that side of her nature
being indolent, perhaps being alone indolent, she was aware that she was
contented to wait. But was such a course right? Was it doing justice to
herself or to France? For it is the duty of the French citizen, by
industry, frugality and vigilance, to accumulate goods; and it was above
all the duty of the French citizen to carry back accumulated hoards to
that distressed country, stripped bare as she was by the perfidious
Allies. She might herself rejoice in these circumstances, these grasses,
orchards, poultry, cider-presses, vegetable-gardens--even if the turnips
were not of the Paris _navet_ variety! She might not ask for better. But
there might be a little _pays_, near Falaise, or, in the alternative,
near Bayeux, a little spot that she might enrich with these spoils from
the barbarians. If every inhabitant of a _pays_ in France did the same
would not France again be prosperous, with all its _clochers_ tolling
out contentment across smiling acres? Well, then!

Standing gazing at the poultry, whilst Gunning with a hone smoothed out
some notches from his baggin hook, previous to again going on duty, she
began to reflect on the nature of Christopher Tietjens, for she desired
to estimate what were her chances of retaining her furs, pearls and gilt
articles of vertu.... By the orders of the doctor who attended daily on
Mark--a dry, sandy, no doubt perfectly ignorant person--Mark was never
to be left out of sight. He was of opinion, this doctor, that one day
Mark might move--physically. And there might be great danger if ever he
did move. The lesions, if lesions there were in his brain, might then be
re-started with fatal effects.--Some such talk. So they must never let
him out of their sight. For the night they had an alarm that was
connected by a wire from his bed to hers. Hers was in a room that gave
onto the orchard. If he so much as stirred in his bed the bell would
ring in her ear. But indeed she rose every night, over and over again,
to look from her window into his hut; a dim lantern illuminated his
sheets. These arrangements appeared to her to be barbarous, but they met
the views of Mark and she was thus in no position to question them....
So she had to wait whilst Gunning honed out his sickle-shaped,
short-handled blade.

It had all then begun--all the calamities of the world had begun amidst
the clamours and intoxications of that dreadful day. Of Christopher
Tietjens till then she had known little or nothing. For the matter of
that of Mark himself she had known little or nothing until a very few
years ago. She had known neither his name, nor how he occupied himself,
not yet where he lived. It had not been her business to inquire, so she
had never made inquiries. Then one day--after thirteen years--he had
awakened one morning with an attack of bronchitis after a very wet
Newmarket Craven Meeting. He had told her to go to his Office with a
note addressed to his chief clerk, to ask for his letters and to tell
them to send a messenger to his chambers to get some clothes and
necessaries.

When she had told him that she did not know what his Office was nor
where were his chambers, nor even his surname, he had grunted. He had
expressed neither surprise nor gratification, but she knew that he had
been gratified--probably with himself for having chosen a woman
companion who displayed no curiosity rather than with her for having
displayed none. After that he had had a telephone installed in her
rooms, and not infrequently he would stay later of a morning than had
been his habit, letting a messenger from the Office bring letters or
fetch documents that he had signed. When his father had died he had put
her into mourning.

By that date, gradually, she had learned that he was Mark Tietjens of
Groby, an immense estate somewhere in the North. He employed himself at
an Office of the Government's in Whitehall--apparently with questions of
railways. She gathered, chiefly from ejaculations of the Messenger, that
he treated his Ministry with contempt, but was regarded as so
indispensable that he never lost his post. Occasionally, the Office
would ring up and ask her if she knew where he was. She would gather
from the papers afterwards that that was because there had been a great
railway accident. On those occasions he would have been absent at a
race-meeting. He gave the Office, in fact, just as much of his time as
he chose, no more and no less. She gathered that, with his overpowering
wealth, it was of no account to him except as an occupation of leisure
time between meetings, and she gathered that he was regarded as an
occult power amongst the rulers of the nation. Once, during the war when
he had hurt his hand, he dictated to her a note of a confidential nature
to one of the Cabinet Ministers. It had concerned itself with Transport
and its tone had been that of singular, polite contempt.

For her he was in no way astonishing. 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. For herself, _elle ne demandait pas mieux_. For
there was about him nothing of the unexpected. He was as regular as the
Westminster Chimes; he never exacted the unexpected of her and he was
all-powerful and never in the wrong. He was, in short, what her
countrywomen called _srieux_. No Frenchwoman asks better than that of
lover or husband. It was the serious _collage par excellence_: they as a
_mnage_, were sober, honest, frugal, industrious, immensely wealthy,
and seriously saving. For his dinner, twice a week, she cooked him
herself two mutton chops with all but an eighth of an inch of the fat
pared off, two mealy potatoes, as light and as white as flour, an
apple-pie with a very flaky crust which he ate with a wedge of Stilton
and some pulled bread and butter. This dinner was never varied once in
twenty years, except during the season of game, when on alternate weeks
a pheasant, a brace of grouse or of partridges would come from Groby.
Nor in the twenty years had they once been separated for a whole week
except that every late summer he spent a month at Harrogate. She always
had his dress-shirts washed for him by her own laundress in the
Quartier. He spent almost every week-end in one country house or
another, using at most two dress-shirts and that only if he stayed till
Tuesday. English people of good class do not dress for dinner on
Sundays. That is a politeness to God, because theoretically you attend
evening service and you do not go to church in the country in evening
dress. As a matter of fact you never go to evening service--but it is
complimentary to suggest by your dress that you might be visited by the
impulse. So, at least, Marie Lonie Tietjens understood the affair.

She was looking out on the Common that sloped up to beech trees, at the
poultry--bright chestnut birds, extremely busy on the intense green of
the browsed grass. The great rooster reminded her of the late Monsieur
Rodin, the sculptor who had conspired against Casimir-Bar. She had once
seen him in his studio, conducting some American ladies round his work,
and he had precisely resembled a rooster kicking its leg back and
drooping its wings in the dust round a new hen. Only round a new one.
Naturally!... This rooster was a tremendous Frenchman. _Un vrai de la
vraie._ You could imagine nothing more unlike Christopher Tietjens!...
The backward-raking legs on the dancing toes; the gait of a true master
of deportment at an academy of young ladies! The vigilant clear eye
cocking up every minute.... Hark! A swift shadow ran over the ground:
the sparrow-hawk! The loud, piercing croon of that Father of his
Country. How the hens all re-echoed it; how the chickens ran to their
mothers and all together to the shadow of the hedge. Monsieur, the hawk
would have no chance amidst that outcry. The hawk flits silent and
detests noise. It will bring the poultry-keeper with his gun!... All is
discovered because of the vigilance of Milord Chantecler.... There are
those who reprove him because his eyes are always on the sky, because he
has a proud head. But that is his function--that and gallantry. Perceive
him with a grain of corn; how he flies upon it; how he invites with
cries! His favourite--the newest--hens run clucking joyously to him. How
he bows, droops and prances, holding the grain of corn in his powerful
bill, depositing it, pecking to bruise it and then depositing it before
his sultana of the moment. Nor will he complain if a little ball of
fluff runs quickly and pecks the grain from his bill before Madame
Partlet can take it from him. His gallantry has been wasted, but he is a
good father!... Perhaps there is not even a grain of corn when he issues
his invitations; perhaps he merely calls his favourites to him that he
may receive their praise or perform the act of Love....

He is then the man that a woman desires to have vouchsafed her. When he
smites his wing feathers behind his back and utters his clarion cry of
victory over the hawk that now glides far away down the hill, his hens
come out again from the shadows, the chickens from beneath their
mothers' wings. He has given security to his country and in confidence
they can return to their avocations. Different, indeed, from that
Monsieur Christopher who, even when he was still a soldier, more than
anything resembled a full, grey, coarse meal-sack short in the wind and
with rolling, hard-blue eyes. Not hard eyes, but of a hard blue! And
yet, curiously, he too had some of the spirit of Chantecler beneath his
rolling shoulders of a farmyard boar. Obviously you could not be your
brother's brother and not have some traces of the Milor.... The spleen
too. But no one could say that her Mark was not a proper man, _Chic_ in
an eccentric manner, but, oh yes, _chic_! And that was his brother.

Naturally he might try to despoil her. That is what brother does to
brother's widow and children.... But, on occasion, he treated her with a
pompous courtesy--a parade. On the first time he had seen her--not so
long ago that; only during that period of the war that had been without
measurable time--he had treated her to heavy but expressive gestures of
respect and words of courtesy in an old-fashioned language that he must
have learned at the Thatre Franais while they still played _Ruy Blas_.
French was a different thing now, that she must acknowledge. When she
went to Paris--which she did every late summer whilst her man went to
Harrogate--the language her nephews spoke was a different
affair--without grace, courtesy, intelligibility. Certainly without
respect! Oh, l, l! When they came to divide up her inheritance that
would be a sharper kind of despoilment than ever Christopher Tietjens'!
Whilst she lay on her bed of death those young fellows and their wives
would be all through her presses and armoires like a pack of wolves....
_La famille!_ Well, that was very proper. It showed the appropriate
spirit of acquisition. What was a good mother for if not to despoil her
husband's relatives in the interests of their joint children!

So Christopher had been as courteous as a well-trained meal-sack of the
_dix-huitime_. Eighteenth century. Older still, _priode Molire_! When
he had come into her room that had been dimly lit with a _veilleuse_--a
night-light; they are so much more economical than shaded electric
lights!--he had precisely suggested to her a lumbering character from
Molire as presented at the Comdie Franaise; elaborate of phrase and
character but protuberant in odd places. She might in that case have
supposed that he entertained designs on her person; but with his eyes
sticking out in elaborate considerateness, he had only come to break to
her the news that his brother was about to make an honest woman of her.
That had been Mark's phrase. It is of course only God that can do
that.... But the enterprise had had the full concurrence of Monsieur the
Heir-Apparent.

He had indeed been active whilst she had slumbered in a hooded-chair
after four days and three nights on her feet. She would have surrendered
the body of Mark to no human being but his brother. Now the brother had
come to tell her not to be alarmed--panting with nervousness and
shortness of breath.... Bad lungs both the brothers had! Panting he had
come to tell her not to be alarmed at finding in her man's room a
priest, a lawyer and a lawyer's clerk.... These black-robed people
attend on death, bringing will-forms and the holy oils. The doctor and a
man with oxygen cylinders had been there when she had gone to repose
herself. It was a pretty congregation of the vultures that attend on us
during life.

She had started at once to cry out. That undoubtedly was what had made
him nervous--the anticipation that she would cry out sharply in the
black, silent London that brooded between air-raids. In that silence,
before sleep had visited her peignoir-enveloped, and therefore clumsyish
form, she had been aware of Christopher's activities on the telephone in
the passage. It had struck her that he might have been warning the
Pompes Funbres!... So she had begun to scream: the sound that
irresistibly you make when death is about to descend. But he had
agitated himself to soothe her--for all the world like Monsieur Sylvain
on the boards of Molire's establishment! He spoke that sort of French,
in a hoarse whisper, in the shadows of the night-light ... assuring her
that the priest was for marriage, with licence of the Archevque de
Cantorbri such as in London you got in those days from Lambeth Palace
for thirty pounds sterling. That enabled you to make any woman honest at
any hour of the day or night. The lawyer was there to have a will
re-signed. Marriage in this singular country invalidates any previous
will. So Tietjens (Christophre) assured her.

But then, if there was that haste, there was danger of death. She had
often speculated as to whether he would or would not marry her as an act
of death-bed contrition. Rather contemptuously as great lords with _le
spleen_ make their peace with God. She screamed. In silent, black
London. The night-light wavered in its saucer.

He crepitated out that his brother was doubling, in this new will, his
posthumous provision for her. With provision for the purchase of a house
in France if she would not inhabit the Dower House at Groby. A Louis
Treize dower-house. It was his idea of consolation. He affected to be
business-like.... These English. But then, perhaps they do not go
through your presses and wardrobes whilst your corpse is still warm!

She screamed out that they might take away their marriage papers and
will-forms, but to give her her man again. If they had let her give him
her tisanes instead of...

With her breast heaving, she had cried into that man's face:

"I swear that my first act when I am Madame Tietjens and have the legal
power will be to turn out all these men and give him infusions of
poppy-heads and lime-flowers." She expected to see him recoil, but he
had said:

"In heaven's name do, my dear sister. It might save him and the nation."

It was silly of him to talk like that. These fellows had too much pride
of family. Mark did no more than attend to Transport. Well, perhaps
transport in those days had its importance. Still, probably Tietjens,
Christopher, overrated the indispensableness of Tietjens, Mark.... That
would have been a month before the Armistice. They were black days.... A
good brother, though....

In the other room, whilst papers were signing, after the _cur_ in his
_calotte_ and all had done reading from his book, Mark had signed to her
to bend her head down to him and had kissed her. He whispered:

"Thank God there is one woman-Tietjens who is not a whore and a bitch!"
He winced a little; her tears had fallen on his face. For the first time
she had said: "Mon pauvre homme, ce qu'ils ont fait de toi!" She had
been hurrying from the room when Christopher had stopped her. Mark had
said:

"I regret to put you to further inconvenience ..." in French. He had
never spoken to her in French before. Marriage makes a difference. They
speak to you with ceremony out of respect for themselves and their
station in life. You also are at liberty to address them as your _pauvre
homme_.

There had to be another ceremony. A man looking like a newly dressed
jail-bird stepped out with his book like an office register. With a
blue-black jowl. He married them over again. A civil marriage this time.

It was then that, for the first time, she had become aware of the
existence of another woman-Tietjens, Christopher's wife.... She had not
known that Christopher had a wife. Why was not she there? But Mark with
his labouring politeness and chest had told her that he exaggerated the
formality of the marriage because if both he and Christopher died, she,
Marie Lonie Tietjens, might have trouble with a certain Sylvia. The
Bitch!... Well, she, Marie Lonie, was prepared to face her
sister-in-law.


                              CHAPTER III

The little maid, Beatrice, as well as Gunning, regarded Marie Lonie
with paralysed but bewildered obedience. She was Er Ladyship, a good
mark; a foreign Frenchy, bad; extraordinarily efficient about the house
and garden and poultry-yard, a matter for mixed feelings. She was fair,
not black-avised, a good mark; she was buxom, not skinny, like the real
Quality. A bad mark because she was, then, not real Quality; but a
qualifiedly good mark because, if you as to ave Quality all about you in
the ouse, tis better not to ave real Quality.... But on the whole the
general feeling was favourable, because like themselves she was floridly
blond. It made er uman like. Never you trust a dark woman, and if you
marries a dark man e will treat you bad. In the English countryside it
is like that.

Cabinet-maker Cramp, who was a remnant of the little dark persistent
race that once had peopled Sussex, regarded Marie Lonie with distrust
that mingled with admiration for the quality of the varnish that she
imported from Paris. Proper French Polish that were. He lived in the
cottage just across the path on the Common. E couldn' say as ow e liked
the job the Governors give im. He had to patch up and polish with
beeswax--not varnish--rough stuff such s is granf'er ad ad. An ad got
rid of. Rough ol truck. More 'nundred yeers old. N more!

He had to take bits of old wood out of one sort of old truck and fit it
into missing bits of other old truck. Bought old Moley's pig-pound
boards that had been Little Kingsworth church stalls. The Cahptn ad ad
im, Cramp, use'm for all manner of patchin's up. The Captain had bought,
too, ol Miss Cooper's rabbit utch. Beautifully bevelled the panels was,
too, when cleaned up n beeswaxed. Cramp would acknowledge that. Made him
match the bevelling in the timber from Kingsworth Church stalls for one
of the missing doors, an more of the timber for the patching. Proper
job, he, Cramp, had made of it, too; he would say that. N it looked
proper when it was finished--a long, low press, with six bevelled doors;
beautiful purfling on the edges. Like some of the stuff Is Lordship ad
in the Tujer Room at Fittleworth House. More'n a undred yeers old. Three
undred. Four.... There's no knowin.

N no accountin fer tastes. E would say e ad n eye--the Cahptn ad. Look
at a bit of ol rough truck, the Cahptn would, n see it was older than
the Monument to Sir Richard Atchison on Tadworth Ill that was set up in
the year 1842 to celebrate the glorious victory of Free Trade. So the
Monument said. Lug a bit of rough ol truck out of the back of a
cow-house where it had been throwed--the Cahptn would. And his, Cramp's,
heart would sink to see the ol mare come back, some days, the cart full
of encoops, n leaden pig-truffs, n pewter plates that ad been used to
stop up oles in cow-byres.

N off it would all go to Murrikay. Queer place Murrikay must be--full of
the leavins of ol England. Pig-troughs, hen-coops, rabbit-hutches,
wash-house coppers that no one now had any use for. He loaded em, when
he'd scrubbed, and silver-sanded and bees-waxed-n-turpentined em, onto
the ol cart, n put to ol mare, n down to station, n on to Southampton n
off to New York. Must be a queer place, yon! Hadn't they no
cabinet-makers or ol rough truck of ther own?

Well, it took all sorts to make a world n thank God fer that. He, Cramp,
had a good job likely to last im is lifetime because some folks wus
queer in the ed. The ol lumber went out yon and his, Cramp's missus, was
gettin together a proper set of goods. A tidy treat their sittin room
looked with aspidistras in mahogany tripods, n a Wilton carpet n bamboo
cheers n mahogany whatnots. A proper woman Missus Cramp was if sharp in
the tongue.

Miss's Cramp she didn' give so much fer Er Ladyship. She was agin
Foreigners. All German spies they wus. Have no truck with them, she
wouldn't. Oo noo if they wus s much s married. Some says they wus, some
says they wusn. But you couldn' take in Miss's Cramp.... N Quality! What
was to show that they were real Quality? Livin how they did wasn'
Quality manners. Quality wus stuck up n wore shiny clothes n had
motorcars n statues n palms n ball-rooms n conservatories. N didn bottle
off the cider n take the eggs n speak queer lingo to th handy-man. N
didn' sell the cheers they sat on. The four younger children also didn't
like Er Ladyship. Never called em pretty dears, she didn't, nor give em
sweeties nor rag-dolls nor apples. Smacked em if she found em in the
orchard. Never so much s give em red flannel capes in the winter.

But Bill, the eldest, liked Er Ladyship. Called er a proper right un.
Never stopped tarkin of er. N _she_ ad statues in er bedroom, n fine
gilt cheers, n clocks, n flowerin plants. Bill e'd made fer Er Ladyship
what she called n eightyjare. In three stories, to stand in a corner n
hold knick-nacks out of fretwork to a pettern she'd give im. Varnished
proper, too. A good piece of work if he shouldn't say so.... But Miss's
Cramp she'd never been allowed in er Ladyship's bedroom. A proper place
it was. Fit fer a Countess! If Miss's Cramp could be allowed to see it
she'd maybe change her opinions.... But Miss's Cramp she said: Never you
trust a fair woman, bein dark.

The matter of the cider, however, did give him to think. Proper cider it
was, when they was given a bottle or two. But it wasn't Sussex cider. A
little like Devonshire cider, more like Herefordshire. But not the same
as any. More head it had n was sweeter, n browner. N not to be drunk s
freely! Fair scoured you it did if you drunk s much s a quart!

The little settlement was advancing furtively to the hedge. Cramp put
his bald poll out of his work-shed and then crept out. Mrs. Cramp, an
untidy, dark, very thin woman emerged over her door-sill, wiping her
hands on her apron. The four Cramp children at different stages of
growth crept out of the empty pig-pound.--Cramp was not going to buy his
winter pigs till next fortnightly fair at Little Kingsnorth.--The
Elliott Children, with the milk-can, came at a snail's pace down the
green path from the farm; Mrs. Elliott, an enormous woman with untidy
hair, peered over her own hedge, which formed a little enclosure on the
Common; Young Hogben, the farmer's son, a man of forty, very thick-set,
appeared on the path in the beech-wood, ostensibly driving a great black
sow. Even Gunning left his brushing and lumbered to the edge of the
stable. From there he could still see Mark in his bed, but also, looking
downwards between the apple-trunks he could see Marie Lonie bottle the
cider, large, florid and intent, in the open dairying-shed where water
ran in a V-shaped wooden trough.

"Runnin t' cider out of cask with a chube!" Mrs. Cramp screamed up the
hill to Mrs. Elliott. "Ooever eered!" Mrs. Elliott rumbled huskily back
at Mrs. Cramp. All these figures closed in furtively; the children
peering through tiny interstices in the hedge and muttering one to the
other: "Ooever eered.... Foreign ways, I call it.... A glass chube....
Ooever eered." Even Cramp, though, wiping his bald head with his
carpenter's apron, he admonished Mrs. Cramp to remember that he had a
good job--even Cramp descended from the path to the hedge-side and stood
so close--peering over--that the thorns pricked his perspiring chest
through his thin shirt. They said to the baker who wearily followed his
weary horse up the steep path, coming from the deep woods below: It had
ought to be stopped. The police had ought to know. Bottling cider by
means of a glass tube. And standing the cider in running water. Where
was the excise? Rotting honest folks guts! Poisoning them. No doubt the
governor could tell them a tale if he could speak or move. The police
had ought to know.... Showing off, with cider in running water--to cool
it when first bottled! Ooever eered! Just because they ad a Ladyship to
their tail. N more money than better folks. Not so much money either.
Reckon they'd come to smash n be sold up like Igginson at Fittleworth.
Set isself up fer Quality, e did too!... N not so much of a Ladyship,
neither. Not so much more of a Ladyship as us if the truth was known.
Not an Earl or a Lord, only a baronite-ess at that, supposin we all ad
our rights.... The police had ought to be brought into this affair!

A number of members of the Quality, on shining horses, their leathers
creaking beautifully, rode at a walk up the path. They were the real
Quality. A fine old gentleman, thin as a lath, clean face, hooky nose,
white moustache, lovely cane, lovely leggings. On Is Lordship's
favourite hack. A bay mare. A fine lady, slim as a boy, riding astride
as they do to-day though they did not use to. But times change. On the
Countess's own chestnut with white forehead. A bad-tempered horse. She
must ride well that lady. Another lady, grey haired, but slim too,
riding side-saddle in a funny sort of get-up. Long skirt with panniers
and three-cornered hat like the ones you see in pictures of highwaymen
in the new pub in Queen's Norton. Sort of old-fashioned, she looked. But
no doubt it was the newest pattern. Things is so mixed up nowadays. Is
Lordship's friends could afford to do as they pleased. A boy, eighteen
maybe. Shiny leggings too: all their clothes is shiny. Rides well, too,
the boy. Look how his legs nip into Orlando--the chief whip's horse. Out
for an airing. Is Lordship's groom of the stud only too glad if the
horses can get exercise in hay-cutting time. The real Quality.

They reined in their horses and sat staring, a little further up the
road, down into the orchard. They had ought to be told what was going on
down there. Puts white powder into the cider along o the sugar. The
Quality ought to be told.... But you do not speak to the Quality. Better
if they do not notice you. You never know. They sticks together. Might
be friends of Tietjenses for all you know. You don't know Tietjenses
ain't Quality. Better git a move on or something might appen to you. You
hear!

The boy in the shiny leggings and clothes--bareheaded he was, with shiny
fair hair and shiny cheeks--exclaimed in a high voice:

"I say, mother, I don't like this spying!" And the horses started and
jostled.

You see. They don't like this spying. Get a move on. And all that
peasantry got a move on whilst the horses went slowly up hill. Queer
things the Gentry can do to you still if they notice you. It is all very
well to say this is a land fit for whatever the word is that stands for
simple folk. They have the police and the keepers in their hands and
your cottages and livings.

Gunning went out at the garden gate beside the stable and shouted
objurgations at Young Hogben.

"Hey, don't you drive that sow. She's as much right on Common as you."

The great sow was obstinately preceding the squat figure of Young
Hogben, who hissed and squeaked behind her. She flapped her great ears
and sniffed from side to side, a monument of black imperturbability.

"You keep your ogs out of our swedes!" Young Hogben shouted amidst
objurgations. "In our forty-acre she is all day n all night too!"

"You keep your swedes outen our ogs," Gunning shouted back, swinging his
gorilla arms like a semaphore. He advanced on to the Common. Young
Hogben descended the slope.

"You fence your ogs in same's other folks as to do," Young Hogben
menaced.

"Folks as abuts on Commons as to fence out, not fence in," Gunning
menaced. They stood foot to foot on the soft sward menacing each other
with their chins.

"Is Lordship sold Tietjens's to the Cahptn without Common rights," the
farmer said. "Ask Mr. Fuller."

"Is Lordship could no more sell Tietjens's 'thout Common rights n you
could milk without drinking rights. Ast Lawyer Sturgis!" Gunning
maintained. Put arsenic in among is roots, Young Hogben maintained that
he would. Spend seven years up to Lewes Jail if e did, Gunning
maintained. They continued for long the endless quarrel that obtains
between tenant-farmer who is not Quality but used to brutalizing his
hinds and gentlemen's henchman who is used to popularity amongst his
class and the peasantry. The only thing upon which they agreed was that
you wouldn't think there adn't been no war. The war ought to have given
tenant-farmers the complete powers of local tyrants; it should have done
the same for gentlemen's bailiffs. The sow grunted round Gunning's
boots, looking up for grains of maize that Gunning usually dropped. In
that way sows come to heel when you call them however far away they may
be on the Common.

                 *        *        *        *        *

From the hard road up the hill--Tietjens's went up the slope to the
hedge there--descended the elderly lady who was singularly attired in
the eyes of the country people. She considered that she was descended,
not by blood, but by moral affinity from Madame de Maintenon, therefore
she wore a long grey riding skirt with panniers, and a three-cornered,
grey felt hat, and carried a riding switch of green shagreen. Her thin
grey face was tired but authoritative, her hair which she wore in a knot
beneath her hat was luminously grey, her pince-nez rimless.

Owing to the steepness of the bank on which the garden rose, the path of
sea-pebbles zigzagged across most of its width, orange-coloured because
it had been lately sanded. She went furtively between quince-trunks,
much like the hedge-sparrow, flitting a stretch and then stopping for
the boy with the shining leggings stolidly to overtake her.

She said that it was dreadful to think that the sins of one's youth
could so find one out. It ought to make her young companion think. To
come at the end of one's life to inhabiting so remote a spot. You could
not get there with automobiles. Her own Delarue-Schneider had broken
down on the hill-road in the attempt to get there yesterday.

The boy, slim in the body, but heavy in the bright red cheeks, with
brown hair, truly shiny leggings and a tie of green, scarlet and white
stripes, had a temporarily glum expression. He said, nevertheless, with
grumbling determination, that he did not think this was playing the
game. Moreover hundreds of motors got up that hill; how else would
people come to buy the old furniture? He had already told Mrs. de Bray
Pape that the carburetters of Delarue-Schneiders were a wash-out.

It was just that, Mrs. Pape maintained, that was so dreadful a thought.
She went swiftly down another zigzag of the path and then faltered.

It was that that was dreadful in these old countries, she said. Why
could they never learn? Take example? Here were the descendants of a
great family, the Tietjens of Groby, a haunt of ancient peace, the one
reduced to a no doubt dreadful state by the sins of his youth, the other
to making a living by selling old furniture.

The youth said she was mistaken. She must not believe all that his
mother hinted to her. His mother was all right, but her hints went
further than facts warranted. If he wanted to let Groby to Mrs. de Bray
Pape it was because he hated swank. His uncle also hated swank.... He
mumbled a little and added: "And ... my father!" Moreover it was not
playing the game. He had soft brown eyes that were now clouded and he
was blushing.

He mumbled that mother was splendid, but he did not think she ought to
have sent him there. Naturally she had her wrongs. For himself he was a
Marxist-Communist. All Cambridge was. He therefore of course approved of
his father's living with whom he wished. But there were ways of doing
things. Because you were advanced you did not have to treat women with
discourtesy. The reverse, rather. He was painfully agitated by the time
he overtook the tired lady at the corner of the next zigzag.

She wanted him not to misunderstand her. No discredit attached in her
eyes to the pursuit of selling old furniture. Far from it. Mr. Lemuel of
Madison Avenue might be called a dealer in old furniture. It was, of
course, Oriental, which made a difference. But Mr. Lemuel was a most
cultivated man. His country house at Croogers in the State of New York
was kept up in a style that would have done credit to the grands
seigneurs of pre-Revolutionary France. But from that to this ... what a
downfall!

The house--the cottage--was by now nearly below her feet, the roof
extremely high, the windows sunk very deep in grey stone and very small.
There was a paved semi-circular court before the door, the space having
been cut out of the orchard bank and walled with stones. It was
extravagantly green, sunk in greenery, and the grass that came nearly to
Mrs. Pape's middle was filled with hiding profusions of flowers turning
to seed. The four counties swept away from under her, hedges like string
going away, enclosing fields, to the hills on the very distant horizon.
The country near at hand wooded. The boy beside her took a deep breath
as he always did when he saw a great view. On the moors above Groby, for
instance. Purple they were.

"It _isn't_ fit for human habitation!" the lady exclaimed with the
triumphant intonation of one who sees a great truth confirmed. "The
homes of the poor in these old countries beggar even pity. Do you
suppose they so much as have a bath?"

"I should think my father and uncle were personally _clean_!" the boy
said. He mumbled that this was supposed to be rather a show place. He
could trust his father indeed to find rather a show place to live in.
Look at the rock plants in the sunk garden! He exclaimed: "Look here!
Let's go back!"

Mrs. Pape's perturbation gave way to obstinacy. She exclaimed:

"Never!" She had a mission from the poor boy's injured mother. She would
never look Sylvia Tietjens in the face if she flinched. Sanitation went
before anything. She hoped to leave the world a better place before she
passed over. She had Authority conferred on her. Metem-psychosistically.
She believed that the soul of Madame de Maintenon, the companion of
Lewis the Fourteenth, had passed into her. How many convents had not the
Maintenon set up and how rigidly had she not looked after the virtue and
the sanitation of the inhabitants? That was what she, Mrs. Millicent de
Bray Pape, looked to. She had in the South of France--the Riviera--a
palace, erected by Mr. Behrens, the celebrated architect--after the
palace of the Maintenon at Sans Souci. But sanitated! She asked the
young man to believe her. The boudoir appeared to be only a panelled
boudoir; very large because of the useless vanity of le Raw Solale.
Madame de Maintenon would have been content without such vanity.... But
only touch a spring in the panels and every sort of bathing arrangement
presented itself to you hidden in the wall. Sunken baths; baths above
ground; douches with sea-water extra-iodized; lateral douches with and
without bath-salts dissolved in the water. That was what she called
making the world a little better. Impossible not to be healthy with all
that...

The boy mumbled that he was not in principle against the old tree's
coming down. He was, indeed, in principle against his uncle's and his
father's adoption of the peasant life. This was an industrial age. The
peasant had always spoilt every advance in the ideas of the world. All
the men at Cambridge were agreed as to that. He exclaimed:

"Hi! You can't do that.... Not go through standing hay!"

Every fibre of his country boy landowner's soul was outraged as he saw
the long trail of satiny grey that followed Mrs. de Bray Pape's long
skirts. How were his father's men to cut hay that had been trampled like
that? But, unable to bear any longer the suspense of the spectacular
advance towards Mark Tietjens along those orange zigzags, Mrs. de Bray
Pape was running straight down the bank towards the unwalled, thatched
hut. She could see it through the tops of the apple-tree.

The boy, desperately nervous, continued to descend the zigzag paths that
would take him into the very purlieus of his father's house--onto the
paved court where there were rock plants between the interstices. His
mother _ought_ not to have forced him to accompany Mrs. de Bray Pape.
His mother was splendid. Divinely beautiful: athletic as Atalanta or
Betty Nuthall, in spite of her sufferings. But she ought not to have
sent Mrs. de Bray Pape. It was _meant_ as a sort of revenge. General
Campion had not approved. He could see that, though he had said: "My
boy, you ought always to obey your dear mother! She has suffered so
much. It is your duty to make it up to her by fulfilling her slightest
whim. An Englishman always does his duty to his mother!"

Of course it was the presence of Mrs. de Bray Pape that forced the
General to say that. Patriotism. General Campion was deadly afraid of
mother. Who wasn't? But he would hardly have enjoined upon a son to go
and spy upon his father and his father's ... companion if he had not
wanted to show Mrs. de Bray Pape how superior English family ties were
to those of her country. They ragged each other about that all day long.

And yet he did not know. The dominion of women over those of the
opposite sex was a terrible thing. He had seen the old General whimper
like a whipped dog and mumble in his poor white moustache.... Mother was
splendid. But wasn't sex a terrible thing.... His breath came short.

He covered two foot of pebbles with the orange sand rolled into them. A
tidy job it must be rolling on that slope! Still, the actual gradient
was not so steep on the zigzags. One in sixteen perhaps. He covered
another two foot of pebbles with orange sand rolled in. How could he?
How could he cover another two? His heels were trembling!

Four counties ran out below his feet. To the horizon! _He showed him the
kingdoms of the earth._ As great a view as above Groby, but not purple
and with no sea. Trust father to settle where you could see a great view
by going up hill. _Vox adhsit_.... "His feet were rooted to the earth."
... No, _vox adhsit faucibus_ meant that his voice stuck to his jaws.
Palate rather. His palate was as dry as sawdust! How _could_ he do
it!... A terrible thing! They called it Sex!... His mother had coerced
him into this dry palate and trembling heels by the force of her sex
fever. Dreadful good-nights they had had in her boudoir, she forcing and
forcing and forcing him with arguments to go. To come here. Beautiful
mother!... Cruel! Cruel!

The boudoir all lit up. Warm! Scented! Mother's shoulders! A portrait of
Nell Gwynn by Sir Peter Lely. Mrs. de Bray Pape wanted to buy it.
Thought she could buy the earth, but Lord Fittleworth only laughed....
How had they all got forced down there? By mother.... To spy on father.
Mother had never set any store by Fittleworth--good fellow Fittleworth,
good landlord!--till last winter when she had got to know that father
had bought this place. Then it was Fittleworth, Fittleworth,
Fittleworth! Lunches, dinner, dances at the Ambassadors. Fittleworth
wasn't saying no. Who could say no to mother with her figure in the
saddle and her hair?

If he had known when they came down to Fittleworth's last winter what he
knew now! He knew now that his mother, come down for the hunting, though
she had never taken much stock in hunting ... Still, she could ride.
Jove, she could ride. He had gone queer all over again and again at
first in taking those leaps that she took laughing. Diana, that's what
she was.... Well, no, Diana was ... His mother, come down for the
hunting, was there to torment father and his ... companion. She had told
him. Laughing in that way she had.... It must be sex cruelty!...
Laughing like those Leonardi-do-da.... Well, Vinci women. A queer laugh,
ending with a crooked smile.... In correspondence with Father's
servants.... Dressing up as a housemaid and looking over the hedge.

How _could_ she do it? _How?_ How could she force him to be here? What
would Monty, the Prime Minister's son, Dobles, Porter--fat ass because
his father was too beastly rich--what would his set think at Cambridge?
They were all Marxist-Communists to a man. But still ...

What would Mrs. Lowther think if she _really_ knew?... If she could have
been in the corridor one night when he came out from his mother's
boudoir! He would have had the courage to ask her then. Her hair was
like floss silk, her lips like cut pomegranates. When she laughed she
threw up her head.... He was now warm all over, his eyes wet and warm.

When he had asked if he ought to--if _she_ wanted him to--do whatever
his mother wanted whether or no he approved.... If his mother asked him
to do what he thought was a mean action.... But that had been on the
Peacock Terrace with the famous Fittleworth Seven Sister Roses.... How
she went against the roses.... In a yellow ... No, moth-coloured ... Not
yellow, not yellow. Green's forsaken, but yellow's forsworn. Great pity
filled him at the thought that Mrs. Lowther might be forsaken. But she
must not be forsworn ... moth-coloured silk. Shimmering. Against pink
roses. Her fine, fine hair, a halo. She had looked up and sideways. She
had been going to laugh with her lips like cut pomegranates.... She had
told him that as a rule it was a good thing to do what one's mother
wanted when she was like Mrs. Christopher Tietjens. Her soft voice....
Soft Southern voice.... Oh, when she laughed at Mrs. de Bray Pape....
How could she be a friend of Mrs. de Bray Pape's?...

If it hadn't been sunlight.... If he had come on Mrs. Lowther as he came
out of his mother's boudoir! He would have had courage. At night. Late.
He would have said: "If you are really interested in my fate tell me if
I ought to spy upon my father and his ... companion!" She would not have
laughed, late at night. She would have given him her hand. The loveliest
hands and the lightest feet. And her eyes would have dimned.... Lovely,
lovely pansies! Pansies are hearts-ease....

Why did he have these thoughts: these wafts of intolerable ... oh,
desire. He was his mother's son.... His mother was ... He would kill
anyone who said it....

Thank God! Oh, thank God! He was down on the crazy paving level with the
house. _AND there was another path went up to Uncle Mark's shed._ The
Blessed Virgin--who was like Helen Lowther!--had watched over him. He
had not to walk under those little deep, small-paned windows.

His father's ... companion might have been looking out. He would have
fainted....

His father was a good sort of man. But he, too, must be ... like Mother.
If what they said was true. Ruined by dissolute living. But a good, grey
man. The sort of man to be tormented by Mother. Great spatulate fingers.
But no one had ever tied flies like Father. Some he had tied years ago
were the best he, Mark Tietjens junior of Groby, had yet. And Father
loved the wine-coloured moor. _How_ could he stifle under these boughs!
A house overhung by trees is unsanitary. Italians say that....

But what a lovely glimpse under the trees! Sweet-williams along the
path. Light filtered by boughs. Shadow. Gleams in the little
window-panes. Wall-stones all lichen. That's England. If he could spend
a while here with Father....

Father had been matchless with horses. Women, too.... What an
inheritance was his, Mark Tietjens, junior's! If he could spend a while
here.... But his Father slept with ... If she came out of the door....
She must be beautiful.... No they said she was not a patch on mother. He
had overheard that at Fittleworth's. Or Helen Lowther.... But his father
had had his pick?... If he chose then to sleep with ...

If she came out of the door he would faint.... Like the Venus of Botti
... A crooked smile.... No, Helen Lowther would protect.... He might
fall in love with his Father's ... What do you know of what will happen
to you when you come in contact with the Bad Woman.... Of advanced
views.... They said she was of Advanced Views. And a Latinist.... He was
a Latinist. Loved it!

Or his father might with Hel ... Hot jealousy filled him. His father was
the sort of man ... She might ... Why did over ... People like mother
and father beget children?

He kept his eyes fascinatedly fixed on the stone porch of the cottage
whilst he stumbled up the great stone slabs to the path. The path led to
Uncle Mark's wall-less thatched hut.... No form filled the porch. What
was to become of him? He had great wealth; terrific temptation would be
his. His mother was no guide. His father might have been better....
Well, there was Marxian-Communism. They all looked to that now, in his
set at Cambridge. Monty, the Prime Minister's son, with black eyes;
Dobles, Campion's nephew, lean as a rat; Porter, with a pig's snout, but
witty as hell. Fat ass.


                               CHAPTER IV

Mark Tietjens thought that a cow or a hog must have got into the
orchard, there was such a rushing in the grass. He said to himself that
that damn Gunning was always boasting about his prowess as a hedger; he
might see that his confounded hedges kept out the beasts from the
Common. An unusual voice--unusual in its intonation--remarked:

"Oh, Sir Mark Tietjens, this is dreadful!"

It appeared to be dreadful. A lady in a long skirt--an apparently
elderly Di Vernon out of "Waverley," which was one of the few novels
Mark had ever read--was making dreadful havoc with the standing grass.
The beautiful, proud heads swayed and went down as she rushed knee-deep
amongst it; stopped, rushed again across his view and then stopped
apparently to wring her hands and once more explain that it was
dreadful. A tiny rabbit, scared out by her approach, scuttered out under
his bed and presumably down into the vegetable beds. Marie Lonie's
Mistigris would probably get it and, since it was Friday, Marie Lonie
would be perturbed.

The lady pushed through the remaining tall grass that stood between them
and had the air of rising up at his bed-foot. She was rather a faint
figure--like the hedge-sparrow. In grey, with a grey short coat and a
waistcoat with small round buttons and a three-cornered hat. A tired,
thin face.... Well, she must be tired, pushing through that long grass
with a long skirt. She had a switch of green shagreen. The hen-tomtit
that lived in the old shoe they had tucked on purpose under his thatch
uttered long warning cries. The hen-tomtit did not like the aspect of
this apparition.

She was devouring his face with her not disagreeable eyes and muttering:

"Dreadful! Dreadful!" An aeroplane was passing close overhead. She
looked up and remarked almost tearfully:

"Hasn't it struck you that but for the sins of your youth you might be
doing stunts round these good-looking hills? Now!"

Mark considered the matter, fixedly returning her glance. For an
Englishman the phrase, "the sins of your youth," as applied to a
gentleman's physical immobility implies only one thing. It never had
occurred to him that that implication might be tacked on to him. But of
course it might. It was an implication of a disagreeable, or at least a
discrediting, kind, because in his class they had been accustomed to
consider that the disability was incurred by consorting with public
women of a cheap kind. He had never consorted with any woman in his life
but Marie Lonie, who was health exaggerated. But if he had had to do
with women he would have gone in for the most expensive sort. And taken
precautions! A gentleman owes that to his fellows!

The lady was continuing:

"I may as well tell you at once that I am Mrs. Millicent de Bray Pape.
And hasn't it struck you that but for _his_ depravity--unbridled
depravity--your brother might to-day be operating in Capel Court instead
of peddling old furniture at the end of the world?"

She added disconcertingly:

"It's nervousness that makes me talk like this. I have always been shy
in the presence of notorious libertines. That is my education."

Her name conveyed to him that this lady was going to occupy Groby. He
saw no objection to it. She had, indeed, written to ask him if he saw
any objection to it. It had been a queerly written letter, in
hieroglyphs of a straggling and convoluted kind.... "I am the lady who
is going to rent your mansion, Groby, from my friend Mrs. Sylvia."

It had struck him then--whilst Valentine had been holding the letter up
for him to read.... Pretty piece, Valentine, nowadays. The country air
suited her--that this woman must be an intimate friend of his brother's
wife Sylvia. Otherwise she would have said "Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens," at
least.

Now he was not so certain. This was not the sort of person to be an
intimate friend of that bitch's. Then she was a cat's-paw. Sylvia's
intimates--amongst women--were all Bibbies and Jimmies and Marjies. If
she spoke to any other woman it was to make use of her--as a lady's maid
or a tool.

The lady said:

"It must be agony to you to be reduced to letting your ancestral home.
But that does not seem to be a reason for not speaking to me. I meant to
ask the Earl's housekeeper for some eggs for you, but I forgot. I am
always forgetting. I am so active. Mr. de Bray Pape says I am the most
active woman from here to Santa F."

Mark wondered: why Santa F? That was probably because Mr. Pape had
olive-tree plantations in that part of California. Valentine had told
him over Mrs. Pape's letter that Mr. Pape was the largest olive-oil
merchant in the world. He cornered all the olive-oil and all the
straw-coloured flasks in Provence, Lombardy, California, and informed
his country that you were not really refined if you used in your salads
oil that did not come out of a Pape Quality flask. He showed ladies and
gentlemen in evening dress starting back from expensively laid
dinner-tables, holding their noses and exclaiming: "Have you no
_Papes_!" Mark wondered where Christopher got his knowledges, for
naturally Valentine had the information from him. Probably Christopher
had looked at American papers. But why should one look at American
papers? Mark himself never had. Wasn't there the _Field_?... He was a
queer chap, Christopher.

The lady said:

"It _isn't_ a reason for not speaking to me! It isn't!"

Her greyish face flushed slowly. Her eyes glittered behind her rimless
pince-nez. She exclaimed:

"You are probably too haughtily aristocratic to speak to me, Sir Mark
Tietjens. But I have in me the soul of the Maintenon; you are only the
fleshly descendant of a line of chartered libertines. That is what Time
and the New World have done to redress the balance of the Old. It is we
who are keeping up the status of the grands seigneurs of old in your
so-called ancestral homes."

He thought she was probably right. Not a bad sort of woman: she would
naturally be irritated at his not answering her. It was proper enough.

He never remembered to have spoken to an American or to have thought
about America. Except, of course, during the war. Then he had spoken to
Americans in uniform about Transport. He hadn't liked their collars, but
they had known their jobs as far as their jobs went--which had been
asking to be provided with a disproportionate amount of transport for
too few troops. He had had to wring that transport out of the country.

If he had had his way he wouldn't have. But he hadn't had his way.
Because the Governing Classes were no good. Transport is the soul of a
war: the spirit of an army had used to be in its feet, Napoleon had
said. Something like that. But those fellows had starved the army of
transport; then flooded it with so much it couldn't move; then starved
it again. Then they had insisted on his finding enormously too much
transport for those fellows with queer collars who used it for disposing
of typewriters and sewing machines that came over on transports.... It
had broken his back. That and solitude. There had not been a fellow he
could talk to in the Government towards the end. Not one who knew the
difference between the ancestry of Persimmon and the stud form of
Sceptre or Isinglass. Now they were paying for it.

The lady was saying to him that her spiritual affinity was probably a
surprise to Sir Mark. There was none the less no mistake about it. In
every one of the Maintenon's houses she felt instantly at home; the
sight in any Museum of any knick-knack or jewel that had belonged to the
respectable companion of Louis Quatorze startled her as if with an
electric shock. Mr. Quarternine, the celebrated upholder of the
metempsychosistic school, had told her that those phenomena proved
beyond doubt that the soul of the Maintenon had returned to earth in her
body. What, as against that, were the mere fleshly claims of Old Family?

Mark considered that she was probably right. The old families of his
country were a pretty inefficient lot that he was thankful to have done
with. Racing was mostly carried on by English nobles from
Frankfort-on-the-Main. If this lady could be regarded as speaking
allegorically she was probably right. And she had had to get a soul from
somewhere.

But she talked too much about it. People ought not to be so tremendously
fluent. It was tiring; it failed to hold the attention. She was going
on.

He lost himself in speculations as to her reason for being there,
trampling on his brother's grass. It would give Gunning and the extra
hands no end of an unnecessary job to cut. The lady was talking about
Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette had gone sledging on salt in summer.
Trampling down hay-grass was really worse. Or no better. If every one in
the country trampled on grass like that it would put up the price of
fodder for transport animals to something prohibitive.

Why had she come there? She wanted to take Groby furnished. She might
for him. He had never cared about Groby. His father had never had a stud
worth talking about. A selling plater or two. He had never cared for
hunting or shooting. He remembered standing on Groby lawn watching the
shooting parties take to the hills on the Twelfth and feeling rather a
fool. Christopher of course loved Groby. He was younger and hadn't
expected to own it.

A pretty muck Sylvia might have made of the place--if her mother had let
her. Well, they would know pretty soon. Christopher would be back if the
machine did not break his obstinate neck.... What, then, was this woman
doing here? She probably represented a new turn of the screw that that
unspeakable woman was administering to Christopher.

His sister-in-law Sylvia represented for him unceasing, unsleeping
activities of a fantastic kind. She wanted, he presumed, his brother to
go back and sleep with her. So much hatred could have no other
motive.... There could be no other motive for sending this American lady
here.

The American lady was telling him that she intended to keep up at Groby
a semi-regal state--of course with due democratic modesty. Apparently
she saw her way to squaring that circle!... Probably there are ways.
There must be quite a lot of deucedly rich fellows in that country! How
did they reconcile doing themselves well with democracy? Did their
valets sit down to meals with them, for instance? That would be bad for
discipline. But perhaps they did not care about discipline. There was no
knowing.

Mrs. de Bray Pape apparently approved of having footmen in powder and
the children of the tenants kneeling down when she drove out in his
father's coach and six. Because she intended to use his father's coach
and six when she drove over the moors to Redcar or Scarborough. That,
Mrs. de Bray Pape had been told by Sylvia, was what his father had done.
And it was true enough. That queer old josser his father had always had
out that monstrosity when he went justicing or to the Assizes. That was
to keep up his state. He didn't see why Mrs. de Bray Pape shouldn't keep
up hers if she wanted to. But he did not see the tenants' children
kneeling to the lady! Imagine old Scutt's children at it, or Long Tom o'
th' Clough's!... Their grandchildren, of course. They had called his
father "Tietjens"--some of them even "Auld Mark!" to his face. He
himself had always been "Young Mark" to them. Very likely he was still.
These things do not change any more than the heather on the moors. He
wondered what the tenants would call her. She would have a tough time of
it. They weren't her tenants; they were his and they jolly well knew it.
These fellows who took houses and castles furnished thought they jolly
well hired the family. There had been before the war a fellow from
Frankfort-on-the-Main took Lindisfarne or Holy Island or some such place
and hired a bagpiper to play round the table while they ate. And closed
his eyes whilst the fellow played reels. As if it had been a holy
occasion.... Friend of Sylvia's friends in the Government. To do her
credit she would not stop with Jews. The only credit she had to her
tail!

Mrs. de Bray Pape was telling him that it was not undemocratic to have
your tenants' children kneel down when you passed.

A boy's voice said:

"Uncle Mark!" Who the devil could that be? Probably the son of one of
the people he had week-ended with. Bowlby's maybe; or Teddy Hope's. He
had always liked children and they liked him.

Mrs. de Bray Pape was saying that, yes, it was good for the tenants'
children. The Rev. Dr. Slocombe, the distinguished educationalist, said
that these touching old rites should be preserved in the interests of
the young. He said that to see the Prince of Wales at the Coronation
kneeling before his father and swearing fealty had been most touching.
And she had seen pictures of the Maintenon having it done when she
walked out. _She_ was now the Maintenon, therefore it must be right. But
for Marie Antoinette ...

The boy's voice said:

"I hope you will excuse.... I _know_ it isn't the thing...."

He couldn't see the boy without turning his head on the pillow and he
was not going to turn his head. He had a sense of someone a yard or so
away at his off-shoulder. The boy at least had not come through the
standing hay.

He did not imagine that the son of anyone he had ever week-ended with
would ever walk through standing hay. The young generation were a pretty
useless lot, but he could hardly believe they would have come to that
yet. Their sons might.... He saw visions of tall dining-rooms lit up,
with tall pictures, and dresses, and the sunset through high windows
over tall grasses in the parks. He was done with that. If any tenants'
children ever knelt to him it would be when he took his ride in his
wooden coat to the little church over the Moors.... Where his father had
shot himself.

That had been a queer go. He remembered getting the news. He had been
dining at Marie Lonie's....

The boy's voice was, precisely, apologizing for the fact that that lady
had walked through the grass. At the same time, Mrs. de Bray Pape was
saying things to the discredit of Marie Antoinette, whom apparently she
disliked. He could not imagine why anyone should dislike Marie
Antoinette. Yet very likely she was dislikeable. The French, who were
sensible people, had cut her head off, so they presumably disliked
her....

He had been dining at Marie Lonie's, she standing, her hands folded
before her, hanging down, watching him eat his mutton chops and boiled
potatoes, when the porter from his Club had 'phoned through that there
was a wire for him. Marie Lonie had answered the telephone. He had told
her to tell the porter to open the telegram and read it to her. That was
a not unusual proceeding. Telegrams that came to him at the Club usually
announced the results of races that he had not attended. He hated to get
up from the dinner-table. She had come back slowly, and said still more
slowly that she had bad news for him; there had been an accident; his
father had been found shot dead.

He had sat still for quite a time; Marie Lonie also had said nothing.
He remembered that he had finished his chops, but had not eaten his
apple-pie. He had finished his claret.

By that time he had come to the conclusion that his father had probably
committed suicide, and that he--he, Mark Tietjens--was probably
responsible for his father's having done that. He had got up, then, told
Marie Lonie to get herself some mourning, and had taken the night train
to Groby. There had been no doubt about it when he got there. His father
had committed suicide. His father was not the man unadvisedly to crawl
through a quicken-hedge with his gun at full-cock behind him, after
rabbits.... It had been purposed.

There was, then, something soft about the Tietjens stock--for there had
been no real and sufficient cause for the suicide. Obviously his father
had had griefs. He had never got over the death of his second wife; that
was soft for a Yorkshireman. He had lost two sons and an only daughter
in the war; other men had done that and got over it. He had heard
through him, Mark, that his youngest son--Christopher--was a bad hat.
But plenty of men had sons who were bad hats.... Something soft then
about the stock! Christopher certainly was soft. But that came from the
mother. Mark's stepmother had been from the south of Yorkshire. Soft
people down there! a soft woman. Christopher had been her ewe-lamb and
she had died of grief when Sylvia had run away from him!...

The boy with a voice had got himself into view towards the bottom of the
bed, near Mrs. de Bray Pape ... a tallish slip of a boy, with slightly
chawbacony cheeks, high-coloured, lightish hair, brown eyes. Upstanding
but softish. Mark seemed to know him, but could not place him. The boy
asked to be forgiven for the intrusion, saying that he knew it was not
the thing.

Mrs. de Bray Pape was talking improbably about Marie Antoinette, whom
she very decidedly disliked. She said that Marie Antoinette had behaved
with great ingratitude to Madame de Maintenon--which must have been
difficult. Apparently, according to Mrs. de Bray Pape, when Marie
Antoinette had been a neglected little girl about the Court of France,
Madame de Maintenon had befriended her, lending her frocks, jewels and
perfumes. Later Marie Antoinette had persecuted her benefactor. From
that had arisen all the woes of France and the Old World in general.

That appeared to Mark to be to mix history, but he was not very certain.
Mrs. de Bray Pape said, however, that she had those little-known facts
from Mr. Reginald Weiler, the celebrated professor of social economy at
one of the Western Universities.

Mark returned to the consideration of the softness of the Tietjens
stock, whilst the boy gazed at him with eyes that might have been
imploring or that might have been merely moon-struck. Mark could not see
what the boy could have to be imploring about, so it was probably just
stupidity. His breeches, however, were very nicely cut. Very nicely,
indeed; Mark recognized, indeed, the tailor--a man in Conduit Street. If
that fellow had the sense to get his riding breeches from that man, he
could not be quite an ass....

That Christopher was soft because his mother did not come from the north
of Yorkshire or Durham might be true enough--but that was not enough to
account for the race dying out. His, Mark's, father had no descendants
by his sons. The two brothers who had been killed had been childless. He
himself had none. Christopher ... Well, that was debateable!

That he, Mark, had practically killed his own father he was ready to
acknowledge. One made mistakes; that was one. If one made mistakes, one
should try to repair them; otherwise, one must, as it were, cut one's
losses. He could not bring his father back to life; he hadn't, equally,
been able to do anything for Christopher.... Not much, certainly. The
fellow had refused his brass.... He couldn't really blame him.

The boy was asking him if he would not speak to them. He said he was
Mark's nephew, Mark Tietjens junior.

Mark took credit to himself because he did not stir a hair. He had so
made up his mind, he found, that Christopher's son was not his son that
he had almost forgotten the cub's existence. But he ought not to have
made up his mind so quickly: he was astonished to find from the
automatic working of his mind that he so had. There were too many
factors to be considered that he had never bothered really to consider.
Christopher had determined that this boy should have Groby: that had
been enough for him, Mark. He did not care who had Groby.

But the actual sight of this lad whom he had never seen before presented
the problem to him as something that needed solution. It came as a
challenge. When he came to think of it, it was a challenge to him to
make up his mind finally as to the nature of Woman. He imagined that he
had never bothered his head about that branch of the animal kingdom. But
he found that, lying there, he must have spent quite a disproportionate
amount of his time in thinking about the motives of Sylvia.

He had never spoken much with any but men--and then mostly with men of
his own class and type. Naturally you addressed a few polite words to
your week-end hostess. If you found yourself in the rose-garden of a
Sunday before church with a young or old woman who knew anything about
horses, you talked about horses, or Goodwood, or Ascot to her for long
enough to show politeness to your hostess's guests. If she knew nothing
about horses you talked about the roses or the irises, or the weather
last week. But that pretty well exhausted it.

Nevertheless, he knew all about women. Of that he was confident. That is
to say, that when in the course of conversation or gossip he had heard
the actions of women narrated or commented on, he had always been able
to supply a motive for those actions sufficient to account for them to
his satisfaction, or to let him predict with accuracy what course the
future would take. No doubt, twenty years of listening to the almost
ceaseless but never disagreeable conversation of Marie Lonie had been a
liberal education.

He regarded his association with her with complete satisfaction--as the
only subject for complete satisfaction to be found in the contemplation
of the Tietjens family. Christopher's Valentine was a pretty piece
enough and had her head screwed confoundedly well on. But Christopher's
association with her had brought such a peck of troubles down on his
head that, except for the girl as an individual, it was a pretty poor
choice. It was a man's job to pick a woman who would neither worry him
nor be the cause of worries. Well, Christopher had picked two--and look
at the results!

He himself had been completely unmistaken--from the first minute. He had
first seen Marie Lonie on the stage at Covent Garden. He had gone to
Covent Garden in attendance on his stepmother, his father's second
wife--the soft woman. A florid, gentle, really saintly person. She had
passed around Groby for a saint. An Anglican saint, of course. That was
what was the matter with Christopher. It was the soft streak. A Tietjens
had no business with saintliness in his composition! It was bound to get
him looked on as a blackguard!

But he had attended Covent Garden as a politeness to his stepmother, who
very seldom found herself in Town. And there, in the second row of the
ballet, he had seen Marie Lonie--slimmer, of course, in those days. He
had at once made up his mind to take up with her, and, an obliging
commissionaire having obtained her address for him from the stage-door,
he had, towards twelve-thirty next day, walked along the Edgware Road
towards her lodgings. He had intended to call on her; he met her,
however, in the street. Seeing her there, he had liked her walk, her
figure, her neat dress.

He had planted himself, his umbrella, his billycock hat and all,
squarely in front of her--she had neither flinched nor attempted to bolt
round him--and had said that, if at the end of her engagement in London,
she cared to be placed "_dans ses draps_," with two hundred and fifty
pounds a year and pin money to be deliberated on, she might hang up her
cream-jug at an apartment that he would take for her in St. John's Wood
Park, which was the place in which, in those days, most of his friends
had establishments. She had preferred the neighbourhood of the Gray's
Inn Road, as reminding her more of France.

But Sylvia was quite another pair of shoes....

That young man was flushing all over his face. The young of the tomtit
in the old shoe were getting impatient; they were chirruping in spite of
the alarm-cries of the mother on the boughs above the thatch. It was
certainly insanitary to have boughs above your thatch, but what did it
matter in days so degenerate that even the young of tom-tits could not
restrain their chirpings in face of their appetites.

That young man--Sylvia's by-blow--was addressing embarrassed remarks to
Mrs. de Bray Pape. He suggested that perhaps his uncle resented the
lady's lectures on history and sociology. He said they had come to talk
about the tree. Perhaps that was why his uncle would not speak to them.

The lady said that it was precisely giving lessons in history to the
dissolute aristocracy of the Old World that was her mission in life. It
was for their good, resent it how they might. As for talking about the
tree, the young man had better do it for himself. She now intended to
walk around the garden to see how the poor lived.

The boy said that in that case he did not see why Mrs. de Bray Pape had
come at all. The lady answered that she had come at the sacred behest of
his injured mother. That ought to be answer enough for him. She flitted,
disturbedly from Mark's view.

The boy, swallowing visibly in his throat, fixed his slightly protruding
eyes on his uncle's face. He was about to speak, but he remained for a
long time silent and goggling. That was a Christopher Tietjens
trick--not a Tietjens family trick. To gaze at you a long time before
speaking. Christopher had it, no doubt, from his mother--exaggeratedly.
She would gaze at you for a long time. Not unpleasantly, of course. But
Christopher had always irritated him, even as a small boy.... It is
possible that he himself might not be as he was if he hadn't gazed at
him for a long time, like a stuck pig. On the morning of that beastly
day. Armistice Day.... Beastly.

Cramp's eldest son, a bugler in the second Hampshires, went down the
path, his bugle shining behind his khaki figure. Now they would make a
beastly row with that instrument. On Armistice Day they had played the
Last Post on the steps of the church under Marie Lonie's windows....
The Last Post!... The Last of England! He remembered thinking that. He
had not by then had the full terms of that surrender, but he had had a
dose enough of Christopher's stuck-piggedness!... A full dose! He didn't
say he didn't deserve it. If you make mistakes you must take what you
get for it. You shouldn't make mistakes.

The boy at the foot of the bed was making agonized motions with his
throat: swallowing his Adam's apple.

He said:

"I can understand, uncle, that you hate to see us. All the same, it
seems a little severe to refuse to speak to us!"

Mark wondered a little at the breakdown in communications that there
must have been. Sylvia had been spying round that property, and round
and round and round again. She had had renewed interviews with Mrs.
Cramp. It had struck him as curious taste to like to reveal to
dependents--to reveal and to dwell upon the fact that you were
distasteful to your husband. If his woman had left him he would have
preferred to hold his tongue about it. He certainly would not have gone
caterwauling about it to the carpenter of the man she had taken up with.
Still, there was no accounting for tastes. Sylvia had, no doubt, been so
full of her own griefs that very likely she had not listened to what
Mrs. Cramp had said about his, Mark's, condition. On the one or two
interviews he had had with that bitch she had been like that. She had
sailed in with her grievances against Christopher with such vigour that
she had gone away with no ideas at all as to the conditions on which she
was to be allowed to inhabit Groby. 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. They go
a little dotty.... The fellow--he could not call his name to mind, half
Scotch, half Jew, who had told him the worst tales against Christopher
had gone a little dotty. He had grown a beard and wore a top-hat at
inappropriate functions. Well, in effect, Christopher was a saint, and
Provvy invents retributions of an ingenious kind against those who libel
saints.

At any rate, that bitch must have become so engrossed in her tale that
it had not come through to her that he, Mark, could not speak. Of
course, the results of venereal disease are not pleasant to contemplate,
and, no doubt, Sylvia, having invented the disease for him, had not
liked to contemplate the resultant symptoms. At any rate, that boy did
not know--and neither did Mrs. de Bray Pape--that he did not speak. Not
to them, not to anybody. He was finished with the world. He perceived
the trend of its actions, listened to its aspirations, and even to its
prayers, but he would never again stir lip or finger. It was like being
dead--or being God.

This boy was apparently asking for absolution. He was of opinion that it
was not a very sporting thing of himself and Mrs. Bray to come there....

It was, however, sporting enough. He could see that they were both as
afraid of him, Mark, as of the very devil. Its taste might, however, be
questioned. Still, the situation was unusual--as all situations are.
Obviously it was not in good taste for a boy to come to the house in
which his father lived with a mistress, nor for the wife's intimate
friend either. Still they apparently wanted, the one to let, the other
to take, Groby. They could not do either if he, Mark, did not give
permission, or, at any rate, if he opposed them. It was business, and
business may be presumed to cover quite a lot of bad taste.

And, in effect, the boy was saying that his mother was, of course, a
splendid person, but that he, Mark Junior, found her proceedings in many
respects questionable. One could not, however, expect a woman--and an
injured woman ... The boy, with his shining eyes and bright cheeks,
seemed to beg Mark to concede that his mother was at least an injured
woman.... One could not expect, then, a wronged woman to see things eye
to eye with ... with young Cambridge! For, he hastened to assure Mark,
his Set--the son of the Prime Minister, young Doble, and Porter, as well
as himself, were unanimously of opinion that a man ought to be allowed
to live with whom he liked. He was not, therefore, questioning his
father's actions, and, for himself, if the occasion arose, he would be
very glad to shake his father's ... companion ... by the hand.

His bright eyes became a little humid. He said that he was not in effect
questioning anything, but he thought that he himself would have been the
better for a little more of his father's influence. He considered that
he had been too much under his mother's influence. They noticed it, even
at Cambridge! That, in effect, was the real snag when it came to be a
question of dissolving unions once contracted. Scientifically
considered. Questions of ... of sex attraction, in spite of all the
efforts of scientists, remained fairly mysterious. The best way to look
at it ... the safest way, was that sex attraction occurred, as a rule,
between temperamental and physical opposites, because Nature desired to
correct extremes. No one, in fact, could be more different than his
father and mother--the one so graceful, athletic and ... oh, charming.
And the other so ... oh, let us say perfectly honourable, but ... oh,
lawless. Because, of course, you can break certain laws and remain the
soul of honour.

Mark wondered if this boy was aware that his mother habitually informed
every one whom she met that his father lived on women. On the immoral
earnings of women, she would infer when she thought it safe....

The soul of honour, then, and masculinely clumsy and damn fine in his
way.... Well, he, Mark Tietjens junior, was not there to judge his
father. His uncle Mark could see that he regarded his father with
affection and admiration. But if Nature--he must be pardoned for using
anthropomorphic expressions since they were the shortest way--if Nature,
then, meant unions of opposite characters to redress extremes in the
children, the process did not complete itself with ... in short, with
the act of physical union. For just as there were obviously inherited
physical characteristics, and, no doubt, inherited memory, there yet
remained the question of the influence of temperament by means of
personal association. So that for one opposite to leave the fruits of a
union exclusively under the personal influence of the other opposite was
very possibly to defeat the purposes of Nature...

That boy, Mark thought, was a very curious problem. He seemed to be a
good, straight boy. A little loquacious; still, that was to be excused
since he had to do all the talking himself. From time to time he had
paused in his speech as if, deferentially, he wished to have Mark's
opinion. That was proper. He, Mark, could not stand
hobbledehoys--particularly the hobbledehoys of that age, who appeared to
be opinionative and emotional beyond the normal in hobbledehoys. Anyhow,
he could not stand the Young once they were beyond the age of childhood.
But he was aware that, if you want to conduct a scientific
investigation, if you want to arrive, for yourself, at the truth of an
individual's parentage--you must set aside your likes and dislikes.

Heaven knew, he had found Christopher, when he had been only one of the
younger ones in his father's--he had found him irritating enough ... a
rather moony, fair brat, interested mostly in mathematics, with a trick
of standing with those goggle eyes gazing bluely at you--years ago, in
and around, at first the nursery, then the stables at Groby. Then, if
this lad irritated him, it was rather an argument in favour of his being
Christopher's son than Sylvia's by-blow by another man.... What was the
fellow's name? A rank bad hat, anyhow.

The probability was that he _was_ the other fellow's son. That woman
would not have trepanned Christopher into the marriage if she hadn't at
least thought that she was with child. There was nothing to be said
against any wench's tricking any man into marrying her if she were in
that condition. But once having got a man to give a name to your bastard
you ought to treat him with some loyalty; it is a biggish service he has
done you. That Sylvia had never done.... They had got this young fellow
into their--the Tietjenses'--family. There he was, with his fingers on
Groby already.... That was all right. As great families as Tietjens' had
had that happen to them.

But what made Sylvia pestilential was that she should afterwards have
developed this sex-madness for his unfortunate brother.

There was no other way to look at it. She had undoubtedly lured
Christopher on to marry her because she thought, rightly or wrongly,
that she was with child by another man. They would never know--she
herself probably did not know!--whether this boy was Christopher's son
or the other's. English women are so untidy--shame-faced--about these
things. That was excusable. But every other action of hers from that
date had been inexcusable--except regarded as actions perpetrated under
the impulsion of sex-viciousness.

It is perfectly proper--it is a mother's duty to give an unborn child a
name and a father. But afterwards to blast the name of that father is
more discreditable than to leave the child nameless. This boy was now
Tietjens of Groby--but he was also the boy who was the son of a father
who had behaved unspeakably according to the mother.... And the son of a
mother who had been unable to attract her man!... Who advertised the
fact to the estate carpenter! If we say that the good of the breed is
the supreme law what sort of virtue was this?

It was all very well to say that every one of Sylvia's eccentricities
had in view the sole aim of getting her boy's father to return to her.
No doubt they might. He, Mark, was perfectly ready to concede that even
her infidelities, notorious as they had been, might have been merely
ways of calling his unfortunate brother's attention back to her--of
keeping herself in his mind. After the marriage Christopher, finding out
that he had been a mere cat's-paw, probably treated her pretty coldly or
ignored her--maritally.... And he was a pretty attractive fellow,
Christopher. He, Mark, was bound nowadays to acknowledge that. A regular
saint and Christian martyr and all that.... Enough to drive a woman wild
if she had to live beside him and be ignored.

It is obvious that women must be allowed what means they can make use of
to maintain--to arouse--their sex attraction for their men. That is what
the bitches are for in the scale of things. They have to perpetuate the
breed. To do that they have to call attention to themselves and to use
what devices they see fit to use, each one according to her own
temperament. That cruelty was an excitant, he was quite ready, too, to
concede. He was ready to concede anything to the woman. To be cruel is
to draw attention to yourself; you cannot expect to be courted by a man
whom you allow to forget you. But there probably ought to be a limit to
things. You probably ought in this, as in all other things, to know what
you can do and what you can't--and the proof of this particular pudding,
as of all others, was in the eating. Sylvia had left no stone unturned
in the determination to keep herself in her man's mind, and she had
certainly irretrievably lost her man: to another girl. Then she was just
a nuisance.

A woman intent on getting a man back ought to have some system, some
sort of scheme at the very least. But Sylvia--he knew it from the
interminable talk that he had had with Christopher on Armistice
Night--Sylvia delighted most in doing what she called pulling the
strings of shower-baths. She did extravagant things, mostly of a cruel
kind, for the fun of seeing what would happen. Well, you cannot allow
yourself fun when you are on a campaign. Not as to the subject matter of
the campaign itself! If then you do what you want rather than what is
expedient, you damn well have to take what you get for it. _Damn_ well!

What would have justified Sylvia, no matter what she did, would have
been if she had succeeded in having another child by his brother. She
hadn't. The breed of Tietjens was not enriched. Then she was just a
nuisance....

An infernal nuisance.... For what was she up to now? It was perfectly
obvious that both Mrs. de Bray Pape and this boy were here because she
had had another outbreak of ... practically Sadism. They were here so
that Christopher might be hurt some more and she not forgotten. What,
then, was it? What the deuce was it?

The boy had been silent for some time. He was gazing at Mark with the
goggle-eyed gasping that had been so irritating in his
father--particularly on Armistice Day.... Well, he, Mark, was apparently
now conceding that this boy was probably his brother's son. A real
Tietjens after all was to reign over the enormously long, grey house
behind the fantastic cedar. The tallest cedar in Yorkshire. In England.
In the Empire.... He didn't care. He who lets a tree overhang his roof
calls the doctor in daily.... The boy's lips began to move. No sound
came out. He was presumably in a great state!

He was undoubtedly like his father. Darker ... Brown hair, brown eyes,
high-coloured cheeks all flushed now. Straight nose; marked brown
eyebrows. A sort of ... scared, puzzled ... what was it?... expression.
Well, Sylvia was fair; Christopher was dark-haired with silver streaks,
but fair-complexioned.... Damn it: this boy was more attractive than
Christopher had been at his age and earlier.... Christopher hanging
round the school-room door in Groby, puzzled over the mathematical
theory of waves. He, Mark, hadn't been able to stand him or, indeed, any
of the other children. There was sister Effie--born to be a curate's
wife.... Puzzled! That was it!... That bothering woman, his father's
second wife--the Saint!--had introduced the puzzlement strain into the
Tietjenses.... This was Christopher's boy, saintly strain and all.
Christopher was probably born to be a rural dean in a fat living writing
treatises on the integral calculus all the time except on Saturday
afternoons. With a great reputation for saintliness. Well, he wasn't the
one and hadn't the other. He was an old furniture dealer, who made a
stink in virtuous nostrils.... Provvy works in a mysterious way. The boy
was saying now:

"The tree ... the great tree.... It darkens the windows...."

Mark said: "Oha!" to himself. Groby Great Tree was the symbol of
Tietjens. For thirty miles round Groby they made their marriage vows by
Groby Great Tree. In the other Ridings they said that Groby Tree and
Groby well were equal in height and depth one to the other. When they
were really imaginatively drunk Cleveland villagers would declare--would
knock you down if you denied--that Groby Great Tree was 365 foot high
and Groby well 365 feet deep. A foot for every day of the year.... On
special occasions--he could not himself be bothered to remember
what--they would ask permission to hang rags and things from the boughs.
Christopher said that one of the chief indictments against Joan of Arc
had been that she and the other village girls of Domrmy had hung rags
and trinkets from the boughs of a cedar. Offerings to fairies....
Christopher set great store by the tree. He was a romantic ass. Probably
he set more store by the tree than by anything else at Groby. He would
pull the house down if he thought it incommoded the tree.

Young Mark was bleating, positively bleating:

"The Italians have a proverb.... He who lets a tree overhang his house
invites a daily call from the doctor.... I agree myself.... In
principle, of course...."

Well, that was that! Sylvia, then, was proposing to threaten to ask to
have Groby Great Tree cut down. Only to threaten to ask. But that would
be enough to agonize the miserable Christopher. You couldn't cut down
Groby Great Tree. But the thought that the tree was under the
guardianship of unsympathetic people would be enough to drive
Christopher almost dotty--for years and years.

"Mrs. de Bray Pape," the boy was stammering, "is extremely keen on the
tree's being ... I agree in principle.... My mother wished you to see
that--oh, in modern days--a house is practically unlettable if ... So
she got Mrs. de Bray Pape ... She hasn't had the courage though she
swore she had...."

He continued to stammer. Then he started and stopped, crimson. A woman's
voice had called:

"Mr. Tietjens.... Mr. Mark.... Hi ... hup!"

A small woman, all in white, white breeches, white coat, white
wide-awake, was slipping down from a tall bay with a white star on the
forehead--a bay with large nostrils and an intelligent head. She waved
her hand obviously at the boy and then caressed the horse's nostrils.
Obviously at the boy ... for it was obviously unlikely that Mark Senior
would know a woman who could make a sound like "Hi, hup!" to attract his
attention.

Lord Fittleworth, in a square, hard hat, sat on an immense,
coffin-headed dapple-grey. He had bristling, close-cropped moustaches
and sat like a limpet. He waved his crop in the direction of Mark and
went on talking to Gunning, who was at his stirrup. The coffin-headed
beast started forward and reared a foot or so; a wild, brazen, yelping
sound had disturbed it. The boy was more and more scarlet and, as
emotion grew on him, more and more like Christopher on that beastly
day.... Christopher with a piece of furniture under his arm, in Marie
Lonie's room, his eyes goggling out at the foot of the bed.

Mark swore painfully to himself. He hated to be reminded of that day.
Now this lad and that infernal bugle that the younger children of Cramp
had got hold of from their bugler-brother had put it back damnably in
his mind. It went on. At intervals. One child had a try, then another.
Obviously then Cramp the eldest took it. It blared out.... Ta ... Ta ...
Ta.... Ta ... ti ... ta-ta-ti ... Ta.... The Last Post. The b----y
infernal Last Post.... Well, Christopher, as that day Mark had
predicted, had got himself, with his raw sensibilities, into a pretty
b----y infernal mess while some drunken ass had played the Last Post
under the window.... Mark meant that whilst that farewell was being
played he had had that foresight. And he hated the bugle for reminding
him of it. He hated it more than he had imagined. He could not have
imagined himself using profanity even to himself. He must have been
profoundly moved. Deucedly and profoundly moved at that beastly noise.
It had come over the day like a disaster. He saw every detail of Marie
Lonie's room as it had been on that day. There was, on the marble
mantel-shelf, under an immense engraving of the Sistine Madonna, a
feeding-cup over a night-light in which Marie Lonie had been keeping
some sort of pap warm for him.... Probably the last food to which he had
ever helped himself....


                               CHAPTER V

But no ... that must have been about twelve, or earlier or later, on
that infernal day. In any case he could not remember any subsequent meal
he had had then; but he remembered an almost infinitely long period of
intense vexation. Of mortification in so far as he could accuse himself
of ever having felt mortified. He could still remember the fierce
intaking of his breath through his nostrils that had come when
Christopher had announced what had seemed to him then his ruinous
intentions.... It had not been till probably four in the morning that
Lord Wolstonmark had rung him, Mark, up to ask him to countermand the
transport that was to have gone out from Harwich.... At four in the
morning, the idiotic brutes.--His substitute had disappeared in the
rejoicings, and Lord Wolstonmark had wanted to know what code they used
for Harwich because the transport must at all costs be stopped. There
was going to be no advance into Germany.... He had never spoken after
that!

His brother was done for; the country finished; he was as good as down
and out, as the phrase was, himself. In his deep mortification--yes,
mortification!--he had said to Christopher that morning--the 11th
November, 1918--that he would never speak to him again. He hadn't at
that moment meant to say that he would never speak to Christopher at all
again--merely that he was never going to speak to him about affairs--the
affairs of Groby! Christopher might take that immense, far-spreading,
grey bothersome house and the tree and the well and the moors and all
the John Peel outfit. Or he might leave them. He, Mark, was never going
to speak about the matter any more.

He remembered thinking that Christopher might have taken him to mean
that he intended to withdraw, for what it was worth, the light of his
countenance from the Christopher Tietjens menage. Nothing had been
further from his thoughts. He had a soft corner in his heart for
Valentine Wannop. He had had it ever since sitting, feeling like a fool,
in the anteroom of the War Office, beside her--gnawing at the handle of
his umbrella. But, then, he had recommended her to become Christopher's
mistress: he had, at any rate, begged her to look after his mutton chops
and his buttons. So that it wasn't likely that when, a year or so later,
Christopher announced that he really was at last going to take up with
the young woman and to chance what came of it--it wasn't likely that he
intended to dissociate himself from the two of them.

The idea had worried him so much that he had written a rough note--the
last time that his hand had ever held a pen--to Christopher. He had said
that a brother's backing was not of great use to a woman, but in the
special circumstances of the case, he being Tietjens of Groby for what
it was worth, and Lady Tietjens--Marie Lonie--being perfectly willing
to be seen on all occasions with Valentine and her man, it might be
worth something, at any rate with tenantry and such like.

Well, he hadn't gone back on that!

But once the idea of retiring, not only from the Office but the whole
world, had come into his head it had grown and grown, on top of his
mortification and his weariness. Because he could not conceal from
himself that he was weary to death--of the Office, of the nation, of the
world and people.... People ... he was tired of them, and of the
streets, and the grass, and the sky and the moors. He had done his
job.--That was before Wolstonmark had telephoned, and he still thought
that he had done his job of getting things here and there about the
world to some purpose.

A man is in the world to do his duty by his nation and his family.... By
his own people first. Well, he had to acknowledge that he had let his
own people down pretty badly--beginning with Christopher. Chiefly
Christopher. But that reacted on the tenantry.

He had always been tired of the tenantry and Groby. He had been born
tired of them. That happens. It happens particularly in old and
prominent families. It was odd that Groby and the whole Groby business
should so bore him; he supposed he had been born with some kink. All the
Tietjenses were born with some sort of kink. It came from the solitude
maybe, on the moors, the hard climate, the rough neighbours--possibly
even from the fact that Groby Great Tree overshadowed the house. You
could not look out of the school-room windows at all for its great,
ragged trunk, and all the children's wing was darkened by its branches.
Black! ... funeral plumes! The Hapsburgs were said to hate their
palaces--that was no doubt why so many of them, beginning with Juan Ort,
had come muckers. At any rate, they had chucked the royalty business.

And at a very early age he had decided that he would chuck the
country-gentleman business. He didn't see that he was the one to bother
with those confounded, hard-headed beggars or with those confounded
wind-swept moors and wet valley bottoms. One owed the blighters a duty,
but one did not have to live among them or see that they aired their
bedrooms. It had been mostly swank that, always; since the Corn Laws, it
had been almost entirely swank. Still, it is obvious that a landlord
owes something to the estate from which he and his fathers have drawn
their incomes for generations and generations.

Well, he had never intended to do it, because he had been born tired of
it. He liked racing and talking about racing to fellows who liked
racing. He had intended to do that to the end.

He hadn't been able to.

He had intended to go on living between the Office, his chambers, Marie
Lonie's and weekends with race-horse owners of good family until his
eyes closed.... Of course God disposes in the end, even of the
Tietjenses of Groby! He had intended to give over Groby, on the death of
his father, to whichever of his brothers had heirs and seemed likely to
run the estate well. That would have been quite satisfactory. Ted, his
next brother, had had his head screwed on all right. If he had had
children he would have filled the bill. So would the next brother....
But neither of them had had children and both had managed to get killed
in Gallipoli. Even sister Mary, who was actually next to him and a
_matresse femme_ if ever there was one, had managed to get killed as a
Red Cross matron. _She_ would have run Groby well enough--the great,
blowsy, grey woman with a bit of a moustache.

Thus God had let him down with a bump on Christopher.... Well,
Christopher would have run Groby well enough. But he wouldn't. Wouldn't
own a yard of Groby land; wouldn't touch a penny of Groby money. He was
suffering for it now.

They were both, in effect, suffering, for Mark could not see what was to
become of either Christopher or the estate.

Until his father's death Mark had bothered precious little about the
fellow. He was by fourteen years the younger: there had been ten
children altogether, three of his own mother's children having died
young and one having been soft. So Christopher had been still a baby
when Mark had left Groby for good--for good except for visits when he
had brought his umbrella and seen Christopher mooning at the school-room
door or in his own mother's sitting-room. So he had hardly seen the boy.

And at Christopher's wedding he had definitely decided that he would not
see him again--a mug who had got trepanned into marrying a whore. He
wished his brother no ill, but the thought of him made Mark sickish. And
then, for years, he had heard the worst possible rumours about
Christopher. In a way they had rather consoled Mark. God knows, he cared
little enough about the Tietjens family--particularly for the children
by that soft saint. But he would rather have any brother of his be a
wrong un than a mug.

Then gradually, from the gossip that went abroad, he had come to think
that Christopher was a very bad wrong un indeed. He could account for it
easily enough. Christopher had a soft streak, and what a woman can do to
deteriorate a fellow with a soft streak is beyond belief. And the woman
Christopher had got hold of--who had got hold of him--passed belief too.
Mark did not hold any great opinion of women at all; if they were a
little plump, healthy, a little loyal and not noticeable in their dress
that was enough for him.... But Sylvia was as thin as an eel, as full of
vice as a mare that's a wrong un, completely disloyal and dressed like
any Paris cocotte. Christopher, as he saw it, had had to keep that
harlot to the tune of six or seven thousand a year, in a society of all
wrong uns too--and on an income of at most two.... Plenty for a younger
son. But naturally he had had to go wrong to get the money.

So it had seemed to him ... and it had seemed to matter precious little.
He gave a thought to his brother perhaps twice a year. But then one
day--just after the two brothers had been killed--their father had come
up from Groby to say to Mark at the Club:

"Has it occurred to you that, since those two boys are killed, that
fellow Christopher is practically heir to Groby? You have no legitimate
children, have you?" Mark replied that he hadn't any bastards either,
and that he was certainly not going to marry.

At that date it had seemed to him certain that he was not going to marry
Papist Marie Lonie Riotor, and certainly he was not going to marry
anyone else. So Christopher--or at any rate Christopher's heir--must
surely come in to Groby. It had not really, hitherto, occurred to him.
But when it was thus put forcibly into his mind he saw instantly that it
upset the whole scheme of his life. As he saw Christopher then, the
fellow was the last person in the world to have the charge of Groby--for
you had to regard that as to some extent a cure of souls. And he,
himself, would not be much better. He was hopelessly out of touch with
the estate, and, even though his father's land-steward was a quite
efficient fellow, he himself at that date was so hopelessly immersed in
the affairs of the then war that he would hardly have a moment of time
to learn anything about the property.

There was, therefore, a breakdown in his scheme of life. That was
already a pretty shaking sort of affair. Mark was accustomed to regard
himself as master of his fate--as being so limited in his ambitions and
so entrenched behind his habits and his wealth that, if circumstances
need not of necessity bend to his will, fate could hardly touch him.

And it was one thing for a Tietjens younger son to be a bold sort of
law-breaker--or at any rate that he should be contemptuous of restraint.
It was quite another that the heir to Groby should be a soft sort of bad
hat whose distasteful bunglings led his reputation to stink in the
nostrils of all his own class if a younger son can be said to have a
class.... At any rate in the class to which his father and eldest
brother belonged. Tietjens was said to have sold his wife to her cousin
the Duke at so contemptible a price that he was obviously penniless even
after that transaction. He had sold her to other rich men--to bank
managers, for instance. Yet even after that he was reduced to giving
stumer cheques. If a man sold his soul to the devil he should at least
insist on a good price. Similar transactions were said to distinguish
the social set in which that bitch moved--but most of the men who,
according to Ruggles, sold their wives to members of the government
obtained millions by governmental financial tips--or peerages. Not
infrequently they obtained both peerages and millions. But Christopher
was such a confounded ass that he had got neither the one nor the other.
His cheques were turned down for twopences. And he was such a bungler
that he must needs get with child the daughter of their father's oldest
friend, and let the fact be known to the whole world....

This information he had from Ruggles--and it killed their father. Well,
he, Mark, was absolutely to blame: that was that. But--infinitely
worse--it had made Christopher absolutely determined not to accept a
single penny of the money that had become Mark's and that had been his
father's. And Christopher was as obstinate as a hog. For that Mark did
not blame him. It was a Tietjens job to be as obstinate as a hog.

He couldn't, however, disabuse his mind of the idea that Christopher's
refusal of Groby and all that came from Groby was as much a
manifestation of the confounded saintliness that he got from his soft
mother as of a spirit of resentment. Christopher _wanted_ to rid himself
of his great possessions. The fact that his father and brother had
believed him to be what Marie Lonie would have called _maquereau_ and
had thus insulted him he had merely grasped at with eagerness as an
excuse. He wanted to be out of the world. That was it. He wanted to be
out of a disgustingly inefficient and venial world, just as he, Mark,
also wanted to be out of a world that he found almost more fusionless
and dishonest than Christopher found it.

At any rate, at the first word that they had had about the heirship to
Groby after their father's death, Christopher had declared that he,
Mark, might take his money to the devil and the ownership of Groby with
it. He proposed never to forgive either his father or Mark. He had only
consented to take Mark by the hand at the urgent solicitation of
Valentine Wannop....

That had been the most dreadful moment of Mark's life. The country was,
even then, going to the devil; his brother proposed to starve himself;
Groby, by his brother's wish, was to fall into the hands of that
bitch.... And the country went further and further towards the devil,
and his brother starved worse and worse ... and as for Groby ...

The boy who practically owned Groby had, at the first sound of the voice
of the woman who wore white riding-kit and called "Hi-hup!"--at the very
first sound of her voice the boy had scampered off through the raspberry
canes and was now against the hedge, whilst she leaned down over him,
laughing, and her horse leaned over behind her. Fittleworth was smiling
at them benevolently, and at the same time continuing his conversation
with Gunning....

The woman was too old for the boy, who had gone scarlet at the sound of
her voice. Sylvia had been too old for Christopher: she had got him on
the hop when he had been only a kid.... The world went on.

He was nevertheless thankful for the respite. He had to acknowledge to
himself that he was not as young as he had been. He had a great deal to
think of if he was to get the hang of--he was certainly not going to
interfere with--the world, and having to listen to conversations that
were mostly moral apophthegms had tired him. He had got too many at too
short intervals. If he had spoken he would not have, but, because he did
not speak, both the lady who was descended from the Maintenon and that
boy had peppered him with moral points of view that all required to be
considered, without leaving him enough time to get his breath mentally.

The lady had called them a corrupt and effete aristocracy. They were
probably not corrupt, but certainly, regarded as landowners, they were
effete--both he and Christopher. They were simply bored at the
contemplation of that terrific nuisance--and refusing to perform the
duties of their post they refused the emoluments too. He could not
remember that, after childhood, he had ever had a penny out of Groby.
They would not accept that post; they had taken others.... Well this was
his, Mark's, last post.... He could have smiled at his grim joke.

Of Christopher he was not so sure. That ass was a terrific
sentimentalist. Probably he would have liked to be a great landowner,
keeping up the gates on the estate--like Fittleworth, who was a perfect
lunatic about gates. He was probably even now jaw-jawing Gunning about
them, smacking his boot-top with his crop-handle. Yes--keeping up the
gates and seeing that the tenants' land gave so many bushels of wheat to
the acre or supported so many sheep the year round.... How many sheep
would an acre keep all the year round, and how many bushels of wheat,
under proper farming, should it give? He, Mark, had not the least idea.
Christopher would know--with the difference to be expected of every acre
of all the thousand acres of Groby.... Yes, Christopher had pored over
Groby with the intentness of a mother looking at her baby's face!

So that his refusal to take on that stewardship might very well arise
from a sort of craving for mortification of the spirit. Old Campion had
once said that he believed--he positively believed with shudders--that
Christopher desired to live in the spirit of Christ. That had seemed
horrible to the General, but Mark did not see that it was horrible, _per
se_.... He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage
Groby had it been his job. Christ was a sort of an Englishman, and
Englishmen did not, as a rule, refuse to do their jobs.... They had not
used to. Now, no doubt, they did. It was a Russian sort of trick. He had
heard that even before the revolution great Russian nobles would
disperse their estates, give their serfs their liberty, put on a hair
shirt and sit by the roadside begging.... Something like that. Perhaps
Christopher was a symptom that the English were changing. He himself was
not. He was just lazy and determined--and done with it!

He had not at first been able to believe that Christopher was
resolved--with a Yorkshire resolution--to have nothing to do with Groby
or his, Mark's, money. He had, nevertheless, felt a warm admiration for
his brother the moment the words had been said. Christopher would take
none of his father's money; he would never forgive either his father or
his brother. A proper Yorkshire sentiment, uttered coldly and, as it
were, good-humouredly. His eyes, naturally, had goggled, but he had
displayed no other emotion.

Nevertheless, Mark had imagined that he might be up to some game. He
might be merely meaning to bring Mark to his knees.... But how could
Mark be more brought to his knees than by offering to give over Groby to
his brother? It is true he had kept that up his sleeve whilst his
brother had been out in France. After all, there was no sense in
offering a fellow who might be going to become food for powder the
management of great possessions. He had felt a certain satisfaction in
the fact that Christopher _was_ going out, though he was confoundedly
sorry too. He really admired Christopher for doing it--and he imagined
that it might clear some of the smirchiness that must attach to
Christopher's reputation, in spite of what he now knew to be his
brother's complete guiltlessness of the crimes that had been attributed
to him. He had, of course, been wrong--he had reckoned without the
determined discredit that, after the war was over, the civilian
population would contrive to attach to every man who had been to the
front as a fighting soldier. After all, that was natural enough. The
majority of the male population was civilian, and, once the war was over
and there was no more risk, they would bitterly regret that they had not
gone. They would take it out of the ex-soldiers all right!

So that Christopher had rather been additionally discredited than much
helped by his services to the country. Sylvia had been able to put it,
very reasonably, that Christopher was by nature that idle and dissolute
thing, a soldier. That, in times of peace, had helped her a great deal.

Still, Mark had been pleased with his brother, and once Christopher had
been invalided back, and had returned to his old-tin saving depot near
Ealing, Mark had at once set wheels in motion to get his brother
demobilized, so that he might look after Groby. By that time Groby was
inhabited by Sylvia, the boy, and Sylvia's mother. The estate just had
to be managed by the land-steward who had served his father, neither
Sylvia nor her family having any finger in that; though her mother was
able to assure him, Mark, that the estate was doing as well as the
Agricultural Committees of grocers and stock-jobbers would let it. They
insisted on wheat being sown on exposed moors where nothing but heather
had a chance, and active moorland sheep being fattened in water-bottoms
full of liver fluke. But the land-steward fought them as well as one man
could be expected to fight the chosen of a nation of small
shopkeepers....

And at that date--the date of Christopher's return to Ealing--Mark had
still imagined that Christopher had really only been holding out for the
possession of Groby. He was, therefore, disillusioned rather nastily. He
had managed to get Christopher demobilized--without telling him anything
about it--by just about the time when the Armistice came along.... And
then he found that he really had put the fat in the fire!

He had practically beggared the wretched fellow, who, counting on living
on his pay for at least a year longer, had mortgaged his blood-money in
order to go into a sort of partnership in an old-furniture business with
a confounded American. And, of course, the blood-money was considerably
diminished, being an allowance made to demobilized officers computed on
the number of their days of service. So he had docked Christopher of two
or three hundred pounds. That was the sort of mucky situation into which
Christopher might be expected to be got by his well-wishers.... There he
had been, just before Armistice Day, upon the point of demobilization
and without an available penny! It appeared that he had to sell even the
few books that Sylvia had left him when she had stripped his house.

That agreeable truth had forced itself on Mark at just the moment when
he had been so rotten bad with pneumonia that he might be expected to
cash in at any moment. Marie Lonie had indeed, of her own initiative,
telephoned to Christopher that he had better come to see his brother if
he wanted to meet him on this side of the grave.

They had at once started arguing--or, rather, each had started exposing
his views. Christopher stated what he was going to do, and Mark his
horror at what Christopher proposed. Mark's horror came from the fact
that Christopher proposed to eschew comfort. An Englishmen's duty is to
secure for himself for ever reasonable clothing, a clean shirt a day, a
couple of mutton chops grilled without condiments, two floury potatoes,
an apple pie with a piece of Stilton and pulled bread, a pint of Club
Mdoc, a clean room, in the winter a good fire in the grate, a
comfortable arm-chair, a comfortable woman to see that all these were
prepared for you, to keep you warm in bed and to brush your bowler and
fold your umbrella in the morning. When you had that secure for life,
you could do what you liked provided that what you did never endangered
that security. What was to be said against that?

Christopher had nothing to advance except that he was not going to live
in that way. He was not going to live in that way unless he could secure
that, or something like it, by his own talents. His only available and
at the same time marketable talent was his gift for knowing genuine old
furniture. So he was going to make a living out of old furniture. He had
had his scheme perfectly matured; he had even secured an American
partner, a fellow who had as great a gift for the cajolement of American
purchasers of old stuff as he, Christopher, had for its discovery. It
was still the war then, but Christopher and his partner, between them,
had predicted the American mopping up of the world's gold supply and the
consequent stripping of European houses of old stuff.... At that you
could make a living.

Other careers, he said, were barred to him. The Department of
Statistics, in which he had formerly had a post, had absolutely
cold-shouldered him. They were not only adamant, they were also
vindictive against civil servants who had become serving soldiers. They
took the view that those members of their staffs who had preferred
serving were idle and dissolute fellows who had merely taken up arms in
order to satisfy their lusts for women. Women had naturally preferred
soldiers to civilians; the civilians were now getting back on them. That
was natural.

Mark agreed that it was natural. Before he had been interested in his
brother as a serving soldier, he had been inclined to consider most
soldiers as incompetent over Transport and, in general, nuisances. He
agreed, too, that Christopher could not go back to the Department. There
he was certainly a marked man. He could possibly have insisted on his
rights to be taken back even though his lungs, being by now pretty
damaged by exposure, might afford them a pretext for legally refusing
him. H.M. Civil Service and Departments have the right to refuse
employment to persons likely to become unfit for good. A man who has
lost an eye may be refused by any Department because he may lose the
other and so become liable for a pension. But, even if Christopher
forced himself on the Department, they would have their bad mark against
him. He had been too rude to them during the war when they had tried to
force him to employ himself in the faking of statistics that the
Ministry had coerced the Department into supplying in order to dish the
French, who demanded more troops.

With that point of view, Mark found himself entirely in sympathy. His
long association with Marie Lonie, his respect for the way in which she
had her head screwed on, the constant intimacy with the life and point
of view of French individuals of the _petite bourgeoisie_ which her
gossip had given him--all these things, together with his despair for
the future of his own country, had given him a very considerable belief
in the destinies and, indeed, in the virtues of the country across the
Channel. It would, therefore, have been very distasteful to him that his
brother should take pay from an organization that had been employed to
deal treacherously with our Allies. It had, indeed, become extremely
distasteful to him to take pay himself from a Government that had forced
such a course upon the nation, and he would thankfully have resigned
from his Office if he had not considered that his services were
indispensable to the successful prosecution of the war which was then
still proceeding. He wanted to be done with it, but, at the moment, he
saw no chance. The war was by then obviously proceeding towards a
successful issue. Owing to the military genius of the French, who, by
then, had the supreme command, the enemy nations were daily being forced
to abandon great stretches of territory. But that only made the calls on
Transport the greater, whilst, if we were successfully and unwastefully
to occupy the enemy capital, as at that date he imagined that we
obviously must, the demand for the provision of Transport must become
almost unmeasurable.

Still, that was no argument for the re-entry of his brother into the
service of the country. As he saw things, public life had become--and
must remain for a long period--so demoralized by the members of the then
Government, with their devious foreign policies and their intimacies
with a class of shady financiers such as had never hitherto had any
finger in the English political pie--public life had become so
discreditable an affair that the only remedy was for the real governing
classes to retire altogether from public pursuits. Things, in short,
must become worse before they could grow better. With the dreadful
condition of ruin at home and foreign discredit to which the country
must almost immediately emerge under the conduct of the Scotch grocers,
Frankfort financiers, Welsh pettifoggers, Midland armament manufacturers
and South Country incompetents who during the later years of the war had
intrigued themselves into office--with that dreadful condition staring
it in the face, the country must return to something like its old
standards of North Country common sense and English probity. The old
governing class to which he and his belonged might never return to
power, but, whatever revolutions took place--and he did not care!--the
country must reawaken to the necessity for exacting of whoever might be
its governing class some semblance of personal probity and public
honouring of pledges. He obviously was out of it, or he would be out of
it with the end of the war, for even from his bed he had taken no small
part in the directing of affairs at his Office.... A state of war
obviously favoured the coming to the top of all kinds of devious stormy
petrels; that was inevitable and could not be helped. But in normal
times a country--every country--was true to itself.

Nevertheless, he was very content that his brother should, in the
interim, have no share in affairs. Let him secure his mutton chop, his
pint of claret, his woman and his umbrella, and it mattered not into
what obscurity he retired. But how was that to be secured? There had
seemed to be several ways.

He was aware, for instance, that Christopher was both a mathematician of
no mean order and a Churchman. He might perfectly well take orders,
assume the charge of one of the three family livings that Mark had in
his gift, and, whilst competently discharging the duties of his cure,
pursue whatever are the occupations of a well-cared-for mathematician.

Christopher, however, whilst avowing his predilection for such a
life--which, as Mark saw it, was exactly fitted to his asceticism, his
softness in general and his private tastes--Christopher admitted that
there was an obstacle to his assuming such a cure of souls--an obstacle
of an insuperable nature. Mark at once asked him if he were, in fact,
living with Miss Wannop. But Christopher answered that he had not seen
Miss Wannop since the day of his second proceeding to the front. They
had then agreed that they were not the sort of persons to begin a hidden
intrigue, and the affair had proceeded no further.

Mark was, however, aware that a person of Christopher's way of thinking
might well feel inhibited from taking on a cure of souls if, in spite of
the fact that he had abstained from seducing a young woman, he
nevertheless privately desired to enter into illicit relations with her,
and that that was sufficient to justify him in saying that an
insuperable obstacle existed. He did not know that he himself agreed,
but it was not his business to interfere between any man and his
conscience in a matter of the Church. He was himself no very good
Christian, at any rate as regards the relationships of men and women.
Nevertheless, the Church of England was the Church of England. No doubt,
had Christopher been a Papist he could have had the young woman for his
housekeeper and no one would have bothered.

But what the devil, then, was his brother to do? He had been offered, as
a sop in the pan, and to keep him quiet, no doubt, over the affair of
the Department of Statistics, a vice-consulate in some Mediterranean
port--Toulon or Leghorn, or something of the sort. That might have done
well enough. It was absurd to think of a Tietjens, heir to Groby, being
under the necessity of making a living. It was fantastic, but if
Christopher was in a fantastic mood there was nothing to be done about
it. A vice-consulate is a potty sort of job. You attend to ships'
manifests, get members of crews out of jail, give old lady tourists the
addresses of boarding-houses kept by English or half-castes, or provide
the vice-admirals of visiting British squadrons with the names of local
residents who should be invited to entertainments given on the flagship.
It was a potty job; innocuous too, if it could be regarded as a sort of
marking time.... And at that moment Mark thought that Christopher was
still holding out for some sort of concession on Mark's part before
definitely assuming the charge of Groby, its tenants and its mineral
rights.... But there were insuperable objections to even the
vice-consulate. In the first place, the job would have been in the
public service, a fact to which, as has been said, Mark strongly
objected. Then the job was offered as a sort of a bribe. And, in
addition, the consular service exacts from every one who occupies a
consular or vice-consular post the deposit of a sum of four hundred
pounds sterling, and Christopher did not possess even so much as four
hundred shillings.... And, in addition, as Mark was well aware, Miss
Wannop might again afford an obstacle. A British vice-consul might
possibly keep a Maltese or Levantine in a back street and no harm done,
but he probably could not live with an English young woman of family and
position without causing so much scandal as to make him lose his job....

It was at this point that Mark again, but for the last time, asked his
brother why he did not divorce Sylvia.

By that time Marie Lonie had retired to get some rest. She was pretty
worn out. Mark's illness had been long and serious; she had nursed him
with such care that during the whole time she had not been out into the
streets except once or twice to go across the road to the Catholic
church, where she would offer a candle or so for his recovery, and once
or twice to remonstrate with the butcher as to the quality of the meat
he supplied for Mark's broths. In addition, on many days, she had worked
late, under Mark's directions, on papers that the Office had sent him.
She either could not or would not put her man into the charge of any
kind of night nurse. She alleged that the war had mopped up every kind
of available attendant on the sick, but Mark shrewdly suspected that she
had made no kind of effort to secure an assistant. There was her
national dread of draughts to account for that. She accepted with
discipline, if with despair, the English doctor's dictum that fresh air
must be admitted to the sick-room, but she sat up night after night in a
hooded chair, watching for any change in the wind and moving in
accordance a complicated arrangement of screens that she maintained
between her patient and the open window. She had, however, surrendered
Mark to his brother without a murmur, and had quietly gone to her own
room to sleep, and Mark, though he carried on almost every kind of
conversation with his brother, and though he would not have asked her to
leave them in order that he might engage on topics that his brother
might like to regard as private--Mark seized the opportunity to lay
before Christopher what he thought of Sylvia and the relationships of
that singular couple.

It amounted, in the end, to the fact that Mark wanted Christopher to
divorce his wife, and to the fact that Christopher had not altered in
his views that a man cannot divorce a woman. Mark put it that if
Christopher intended to take up with Valentine, it mattered practically
very little whether after an attempt at a divorce he married her or not.
What a man has to do if he means to take up with a woman, and as far as
possible to honour her, is to make some sort of fight of it--as a
symbol. Marriage, if you do not regard it as a sacrament--as, no doubt,
it ought to be regarded--was nothing more than a token that a couple
intended to stick to each other. Nowadays people--the right
people--bothered precious little about anything but that. A constant
change of partners was a social nuisance; you could not tell whether you
could or couldn't invite a couple together to a tea-fight. And society
existed for social functions. That was why promiscuity was no good. For
social functions you had to have an equal number of men and women, or
someone got left out of conversations, and so you had to know who,
officially in the social sense, went with whom. Everyone knew that all
the children of Lupus at the War Office were really the children of a
Prime Minister, so that presumably the Countess and the Prime Minister
slept together most of the time, but that did not mean that you invited
the Prime Minister and the woman to social-official functions, because
they hadn't any ostensible token of union. On the contrary, you invited
Lord and Lady Lupus together to all functions that would get into the
papers, but you took care to have the Lady at any private, week-endish
parties or intimate dinners to which the Chief was coming.

And Christopher had to consider that if it came to marriage ninety per
cent. of the inhabitants of the world regarded the marriages of almost
everybody else as invalid. A Papist obviously could not regard a
marriage before an English registrar or a French _maire_ as having any
moral validity. At best it was no more than a demonstration of
aspirations after constancy. You went before a functionary publicly to
assert that man and woman intended to stick to each other. Equally for
extreme Protestants a marriage by a Papist priest, or a minister of any
other sect, or a Buddhist Lama, had not the blessing of their own brand
of Deity. So that really, to all practical intents, it was sufficient if
a couple really assured their friends that they intended to stick
together, if possible, for ever; if not, at least for years enough to
show that they had made a good shot at it. Mark invited Christopher to
consult whom he liked in his, Mark's, particular set and he would find
that they agreed with his views.

So he was anxious that if Christopher intended to take up with the
Wannop young woman he should take at least a shot at a divorce. He might
not succeed in getting one. He obviously had grounds enough, but Sylvia
might make counter-allegations, he, Mark, couldn't say with what chance
of success. He was prepared himself to accept his brother's assertions
of complete innocence, but Sylvia was a clever devil and there was no
knowing what view a judge might take. Where there had been such a hell
of a lot of smoke he might consider that there must be enough flame to
justify refusing a divorce. There would no doubt be, thus--a beastly
stink. But a beastly stink would be better than the sort of veiled
ill-fame that Sylvia had contrived to get attached to Christopher. And
the fact that Christopher had faced the stink and made the attempt would
be at least that amount of tribute to Miss Wannop. Society was
good-natured and was inclined to take the view that if a fellow had
faced his punishment and taken it he was pretty well absolved. There
might be people who would hold out against them, but Mark supposed that
what Christopher wanted for himself and his girl was reasonable material
comfort with a society of sufficient people of the right sort to give
them a dinner or so a week and a week-end or so a month in the
week-ending season.

Christopher had acquiesced in the justness of his views with so much
amiability that Mark began to hope that he would get his way in the
larger matter of Groby. He was prepared to go further and to stake as
much as his assurance that if Christopher would settle down at Groby,
accept a decent income and look after the estate, he, Mark, would assure
his brother and Valentine of bearable social circumstances.

Christopher, however, had made no answer at all beyond saying that if he
tried to divorce Sylvia it would apparently ruin his old-furniture
business. For his American partner assured him that in the United States
if a man divorced his wife instead of letting her divorce him no one
would do any business with him. He had mentioned the case of a man
called Blum, a pretty warm stock-exchange man, who insisted on divorcing
his wife against the advice of his friends; he found when he returned to
the stock market that all his clients cold-shouldered him, so that he
was ruined. And as these fellows were shortly going to mop up everything
in the world, including the old-furniture trade, Christopher supposed
that he would have to study their prejudices.

He had come across his partner rather curiously. The fellow, whose
father had been a German-Jew but a naturalized American citizen, had
been in Berlin mopping up German old furniture for sale in the American
interior, where he had a flourishing business. So, when America had come
in on the side that was not German, the Germans had just simply dropped
on Mr. Schatzweiler in their pleasant way, incorporated him in their
forces and had sent him to the front as a miserable little Tommy before
the Americans had been a month in the show. And there, amongst the
prisoners he had had to look after, Christopher had found the little,
large-eyed sensitive creature, unable to speak a word of German but just
crazy about the furniture and tapestries in the French chteaux that the
prisoners passed on their marches. Christopher had befriended him; kept
him as far as possible separated from the other prisoners, who naturally
did not like him, and had a good many conversations with him.

It had appeared that Mr. Schatzweiler had had a good deal to do in the
way of buying with Sir John Robertson, the old old-furniture
millionaire, who was a close friend of Sylvia's and had been so
considerable admirer of Christopher's furniture-buying gifts that he
had, years ago, proposed to take Christopher into partnership with
himself. At that time Christopher had regarded Sir John's proposals as
outside the range of his future; he had then been employed in the
Department of Statistics. But the proposal had always amused and rather
impressed him. If, that is to say, that hard-headed old Scotsman who had
made a vast fortune at his trade made to Christopher a quite serious
business proposition on the strength of Christopher's _flair_ in the
matter of old woods and curves, Christopher himself might take his own
gifts with a certain seriousness.

And by the time he came to be in command of the escort over those
miserable creatures he had pretty well realized that after the necessity
for escorts was over he would jolly well have to consider how he was
going to make a living for himself. That was certain. He was not going
to reinsert himself amongst the miserable collection of squits who
occupied themselves in his old Department; he was too old to continue in
the Army; he was certainly not going to accept a penny from Groby
sources. He did not care what became of him--but his not caring did not
take any tragico-romantic form. He would be quite prepared to live in a
hut on a hillside and cook his meals over three bricks outside the
door--but that was not a method of life that was very practicable and
even that needed money. Everyone who served in the Army at the front
knew how little it took to keep life going--and satisfactory. But he did
not see the world, when it settled down again, turning itself into a
place fit for old soldiers who had learned to appreciate frugality. On
the contrary, the old soldiers would be chivvied to hell by a civilian
population who abhorred them. So that merely to keep clean and out of
debt was going to be a tough job.

So, in his long vigils in tents, beneath the moon, with the sentries
walking, challenging from time to time, round the barbed wire stockades,
the idea of Sir John's proposition had occurred to him with some force.
It had gathered strength from his meeting with Mr. Schatzweiler. The
little fellow was a shivering artist, and Christopher had enough of
superstition in him to be impressed by the coincidence of their having
come together in such unlikely circumstances. After all, Providence must
let up on him after a time, so why should not this unfortunate and
impressively Oriental member of the Chosen People be a sign of a
covenant? In a way he reminded Christopher of his former protg
Macmaster--he had the same dark eyes, the same shape, the same shivering
eagerness.

That he was a Jew and an American did not worry Christopher; he had not
objected to the fact that Macmaster had been the son of a Scotch grocer.
If he had to go into partnership and be thrown into close contact with
anyone at all he did not care much who it was as long as it was not
either a bounder or a man of his own class and race. To be in close
mental communion with either an English bounder or an Englishman of good
family would, he was aware, be intolerable to him. But, for a little
shivering, artistic Jew, as of old for Macmaster, he was quite capable
of feeling a real fondness--as you might for an animal. Their manners
were not your manners and could not be expected to be, and whatever
their intelligences, they would have a certain little alertness, a
certain exactness of thought.... Besides, if they did you in, as every
business partner or protg must be expected to do, you did not feel the
same humiliation as you did if you were swindled by a man of your own
race and station. In the one case it was only what was to be expected,
in the other you were faced with the fact that your own tradition had
broken down. And under the long strain of the war he had outgrown alike
the mentality and the traditions of his own family and his own race. The
one and the other were not fitted to endure long strains.

So he welcomed the imploring glances and the eventual Oriental gratitude
of that little man in his unhappy tent. For, naturally, by communicating
in his weighty manner with the United States Headquarters when he
happened to find himself in its vicinity, he secured the release of the
little fellow, who was by now safely back somewhere in the interior of
the North American Continent.

But before that happened he had exchanged a certain amount of
correspondence with Sir John, and had discovered from him and from one
or two chance members of the American Expeditionary Force that the
little man was quite a good old-furniture dealer. Sir John had by that
time gone out of business and his letters were not particularly cordial
to Tietjens--which was only what was to be expected if Sylvia had been
shedding her charms over him. But it had appeared that Mr. Schatzweiler
had had a great deal of business with Sir John, who had indeed supplied
him with a great part of his material, and so, if Sir John had gone out
of business, Mr. Schatzweiler would need to find in England someone to
take Sir John's place. And that was not going to be extraordinarily
easy, for what with the amount of his money that the Germans had mopped
up--they had sold him immense quantities of old furniture and got paid
for it, and had then enlisted him in the ranks of their Brandenburgers,
where naturally he could do nothing with carved oak chests that had
elaborate steel hinges and locks.... What then with that, and his
prolonged absence from the neighbourhood of Detroit, where he had mostly
found his buyers, Mr. Schatzweiler found himself extremely hampered in
his activities. It therefore fell to Christopher, if he was to go into
partnership with the now sanguine and charming Oriental, to supply an
immediate sum of money. That had not been easy, but by means of
mortgaging his pay and his blood-money, and selling the books that
Sylvia had left him, he had been able to provide Mr. Schatzweiler with
enough to make at least a start somewhere across the water.... And Mr.
Schatzweiler and Christopher had between them evolved an ingenious
scheme along lines that the American had long contemplated, taking into
account the tastes of his countrymen and the nature of the times.

Mark had listened to his brother during all this with indulgence and
even with pleasure. If a Tietjens contemplated going into trade he might
at least contemplate an amusing trade carried on in a spirited manner.
And what Christopher humorously projected was at least more dignified
than stock-broking or bill-discounting. Moreover, he was pretty well
convinced by this time that his brother was completely reconciled to him
and to Groby.

It was about then and when he had again begun to introduce the topic of
Groby that Christopher got up from the chair at the bedside that he had
been occupying and, having taken his brother's wrist in his cool
fingers, remarked:

"Your temperature's pretty well down. Don't you think it is about time
that you set about marrying Charlotte? I suppose you mean to marry her
before this bout is finished; you might have a relapse."

Mark remembered that speech perfectly well, with the addition that if
he, Christopher, hurried about it they might get the job done that
night. It must therefore then have been about one o'clock of an
afternoon about three weeks before the 11th November, 1918.

Mark had replied that he would be much obliged to Christopher, and
Christopher, having roused Marie Lonie and told her that he would be
back in time to let her have a good night's rest, disappeared, saying
that he was going straight to Lambeth. In those days, supposing you
could command thirty pounds or so, there was no difficulty in getting
married at the shortest possible notice, and Christopher had promoted
too many last-minute marriages amongst his men not to know the ropes.

Mark viewed the transaction with a good deal of satisfaction. It had
needed no arguing; if the proceeding had the approval of the
heir-presumptive to Groby there was nothing more to be said against it.
And Mark took the view that if he agreed to a proceeding that
Christopher could only have counselled as heir-presumptive, that was an
additional reason for Mark's expecting that Christopher would eventually
consent to administer Groby himself.


                               CHAPTER VI

That would have been three weeks before the eleventh of November. His
mind boggled a little at computing what the actual date in October must
have been. With his then pneumonia his mind had not much registered the
dates of that period; days had gone by in fever and boredom. Still, a
man ought to remember the date of his wedding. Say it had been the
twentieth of October, 1918. The twentieth of October had been his
father's birthday. When he came to think of it he could remember
remembering hazily that it was queer that he should be going out of life
on the date his father had entered it. It made a sort of full stop. And
it made a full stop that, practically on that day, Papists entered into
their own in Groby. He had, that is to say, made up his mind to the fact
that Christopher's son would have Groby as a home even if Christopher
didn't. And the boy was by now a full-fledged Papist, pickled and oiled
and wafered and all. Sylvia had rubbed the fact in about a week ago by
sending him a card for his nephew's provisional baptism and first
communion about a week before. It had astonished him that he had not
felt more bitter.

He had not any doubt that the fact had reconciled him to his marriage
with Marie Lonie. He had told his brother a year or so before that he
would never marry her because she was a Papist, but he was aware that
then he was only chipping at Spelden, the fellow that wrote "Spelden on
Sacrilege," a book that predicted all sorts of disaster for fellows who
owned former Papist Church lands or who had displaced Papists. When he
had told Christopher that he would never marry Charlotte--he had called
her Charlotte for reasons of camouflage before the marriage--he had been
quite aware that he was chipping at Spelden's ghost--for Spelden must
have been dead a hundred years or so. As it were, he had been saying
grimly if pleasantly to that bogy:

"Eh, old un. You see. You may prophesy disaster to Groby because a
Tietjens was given it over the head of one of your fellows in Dutch
William's time. But you can't frighten me into making an honest
woman--let alone a Lady of Groby--out of a Papist."

And he hadn't. He would swear that no idea of disaster to Groby had
entered his head at the date of the marriage. Now, he would not say; but
of what he felt then he was certain. He remembered thinking whilst the
ceremony was going on of the words of Fraser of Lovat before they
executed him in the Forty-Five. They had told him on the scaffold that
if he would make some sort of submission to George II they would spare
his body from being exhibited in quarters on the spikes of the buildings
in Edinburgh. And Fraser had answered: "An the King will have my heid I
care not what he may do with my ----," naming a part of a gentleman that
is not now mentioned in drawing-rooms. So, if a Papist was to inhabit
Groby House, it mattered precious little if the first Lady Tietjens of
Groby were Papist or Heathen.

A man as a rule does not marry his mistress whilst he has any kick in
him. If he still aims at a career it might hinder him if she were known
to have been his mistress, or, of course, a fellow who wants to make a
career might want to help himself on by making a good marriage. Even if
a man does not want to make a career he may think that a woman who has
been his mistress as like as not may cuckold him after marriage, for, if
she has gone wrong with him, she would be more apt to go wrong elsewhere
as well. But if a fellow is practically finished those considerations
disappear, and he remembers that you go to hell if you seduce virgins.
It is as well at one time or another to make your peace with your
Creator. For ever is a long word and God is said to disapprove of
unconsecrated unions.

Besides, it would very likely please Marie Lonie, though she had never
said a word about it, and it would certainly dish Sylvia, who was no
doubt counting on being the first Lady Tietjens of Groby. And then, too,
it would undoubtedly make Marie Lonie safer. In one way and another he
had given his mistress quite a number of things that might well be
desirable to that bitch, and neither his nor Christopher's lives were
worth much, whilst Chancery can be a very expensive affair if you get
into it.

And he was aware that he had always had a soft spot in his heart for
Marie Lonie, otherwise he would not have provided her with the name of
Charlotte for public consumption. A man gives his mistress another name
if there is any chance of his marrying her, so that it may look as if he
were marrying someone else when he does it. _Marie Lonie Riotor_ looks
different from a casual Charlotte. It gives her a better chance in the
world outside.

So it had been well enough. The world was changing and there was no
particular reason why he should not change with it.... And he had not
been able to conceal from himself that he was getting on the way. Time
lengthened out. When he had come in drenched from one of the potty local
meetings that they had had to fall back on during the war he had known
that something was coming to him, because after Marie Lonie had tucked
him up in bed he could not remember the strain of the winner of some
handicap of no importance. Marie Lonie had given him a goodish tot of
rum with butter in it and that might have made him hazy--but, all the
same, that had never happened to him in his life before, rum or no rum.
And by now he had forgotten even the name of the winner and the
meeting....

He could not conceal from himself that his memory was failing, though
otherwise he considered himself to be as sound a man as he had ever
been. But when it came to memory, ever since that day his brain had
checked at times as a tired horse will at a fence.... A tired horse!

He could not bring himself to the computation of what three weeks back
from the eleventh of November came to; his brain would not go at it. For
the matter of that, he could remember precious little of the events of
that three weeks in their due order. Christopher had certainly been
about, relieving Marie Lonie at night and attending to him with a soft,
goggle-eyed attentiveness that only a man with a saint for a mother
could have put up. For hours and hours he would read aloud in Boswell's
"Life of Johnson," for which Mark had had a fancy.

And Mark could remember drowsing off with satisfaction to the sound of
the voice and drowsing with satisfaction awake again, still to the sound
of the voice. For Christopher had the idea that if his voice went
droning on it would make Mark's slumbers more satisfactory.

Satisfaction.... Perhaps the last satisfaction that Mark was ever to
know. For at that time--during those three weeks--he had not been able
to believe that Christopher really meant to stick out about the matter
of Groby. How could you believe that a fellow who waited on you with the
softness of a girl built of meal-sacks was determined to ... call it,
break your heart. That was what it came to.... A fellow, too, who agreed
in the most astounding manner with your views of things in general. A
fellow, for the matter of that, who knew ten times as much as you did. A
damn learned fellow....

Mark had no contempt for learning--particularly for younger sons. The
country was going to the dogs because of the want of education of the
younger sons, whose business it was to do the work of the nation. It was
a very old North Country rhyme that, that when land is gone and money
spent, then learning is most excellent. No, he had no contempt for
learning. He had never acquired any because he was too lazy: a little
Sallust, a little Cornelius Nepos, a touch of Horace, enough French to
read a novel and follow what Marie Lonie said.... Even to himself he
called her Marie Lonie once he was married to her. It had made her jump
at first!

But Christopher was a damn learned fellow. Their father, a younger son
at the beginning, had been damn learned, too. They said that even at his
death he had been one of the best Latinists in England--the intimate
friend of that fellow Wannop, the Professor.... A great age at which to
die by his own hand, his father's! Why, if that marriage had been on the
20th October, 1918, his father, then dead, must have been born on the
20th October what?... 1834.... No, that was not possible.... No: '44.
_His_ father, Mark knew, had been born in 1812--before Waterloo!

Great stretches of time. Great changes! Yet Father had not been an
incult sort of a man. On the contrary, if he was burly and determined,
he was quiet. And sensitive. He had certainly loved Christopher very
dearly--and Christopher's mother.

Father was very tall; stooping like a toppling poplar towards the end.
His head seemed very distant as if he hardly heard you. Iron-grey;
short-whiskered! Absent-minded towards the end. Forgetting where he had
put his handkerchief and where his spectacles were when he had pushed
them up on to his forehead.... He had been a younger son who had never
spoken to his father for forty years. Father's father had never forgiven
him for marrying Miss Selby of Biggen ... not because it was marrying
below him, but because his father had wanted their mother for his eldest
son.... And they had been poor in their early childhood, wandering over
the Continent, to settle at last in Dijon, where they had kept some sort
of state ... a large house in the middle of the town with several
servants. He never could imagine how their mother had done it on four
hundred a year. But she had. A hard woman. But Father had kept in with
French people and corresponded with Professor Wannop and Learned
Societies. He had always regarded him, Mark, as rather a dunce....
Father would sit reading in elegantly bound books, by the hour. His
study had been one of the showrooms of the house in Dijon.

_Did_ he commit suicide? If so then Valentine Wannop was his daughter.
There could not be much getting away from that, not that it mattered
much. In that case Christopher would be living with his half-sister....
Not that it mattered much. It did not matter much, to him, Mark ... but
his father was the sort of man that it might drive to suicide.

A luckless sort of beggar, Christopher!... If you took the whole
conglobulation at its worst--the father suiciding, the son living with
his sister in open sin, the son's son not his son, and Groby going over
to Papist hands.... That was the sort of thing that would happen to a
Tietjens of the Christopher variety: to any Tietjens who would not get
out or get under as he, Mark, had done. Tietjenses took what they damn
well got for doing what they damn well wanted to. Well, it landed them
in that sort of post.... A last post, for, if that boy was not
Christopher's, Groby went out of Tietjens hands. There would be no more
Tietjenses. Spelden might well be justified.

The grandfather of Father scalped by Indians in Canada in the war of
1812; the father dying in a place where he should not have been--taking
what he got for it and causing quite a scandal for the Court of
Victoria; the elder brother of Father killed drunk whilst fox-hunting;
Father suicided; Christopher a pauper by his own act with a by-blow in
his shoes. If then there were to be any more Tietjenses by blood ...
Poor little devils! They would be their own cousins. Something like
that....

And possibly none the worse off for that.... Either Spelden or Groby
Great Tree had perhaps done for the others. Groby Great Tree had been
planted to commemorate the birth of Great-grandfather who had died in a
whoreshop--and it had always been whispered in Groby, amongst the
children and servants, that Groby Great Tree did not like the house. Its
roots tore chunks out of the foundations, and two or three times the
trunk had had to be bricked into the front wall. It had been brought as
a sapling from Sardinia at a time when gentlemen still thought about
landscape gardening. A gentleman in those days consulted his heirs about
tree planting. Should you plant a group of copper beeches against a
group of white maples over against the ha-ha a quarter of a mile from
the house so that the contrast seen from the ball-room windows should be
agreeable--in thirty years' time? In those days thought, in families,
went in periods of thirty years, owner gravely consulting heir who
should see that development of light and shade that the owner never
would.

Nowadays the heir apparently consulted the owner as to whether the
tenant who was taking the ancestral home furnished might not cut down
trees in order to suit the sanitary ideas of the day.... An American
day! Well, why not? Those people could not be expected to know how
picturesque a contrast the tree would make against the roofs of Groby
Great House when seen from Peel's Moorside. They would never hear of
Peel's Moorside, or John Peel, or the coat so greay....

Apparently that was the meaning of the visit of that young colt and Mrs.
de Bray Pape. They had come to ask his, Mark's, sanction as owner to cut
down Groby Great Tree. And then they had funked it and bolted. At any
rate the boy was still talking earnestly to the woman in white over the
hedge. As to where Mrs. de Bray Pape was, he had no means of knowing;
she might be among the potato rows studying the potatoes of the poor for
all he knew. He hoped she would not come upon Marie Lonie, because
Marie Lonie would make short work of Mrs. de Bray Pape and be annoyed
on top of it.

But they were wrong to funk talking to _him_ about cutting down Groby
Great Tree. He cared nothing about it. Mrs. de Bray Pape might just as
well have come and said cheerfully: "Hullo, old cock, we're going to cut
down your bally old tree and let some light into the house...." if that
was the way Americans talked when they were cheerful; he had no means of
knowing. He never remembered to have talked to an American.... Oh, yes,
to Cammy Fittleworth! She had certainly been a dreadfully slangy young
woman before her husband came into the title. But then Fittleworth was
confoundedly slangy too. They said he had to give up in the middle of a
speech he tried to make in the House of Lords because he could not do
without the word "toppin," which upset the Lord Chancellor.... So there
was no knowing what Mrs. de Bray Pape might not have said if she had not
thought she was addressing a syphilitic member of an effete aristocracy
mad about an old cedar tree. But she might just as well have cheerfully
announced it. He did not care. Groby Great Tree had never seemed to like
him. It never seemed to like anybody. They say it never forgave the
Tietjenses for transplanting it from nice warm Sardinia to that
lugubrious climate.... That was what the servants said to the children
and the children whispered to each other in the dark corridors.

But poor old Christopher! He was going to go mad if the suggestion were
made to him. The barest hint! Poor old Christopher, who was now probably
at that very minute in one of those beastly machines overhead, coming
back from Groby.... If Christopher _had_ to buy a beastly South Country
show-cottage, Mark wished he would not have bought it so near a
confounded air-station. However, he expected, probably, that beastly
Americans would come flying in the beastly machines to buy the beastly
old junk. They did indeed do so--sent by Mr. Schatzweiler, who was
certainly efficient except in the sending of cheques.

Christopher had nearly jumped out of his skin--that is to say, he had
sat as still as a lump of white marble--when he had gathered that Sylvia
and, still more his own heir, wanted to let Groby furnished. He had said
to Mark, over Sylvia's first letter: "You won't let 'em?" and Mark knew
the agony that was behind his tallowy mask and goggle eyes.... Perfectly
white around the nostrils he went--that was the sign!

And it had been as near to an appeal as he had ever come--unless the
request for a loan on Armistice Day could be regarded as an appeal. But
Mark did not think that that could be regarded as a score. In their game
neither of them had yet made a real score. Probably neither of them ever
would; they were a stout pair of North Countrymen whatever else could be
said against them.

No: it hadn't been a score when Christopher had said: "You won't let 'em
let Groby?" the day before yesterday: Christopher had been in an agony,
but he was not _asking_ Mark not to let Groby be let; he was only
seeking information as to how far Mark would let the degradation of the
old place go. Mark had let him pretty well know that Groby might be
pulled down and replaced by a terra-cotta hotel before he would stir a
finger. On the other hand, Christopher had only to stir a finger and not
a blade of grass between the cobbles in the Stillroom Yard could be
grubbed up.... But by the rules of the game neither of them could give
an order. Neither. Mark said to Christopher: "Groby's yours!"
Christopher said to Mark: "Groby's yours!" With perfect good-humour and
coldness. So probably the old place would fall to pieces or Sylvia would
turn it into a bawdy-house.... It was a good joke! A good, grim
Yorkshire joke!

It was impossible to know which of them suffered more. Christopher, it
is true, was having his heart broken because the house suffered--but,
damn it, wasn't Mark himself pretty well heart-broken because
Christopher refused to accept the house from him?... It was impossible
to know which!

Yes, his confounded heart had been broken on Armistice Day in the
morning--between the morning and the morning after.... Yes: after
Christopher had been reading Boswell aloud, night after night for three
weeks.... Was that playing the game? Was it playing the game to get no
sleep if you had not forgiven your brother.... Oh, no doubt it was
playing the game. You don't forgive your brother if he lets you down in
a damn beastly way.... And of course it _is_ letting a fellow down in a
beastly--a beastly!--way to let him know that you believe he lives on
the immoral earnings of his wife.... Mark had done that to Christopher.
It was unforgivable all right. And equally of course you do not hurt
your brother except on the lines circumscribed by the nature of the
offence: you are the best friend he has--except on the lines
circumscribed by the offence; and he will nurse you like a blasted soft
woman--except in so far as the lines circumscribed by the offence do not
preclude your ministrations.

For, obviously, the best thing Christopher could have done for his
brother's health would have been to have accepted the stewardship of
Groby--but his brother could die and he himself could die before he
would do that. It was nevertheless a pretty cruel affair.... Over
Boswell the two brothers had got as thick as thieves with an astonishing
intimacy--and with an astonishing similarity. If one of them made a
comment on Bennett Langton it would be precisely the comment that the
other had on his lips. It was what asses call telepathy nowadays ... a
warm, comfortable feeling, late at night with the light shaded from your
eyes, the voice going on through the deep silence of London that awaited
the crashes of falling bombs.... Well, Mark accepted Christopher's
dictum that he himself was an eighteenth-century bloke and was only
forestalled when he had wanted to tell Christopher that he was more
old-fashioned still--a sort of seventeenth-century Anglican who ought to
be strolling in a grove with the Greek Testament beneath the arm and
all.... And, hang it all, there was room for him! The land had not
changed.... There were still the deep beech-woods making groves beside
the ploughlands and the rooks rising lazily as the plough came towards
them. The land had not changed.... Well, the breed had not changed....
There was Christopher.... Only, the times ... they had changed.... The
rooks and the ploughlands and the beeches and Christopher were there
still.... But not the frame of mind in the day.... The sun might rise
and go above the plough till it set behind the hedge, and the ploughman
went off to the inn settle; and the moon could do the same. But they
would--neither sun nor moon--look on the spit of Christopher in all
their journeys. Never. They might as well expect to see a mastodon....
And he, Mark, himself was an old-fashioned buffer. That was all right.
Judas Iscariot himself was an old-fashioned ass, once upon a time!

But it was almost on the edge of not playing the game for Christopher to
let that intimacy establish itself and all the time to cherish that
unforgivingness.... Not quite not playing the game: but almost. For
hadn't Mark held out feelers? Hadn't he made concessions? Hadn't his
very marrying of Marie Lonie been by way of a concession to
Christopher? Didn't Christopher, if the truth was to be known, want Mark
to marry Marie Lonie because he, Christopher, wanted to marry Valentine
Wannop and hadn't a hope? If the truth were known.... Well, he had made
that concession to Christopher, who was a sort of a parson anyhow. But
ought Christopher to have exacted--to have telepathically willed--that
concession if he wasn't himself going to concede something? Ought he to
have forced him, Mark, to accept his mooning womanly services when the
poor devil was already worn out with his military duties of seeing old
tins cleaned out day after day, if he meant to become a beastly
old-furniture dealer and refuse Groby? For, upon his soul, till the
morning of Armistice Day, Mark had accepted Christopher's story of Mr.
Schatzweiler as merely a good-humoured, grim threat.... A sort of a
feint at a threat....

Well, probably it was playing the game all right: if Christopher thought
it was jonnock, jonnock it was!

But ... a damn beastly shock.... Why, he had been practically
convalescent, he had been out of bed in a dressing-gown and had told
Lord Wolstonmark that he could pile in as many papers as he liked from
the Office.... And then Christopher, without a hat and in a beastly
civilian suit of light mulberry-coloured Harris tweed, had burst into
the room with a beastly piece of old furniture under his arm.... A sort
of inlaid toy writing-desk. A model. For cabinet-makers! A fine thing to
bring into a convalescent bedroom, to a man quietly reading Form T.O.
LOUWR, 1962, E 17 of the 10/11/18, in front of a clean fire.... And
chalk-white about the gills the fellow was--with an awful lot of silver
in his hair.... What age was he? Forty? Forty-three? God knew!

Forty.... He wanted to borrow forty quid on that beastly piece of
furniture. To have an Armistice Day Beanfeast and set up house with his
gal! Forty quid! My God! Mark felt his bowels turning over within him
with disgust.... The gal--that fellow's half-sister as like as not--was
waiting in an empty house for him to go and seduce her. In order to
celebrate the salvation of the world by seven million deaths!

If you seduce a girl you don't do it on forty pounds: you accept Groby
and three, seven, ten thousand a year. So he had told Christopher.

And then he had got it. Full in the face. Christopher was not going to
accept a penny from him. Never. Not ever!... No doubt about that,
either. That fact had gone into Mark as a knife goes into the stag's
throat. It had hurt as much, but it hadn't killed! Damn it, it might as
well have! It might as well have.... Does a fellow do that to his own
brother just because his own brother has called him ... what is the
word? _Maquereau!_... Probably a _maquereau_ is worse than a pimp....
The difference between a flea and a louse, as Dr. Johnson said.

Eh, but Christopher was bitter!... Apparently he had gone round first to
Sir John Robertson's with the jigamaree. Years before, Sir John had
promised to buy it for a hundred pounds. It was a special sort of model
signed by some duke of a Bath cabinet-maker in 1762.... Wasn't that the
year of the American Rebellion? Well, Christopher had bought it in a
junk-shop of sorts for a fiver and Sir John had promised him a hundred
quid. He collected cabinet-makers' models: extraordinarily valuable they
were. Christopher had spat out that this was worth a thousand
dollars.... Thinking of his old-furniture customers!

When Christopher had used that word--with the blue pebbles sticking out
of his white-lard head--Mark had felt the sweat break out all over him.
He had known it was all up.... Christopher had gone on: you expected him
to spit electric sparks but his voice was wooden. Sir John had said to
him:

"Eh, no, mon. You're a fine soldier now, raping half the nirls in
Flanders and Ealing and asking us to regard you as heroes. Fine heroes.
And now you're safe.... A hundred pounds is a price to a Christian that
is faithful to his lovely wife. Five pounds is as much as I'll give you
for the model, and be thankful it is five, not one, for old sake's
sake!"

That was what Sir John Robertson had said to Christopher: that was what
the world was like to serving soldiers in that day. You don't have to
wonder that Christopher was bitter--even to his own brother with the
sweat making his under-linen icy. Mark had said:

"My good chap. I won't lend you a penny on that idiotic jigamaree. But
I'll write you a cheque for a thousand pounds this minute. Give me my
cheque-book from the table...."

Marie Lonie had come into the room on hearing Christopher's voice. She
liked to hear the news from Christopher. And she liked Christopher and
Mark to have heated discussions. She had observed that they did Mark
good: on the day when Christopher had first come there, three weeks
before, when they certainly had heatedly discussed she had observed that
Mark's temperature had fallen from ninety-nine point six to ninety-eight
point two. In two hours.... After all, if a Yorkshire man can quarrel he
can live. They were like that, those others, she said.

Christopher had turned on her and said:

"Ma belle amie m'attend  ma maison; nous voulons clbrer avec mes
camarades de rgiment. Je n'ai pas le sous. Prtez moi quarante livres,
je vous en prie, madame!" He had added that he would leave his cabinet
as a pledge. He was as stiff as a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. She
had looked at Mark with some astonishment. After all, she might well be
astonished. He himself had made no sign and suddenly Christopher had
exclaimed:

"Prtez les moi, prtez les moi, pour l'amour de Dieu!"

Marie Lonie had gone a little white, but she had turned up her skirt
and turned down her stocking and took out the notes.

"Pour le dieu d'Amour, monsieur, je veux bien," she had said.... You
never knew what a Frenchwoman would not say. That was out of an old
song.

But the sweat burst out all over his face at the recollection: great
drops of sweat.


                              CHAPTER VII

Marie Lonie, a strong taste of apples in her mouth, strong savours of
apples on the air, wasps around her and as if a snow-drift of down
descending about her feet, was frowning seriously over Burgundy bottles
into which ran cider from a glass tube that she held to their necks. She
frowned because the task was serious and engrossing, because the wasps
annoyed her and because she was resisting an impulse inside herself. It
told her that something ailed Mark and urged her to go and look at him.

It annoyed her because, as a rule--a rule so strong that it had assumed
the aspect of a regulation--she felt presages of something ailing Mark
only at night. Only at night. During the day usually she felt in her
_for intrieur_ that Mark was like what he was only because he wanted so
to be. His glance was too virile and dominant to let you think
otherwise--the dark, liquid, direct glance! But at nightfall--or at any
rate shortly after supper when she had retired to her room terrible
premonitions of disaster to Mark visited her. He was dying where he lay;
he was beset by the spectral beings of the countryside; robbers, even,
had crept upon him, though that was unreasonable. For all the
countryside knew that Mark was paralysed and unable to store wealth in
his mattress.... Still, nefarious strangers might see him and imagine
that he kept his gold repeater watch beneath his pillow.... So she would
rise a hundred times in a night and, going to the low, diamond-casement
window, would lean out and listen. But there would be no sound: the wind
in the leaves; the cry of waterbirds over head. The dim light would be
in the hut, seen unmoving through the apple-boughs.

Now, however, in broad daylight, towards the hour of tea, with the
little maid on a stool beside her plucking the boiling-hens that were to
go to market next day, with the boxes of eggs on their shelves, each egg
wired to the bottom of its box, waiting till she had time to date-stamp
it--in the open potting-shed in the quiet, broad light of a summer day
she was visited by a presage of something ailing Mark. She resented it,
but she was not the woman to resist it.

There was, however, nothing to warrant it. From the corner of the house
to which she proceeded she could see quite well the greater part of
Mark's solitary figure. Gunning, being talked to by the English lord,
held a spare horse by the bridle and was looking at Mark over the hedge.
He exhibited no emotions. A young man was walking along the inside of
the hedge between it and the raspberries. That was no affair of hers:
Gunning was not protesting. The head and shoulders of a young woman--or
it might be another young man--were proceeding along the outside of the
hedge nearly level with the first one. That was equally no affair of
hers. Probably they were looking at the bird's nest. There was some sort
of bird's nest, she had heard, in that thick hedge. There was no end to
the folly of the English in the country as in the town: they would waste
time over everything. This bird was a bottle ... bottle-something, and
Christopher and Valentine and the parson and the doctor and the artist
who lived down the hill were crazy about it. They walked on tiptoe when
they were within twenty yards. Gunning was allowed to trim the hedge,
but apparently the birds knew Gunning.... For Marie Lonie, all birds
were "moineaux"; as who should say "sparrers"; in London they called
them that--just as all flowers were "girofles"--as you might say
wall-flowers.... No wonder this nation was going to rack and ruin when
it wasted its time over preserving the nests of sparrers and naming
innumerable wall-flowers! The country was well enough--a sort of suburb
of Caen: but the people!... no wonder William, of Falaise, in Normandy
subjugated them with such ease.

Now she had wasted five minutes, for the glass tubes, hinged on rubber,
that formed her siphon from barrel to bottle had had perforce to be
taken out of the spile-hole; the air had entered into it, and she would
have to put it back and suck once more at the tube until the first
trickle of cider entered her mouth. She disliked having to do that; it
wasted the cider and she disliked the flavour in the afternoon when one
had lunched. The little maid also would say: "A-oh, melady-ship, Ah _du_
call thet queer!" ... Nothing would cure that child of saying that
though she was otherwise _sage et docile_. Even Gunning scratched his
head at the sight of those tubes.

Could these savages never understand that if you want to have _cidre
mousseux_--foaming--you must have as little sediment as possible? And
that in the bottom of casks, even if they had not been moved for a long
time, there will always be sediment--particularly if you set up a flow
in the liquid by running it from a tap near the bottom. So you siphon
off the top of the great casks for bottling _mousseux_, and drink the
rest from the cask, and run the thickest into little thin-wood casks
with many hoops for freezing in the winter.... To make _calvados_ where
you cannot have alembics because of the excise.... In this unhappy
country you may not have alembics for the distilling of applejack,
plum-brandy or other _fines_--because of the excise! _Quel pays! Quels
gens!_

They lacked industry, frugality--and, above all, spirit! Look at that
poor Valentine, hiding in her room upstairs because there were people
about whom she suspected of being people from the English Lord's
house.... By rights that poor Valentine should be helping her with the
bottling and ready to sell that lugubrious old furniture to visitors
whilst her lord was away buying more old rubbish.... And she was
distracted because she could not find some prints. They
represented--Marie Lonie was well aware because she had heard the facts
several times--street criers of ambulant wares in London years ago.
There were only eight of these to be found. Where were the other four?
The customer, an English lady of title, was anxious for them. As
presents for an immediate wedding! Monsieur my brother-in-law had come
upon the four that were to make up the set at a sale two days before. He
had recounted with satisfaction how he had found them on the grass....
It was supposed that he had brought them home; but they were not in the
warehouse at Cramp the carpenter's, they were not to be found left in
the cart. They were in no drawer or press.... What was to prove that
_mon beau-frre_ had brought them home from the sale? He was not there:
he was gone for a day and a half. Naturally he would be gone for a day
and a half when he was most needed.... And where was he gone, leaving
his young wife in that nervous condition. For a day and a half! He had
never before been gone for a day and a half.... There was then something
brewing; it was in the air; it was in her bones.... It was like that
dreadful day of the Armistice when this miserable land betrayed the
beautiful _pays de France_!... When monsieur had borrowed forty pounds
of her.... In the name of heaven why did not he borrow another forty--or
eighty--or a hundred, rather than be distracted and distract Mark and
his unhappy girl?...

She was not unsympathetic, that girl. She had civilization. She could
talk of Philmon and Baucis. She had made her _bachot_, she was what you
would call _fille de famille_.... But without _chic_.... Without ...
Without ... Well, she neither displayed enough erudition to be a _blas
bleu_--though she had enough erudition!--nor enough _chic_ to be a
_femme lgre_--a _poule_ who would _faire la noce_ with her gallant.
Monsieur the brother-in-law was no gay spark. But you never know with a
man.... The cut of a skirt; a twist of the hair.... Though to-day there
was no hair to twist: but there is the equivalent.

And it was a fact that you never knew a man. Look at the case of Eleanor
Dupont, who lived for ten years with Duchamp of the Sorbonne.... Eleanor
would never attend scrupulously to her attire because her man wore blue
spectacles and was a _savant_.... But what happened.... There came along
a little piece with a hat as large as cart-wheel covered with
green-stuff and sleeves up above her ears--as the mode was then....

That had been a lesson to her, Marie Lonie, who had been a girl at the
time. She had determined that if she achieved a _collage srieux_ with a
monsieur of eighty and as blind as a bat she would study the modes of
the day right down to the latest perfume. These messieurs did not know
it, but they moved among _femmes du monde_ and the fashionable cocottes,
and however much she at home might be the little brown bird of the
domestic hearth, the lines of her dresses, her hair, her personal odour,
must conform. Mark did not imagine; she did not suppose he had ever seen
a fashionable journal in her apartments that were open to him, or had
ever suspected that she walked in the Row on a Sunday when he was
away.... But she had studied these things like another. And more. For it
is difficult to keep with the fashion and at the same time appear as if
you were a serious _petite bourgeoise_. But she had done it; and observe
the results....

But that poor Valentine.... Her man was attached enough: and well he
ought to be, considering the affair in which he had landed her. But
always there comes the _pic des temptes_, the Cap Horn, round which you
must go. It is the day when your man looks at you and says: "H'm, h'm,"
and considers if the candle is not more valuable than the game! Ah,
then.... There are wise folk who put that at the seventh year; other
wise ones, at the second; others again, at the eleventh.... But in fact
you may put it at any day on any year--to the hundredth.... And that
poor Valentine with four spots of oil on her only skirt but two. And
that so badly hung, though the stuff no doubt was once good. One must
concede that! They make admirable tweeds in this country: better
certainly than in Roubaix. But is that enough to save a country--or a
woman dependent on a man who has introduced her into a bad affair?

A voice behind her said:

"I see you have plenty of eggs!"--an unusual voice of a sort of
breathless nervousness. Marie Lonie continued to hold the mouth of her
tube into the neck of a burgundy bottle; into this she had already
introduced a small screw of sifted sugar and an extremely minute portion
of a powder that she got from a pharmacist of Rouen. This, she
understood, made the cider of a rich brownness. She did not see why
cider should be brown, but it was considered to be less fortifying if it
were light golden. She continued also to think about Valentine, who
would be twittering with nerves at the window whose iron-leaded casement
was open above their heads. She would have put down her Latin book and
have crept to the window to listen.

The little girl beside Marie Lonie had risen from the three-legged
stool and held a dead, white fowl with a nearly naked breast by its
neck. She said hoarsely:

"These ere be er Ladyship's settins of prize Reds." She was blonde,
red-faced and wore on her dull fair hair a rather large cap, on her thin
body a check blue cotton gown. "Arf a crownd a piece the heggs be or
twenty-four shillings a dozen if you takes a gross."

Marie Lonie heard the hoarse voice with some satisfaction. This girl
whom they had only had for a fortnight seemed to be satisfactory
mentally; it was not her business to sell the eggs but Gunning's;
nevertheless she knew the details. She did not turn round: it was not
_her_ business to talk to anyone who wanted to buy eggs and she had no
curiosity as to customers. She had too much else to think about. The
voice said:

"Half a crown seems a great deal for an egg. What is that in dollars?
This must be that tyranny over edibles by the producer of which one has
heard so much."

"Tiddn nothin in dollars," the girl said. "Arf a dollar is two bob. Arf
a crownd is two n six."

The conversation continued, but it grew dim in Marie Lonie's thoughts.
The child and the voice disputed as to what a dollar was--or so it
appeared, for Marie Lonie was not familiar with either of the accents
of the disputants. The child was a combative child. She drove both
Gunning and the cabinet-maker Cramp with an organ of brass. Of tin
perhaps, like a penny whistle. When she was not grubbily working she
read books with avidity--books about Blood if she could get them. She
had an exaggerated respect for the Family, but none for any other soul
in the world....

Marie Lonie considered that, by now, she might have got down to the
depth of the cask where you find sediment. She ran some cider into a
clear glass, stopping the tube with her thumb. The cider was clear
enough to let her bottle another dozen, she judged; then she would send
for Gunning to take the spile-bung out of the next cask. Four
sixty-gallon casks she had to attend to; two of them were done. She
began to tire: she was not unfatiguable if she was indefatigable. She
began at any rate to feel drowsy. She wished Valentine could have helped
her. But that girl had not much backbone, and she, Marie Lonie,
acknowledged that for the sake of the future it was good that she should
rest and read books in Latin or Greek. And avoid nervous encounters.

She had tucked her up under an eiderdown on their four-post bed because
They would have all the windows open and currents of air must, above
all, be avoided by women.... _Elle_ had smiled and said that it had once
been her dream to read the works of Aeschyle beside the blue
Mediterranean. They had kissed each other....

The maid beside her was saying that orfn n orfn she'd eared er farver oo
was a dealer wen a lot of ol ens, say, ad gone to three an nine, say
"Make it two arf dollars!" They didn ave dollars in thet country but
they did ave arf dollars. N Capt'n Kidd th' pirate: e ad dollars, n
pieces of eight n moi-dors too!

A wasp annoyed Marie Lonie; it buzzed almost on her nose, retired,
returned, made a wide circuit. There were already several wasps
struggling in the glass of cider she had just drawn; there were others
in circles round spots of cider on the slats of wood on which the
barrels were arranged. They drew in their tails and then expanded,
ecstatically. Yet only two nights before she and Valentine had gone with
Gunning all over the orchard with a lantern, a trowel and a bottle of
prussic acid, stopping up holes along the paths and in banks. She had
liked the experience; the darkness, the ring of light from the lantern
on the rough grass; the feeling that she was out, near Mark, and that
yet Gunning and his lantern kept spiritual visitors away.... What she
suffered between the desire to visit her man in the deep nights and the
possibility of coming up against _revenants_.... Was it reasonable?...
What women had to suffer for their men! Even if they were faithful....

What the unfortunate _Elle_ had not suffered....

Even on what you might call her _nuit de noces_.... At the time it had
seemed incomprehensible. Marie Lonie had had no details. It had merely
seemed fantastic: possibly even tragic because Mark had taken it so
hardly. Truly she believed he had become insane. At two in the morning,
beside Mark's bed. They had--the two brothers--exchanged words of
considerable violence whilst the girl shivered. And was determined. That
girl had been determined. She would not go back to her mother. At two in
the morning.... Well, if you refuse to go back to your mother at two in
the morning you kick indeed your slipper over the mill!

The details of that night came back to her, amongst wasps and beneath
the conversation of the unseen woman in the shed where the water ran in
the trough. She had set the bottles in the trough because it is a good
thing to cool cider before the process of fermentation in the bottles
begins. The bottles with their shining necks of green glass were an
agreeable spectacle. The lady behind her back was talking of
Oklahoma.... The cowboy with the large nose that she had seen on the
film at the Piccadilly Cinema had come from Oklahoma. It was, no doubt,
somewhere in America. She had been used to go to the Piccadilly Cinema
on a Friday. You do not go to the theatre on a Friday if you are _bien
pensant_, but you may regard the cinema as being to the theatre what a
_repas maigre_ is as against a meal with meat.... The lady speaking
behind her came apparently from Oklahoma: she had eaten prairie chickens
in her time. On a farm. Now, however, she was very rich. Or so she told
the little maid. Her husband could buy half Lord Fittleworth's estate
and not miss the money. She said that if only people here would take
example....

On Armistice evening they had come thumping on her door. The bell had
failed to wake her after all the noise in the street of that day.... She
had sprung into the middle of the floor and flown to save Mark ... from
an air raid. She had forgotten that it was the Armistice.... But the
knocking had gone on on the door.

Before it had stood monsieur the brother-in-law and that girl in a dark
blue girl-guide's sort of uniform. Both chalk-white and weary to death.
As if they leaned against one another.... She had been for bidding them
go away, but Mark had come out of the bedroom. In his nightshirt with
his legs bare. And hairy! He had bidden them come in, roughly, and had
got back into bed.... That had been the last time he had been on his
legs! Now, he having been in bed so long, his legs were no longer hairy,
but polished. Like thin glazed bones!

She had recalled his last gesture. He had positively used a gesture,
like a man raving.... And, indeed, he was raving. At Christopher. And
dripping with sweat. Twice she had wiped his face whilst they shouted at
each other.

It had been difficult to understand what they said because they had
spoken a sort of _patois_. Naturally they returned to the language they
had spoken in their childhoods--when they were excited, these
unexcitable people! It resembled the _patois_ of the Bretons. Harsh....

And, for herself, she had been all concerned for the girl. Naturally she
had been concerned for the girl. One is a woman.... At first she had
taken her for a little piece from the streets.... But even for a little
piece from the streets ... Then she had noticed that there had been no
rouge; no imitation pearl necklace....

Of course when she had gathered that Mark was pressing money on them she
had felt different. Different in two ways. It could not be a little
piece. And then her heart had contracted at the idea of money being
given away. They might be ruined. It might be these people instead of
her Paris nephews who would pillage her corpse. But the brother-in-law
pushed the thought of money away from him with both hands. If
she--Elle--wanted to go with him she must share his fortunes.... What a
country! What people!

There had seemed to be no understanding them then.... It had appeared
that Mark insisted that the girl should stop there with her lover: the
lover, on the contrary, insisted that she should go home to her mother.
The girl kept saying that on no account would she leave Christopher. He
could not be left. He would die if he was left.... And, indeed, that
brother-in-law had seemed sick enough. He panted worse than Mark.

She had eventually taken the girl to her own room. A little, agonized,
fair creature. She had felt inclined to enfold her in her arms but she
had not done so. Because of the money.... She might as well have. It was
impossible to get these people to touch money. She would now give no
little to lend that girl twenty pounds for a frock and some
under-garments.

The girl had sat there without speaking. It had seemed for hours. Then
some drunken man on the church steps opposite had begun to play the
bugle. Long calls.... Tee ... Teee ... Teeee.... Ta-heee.... To-hee....
Continuing for ever....

Valentine had begun to cry. She had said that it was dreadful. But you
could not object. It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead.
You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that
night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you
mad. The Dead ought to have all they could get.

If she had not made the necessary allowances that would have seemed to
Marie Lonie an exaggerated sentiment. The English bugle-notes could do
no good to the French dead and the English losses were so negligible in
quantity that it hardly seemed worth while to become _motionne_ when
their funeral call was played by a drunken man. The French papers
estimated the English losses at a few hundreds: what was that as against
the millions of her own people?... But she gathered that this girl had
gone through something terrible that night with the wife, and being too
proud to show emotion over her personal vicissitudes she pretended to
find an outlet because of the sounds of that bugle.... Well, it was
mournful enough. She had understood it when Christopher, putting his
face in at the crack of the door, had whispered to her that he was going
to stop the bugle because its sound was intolerable to Mark.

The girl apparently had been in a reverie, for she had not heard him.
She, Marie Lonie, had gone to look at Mark, and the girl sat there, on
the bed. Mark was by then quite quiescent. The bugle had stopped. To
cheer him she had made a few remarks about the inappropriateness of
playing, for a negligible number of dead, a funeral call at three in the
morning. If it had been for the French dead--or if her country had not
been betrayed! It was betraying her country to have given those monsters
an armistice when they were far from their borders. Merely that was
treachery on the part of these sham Allies. They should have gone right
through those monsters slaying them by the million, defenceless, and
then they should have laid waste their country with fire and sword. Let
them, too, know what it was to suffer as France had suffered. It was
treachery enough not to have done that, and the child unborn would
suffer for it.

But there they waited, then, even after that treachery had been done, to
know what were the terms of even that treachery. They might even now not
intend to be going to Berlin.... What, then, was Life for?

Mark had groaned. In effect he was a good Frenchman. She had seen to
that. The girl had come into the room. She could not bear to be
alone.... What a night of movement and cross movement. She had begun to
argue with Mark. Hadn't there, she had asked, been enough of suffering?
He agreed that there had been enough of suffering. But there must be
more.... Even out of justice to the poor bloody Germans.... He had
called them the poor bloody Germans. He had said that it was the worst
disservice you could do your foes not to let them know that remorseless
consequences follow determined actions. To interfere in order to show
fellows that if they did what they wanted they need not of necessity
take what they got for it was in effect to commit a sin against God. If
the Germans did not experience that in the sight of the world there was
an end of Europe and the world. What was to hinder endless recurrences
of what had happened near a place called Gemmenich on the 4th of August,
1914, at six o'clock in the morning? There was nothing to hinder it. Any
other state from the smallest to the largest might ...

The girl had interrupted to say that the world had changed, and Mark,
lying back exhausted on his pillows, had said with a sort of grim
sharpness:

"It is you who say it.... Then you may run the world.... I know nothing
about it...." He appeared exhausted.

It was singular the way those two discussed--discussed "the situation"
at three-thirty in the morning. Well, nobody wanted to be asleep that
night, it seemed. Even in that obscure street mobs went by, shouting and
playing concertinas. She had never heard Mark discuss before--and she
was never to hear him discuss again. He appeared to regard that girl
with a sort of aloof indulgence; as if he were fond of her but regarded
her as overlearned, too young, devoid of all experience. And Marie
Lonie had watched them and listened with intentness. In twenty years
these three weeks had for the first time showed her her man in contact
with his people. The contemplation had engrossed her.

She could, nevertheless, see that her man was exhausted in his inner
being and obviously that girl was tried beyond endurance. Whilst she
talked she appeared to listen for distant sounds.... She kept on
recurring to the idea that punishment was abhorrent to the modern mind.
Mark stuck to his point that to occupy Berlin was not punishment, but
that not to occupy Berlin was to commit an intellectual sin. The
consequence of invasion is counter-invasion and symbolical occupation,
as the consequence of over-pride is humiliation. For the rest of the
world, he knew nothing of it; for his own country that was logic--the
logic by which she had lived. To abandon that logic was to abandon
clearness of mind: it was mental cowardice. To show the world Berlin
occupied, with stands of arms and colours on her public places, was to
show that England respected logic. Not to show the world that, was to
show that England was mentally cowardly. We dared not put the enemy
nations to pain because we shrank from the contemplation.

Valentine had said: "There has been too much suffering!"

He had said:

"Yes, you are afraid of suffering.... But England is necessary to the
world.... To my world.... Well, make it your world and it may go to rack
and ruin how it will. I am done with it. But then ... you must accept
the responsibility. A world with England presenting the spectacle of
moral cowardice would be a world on a lower plane.... If you lower the
record for the mile you lower the standard of blood-stock. Try to think
of that. If Persimmon had not achieved what it did the French Grand Prix
would be less of an event and the trainers at Maisons Laffitte would be
less efficient. And the jockeys. And the stable lads. And the sporting
writers.... A world profits by the example of a steadfast nation...."

Suddenly Valentine said:

"Where is Christopher?" with such intenseness that it was like a blow.

Christopher had gone out. She exclaimed:

"But you must not let him go out.... He is not fit to go out alone....
He has gone out to go back...."

Mark said:

"Don't go...." For she had got to the door. "He went out to stop the
Last Post. But you may play the Last Post for me. Perhaps he has gone
back to the Square. He had presumably better see what has happened to
his wife. I should not myself."

Valentine had said with extraordinary bitterness:

"He shall not. He shall not." She had gone.

It had come through to Marie Lonie partly then and partly subsequently
that Christopher's wife had turned up at Christopher's empty house, that
was in the Square a few yards away only. They had gone back late at
night probably for purposes of love and had found her there. She had
come for the purpose of telling them that she was going to be operated
on for cancer, so that with their sensitive natures they could hardly
contemplate going to bed together at that moment.

It had been a good lie. That Mrs. Tietjens was a _matresse femme_.
There was no denying that. She herself was engaged for those others both
by her own inclinations and the strong injunctions of her husband, but
Mme Tietjens was certainly ingenious. She had managed to incommode and
discredit that pair almost as much as any pair could be incommoded and
discredited, although they were the most harmless couple in the world.

They had certainly not had an agreeable festival on that Armistice Day.
Apparently one of the officers present at their dinner of celebration
had gone raving mad; the wife of another of Christopher's comrades of
the regiment had been rude to Valentine; the colonel of the regiment had
taken the opportunity to die with every circumstance of melodrama.
Naturally all the other officers had run away and had left Christopher
and Valentine with the madman and the dying colonel on their hands.

An agreeable _voyage de noces_.... It appeared that they had secured a
four-wheel cab in which, with the madman and the other, they had driven
to Balham--an obscure suburb, with sixteen celebrants hanging all over
the outside of the cab and two on the horse's back--at any rate for a
couple of miles from Trafalgar Square. They were not, of course,
interested in the interior of the cab; they were merely gay because
there was to be no more suffering. No doubt Valentine and Christopher
had got rid of the madman somewhere in Chelsea at an asylum for
shell-shock cases; but the authorities would not take the colonel, so
they had driven on to Balham, the colonel making dying speeches about
the late war, his achievements, the money he owed Christopher....
Valentine had appeared to find that extremely trying. The man died in
the cab.

They had had to walk back into Town because the driver of the
four-wheeler was so upset by the death in his cab that he could not
drive. Moreover, the horse was foundered. It had been twelve midnight
before they reached Trafalgar Square. They had had to struggle through
packed crowds nearly all the way. Apparently they were happy at the
accomplishment of their duty--or their benevolence. They stood on the
top step of St. Martin's Church, dominating the square, that was all
illuminated and packed and roaring, with bonfires made of the paving
wood and omnibuses, and the Nelson Column going up and the
fountain-basins full of drunkards, and orators and bands.... They stood
on the top step, drew deep breaths and fell into each other's arms....
For the first time--though apparently they had loved each other for a
lustre or more.... What people!

Then, at the top of the stairs in the house in the Inn, they had
perceived Sylvia, all in white!...

Apparently she had been informed that Christopher and that girl were in
communication--by a lady who did not like Christopher because she owed
him money. A Lady Macmaster. Apparently there was no one in the world
who did not dislike Christopher because they owed him money. The colonel
and the lunatic and the husband of the lady who had been rude to
Valentine ... all! all! Right down to Mr. Schatzweiler, who had only
paid Christopher one cheque for a few dollars out of a great sum and had
then contracted a nervous breakdown on account of the sufferings he had
gone through as a prisoner of war....

But what sort of a man was that Christopher to have in his hands the
fortunes of a woman?... Any woman!

Those were practically the last words her Mark had ever spoken to her,
Marie Lonie. She had been supporting him whilst he drank a tisane she
had made in order that he might sleep, and he had said gravely:

"It is not necessary that I should ask you to be kind to Mademoiselle
Wannop. Christopher is incapable of looking after her...." His last
words, for immediately afterwards the telephone bell had rung. He had
just before seemed to have a good deal of temperature, and it had been
whilst his eyes were goggling at her, the thermometer that she had stuck
in his mouth gleaming on his dark lips, and whilst she was regretting
letting him be tormented by his family that the sharp drilling of the
telephone had sounded from the hall. Immediately the strong German
accent of Lord Wolstonmark had, with its accustomed disagreeableness,
burred in her ear. He had said that the Cabinet was still sitting and
they desired to know at once the code that Mark used in his
communications with various ports. His second in command appeared to be
lost amongst the celebrations of that night. Mark had said with a sort
of grim irony from the bedroom that if they wanted to stop his transport
going out they might just as well not use cypher. If they wanted to use
a twopenny-halfpenny economy as window-dressing for the elections they'd
have to have they might as well give it as much publicity as they could.
Besides, he did not believe they would get into Germany with the
transport they had. A good deal had been smashed lately.

The Minister had said with a sort of heavy joy that they were not going
into Germany: and that had been the most dreadful moment of Marie
Lonie's life; but with her discipline she had just simply repeated the
words to Mark. He had then said something she did not quite catch: and
he would not repeat what he had said. She said as much to Lord
Wolstonmark, and the chuckling accent said that he supposed that that
was the sort of news that would rattle the old boy. But one must adapt
oneself to one's day; the times were changed.

She had gone from the instrument to look at Mark. She spoke to him; she
spoke to him again. And again--rapid words of panic. His face was dark
purple and congested; he gazed straight before him. She raised him; he
sank back inertly.

She remembered going to the telephone and speaking in French to the man
at the other end. She had said that the man at the other end was a
German and a traitor; her husband should never speak to him or his
fellows again. The man had said: "Eh, what's that? Eh ... Who are you?"

With appalling shadows chasing up and down in her mind, she had said:

"I am Lady Mark Tietjens. You have murdered my husband. Clear yourself
from off my line, murderer!"

It had been the first time she had ever given herself that name; it was
indeed the first time she had ever spoken in French to that Ministry.
But Mark had finished with the Ministry, with the Government, with the
nation.... With the world.

As soon as she could get that man off the wire she had rung up
Christopher. He had come round with Valentine in tow. It had certainly
not been much of a _nuit de noces_ for that young couple.




                                PART II


                               CHAPTER I

Sylvia Tietjens, using the persuasion of her left knee, edged her
chestnut nearer to the bay mare of the shining general. She said:

"If I divorce Christopher, will you marry me?"

He exclaimed with the vehemence of a shocked hen:

"Good God, no!"

He shone everywhere except in such parts of his grey tweed suit as would
have shown by shining that they had been put on more than once. But his
little white moustache, his cheeks, the bridge but not the tip of his
nose, his reins, his Guards' tie, his boots, martingale, snaffle, curb,
fingers, finger-nails--all these gave evidence of interminable
rubbings.... By himself, by his man, by Lord Fittleworth's stable-hands,
grooms.... Interminable rubbings and supervisions at the end of extended
arms. Merely to look at him you knew that he was something like Lord
Edward Campion, Lieutenant-General retired, M.P., K.C.M.G. (military),
V.C., M.C., D.S.O....

So he exclaimed:

"Good God, no!" and using a little-finger touch on his snaffle-rein,
made his mare recoil from Sylvia Tietjens' chestnut.

Annoyed at its mate's motion, the bad-tempered chestnut with the white
forehead showed its teeth at the mare, danced a little and threw out
some flakes of foam. Sylvia swayed backwards and forwards in her saddle
and smiled down into her husband's garden.

"You can't, you know," she said, "expect to put an idea out of my head
just by flurrying the horses...."

"A man," the general said between "Come ups" to his mare, "does not
marry his ..."

His mare went backwards a pace or two into the bank and then a pace
forwards.

"His what?" Sylvia asked with amiability. "You can't be going to call me
your cast mistress. No doubt most men would have a shot at it. But I
never have been even your mistress.... I have to think of Michael!"

"I wish," the general said vindictively, "that you would settle what
that boy is to be called.... Michael or Mark!" He added: "I was going to
say: 'His godson's wife.' ... A man may not marry his godson's wife."

Sylvia leant over to stroke the neck of the chestnut.

"A man," she said, "cannot marry any other man's wife.... But if you
think that I am going to be the second Lady Tietjens after that ...
French prostitute ..."

"You would prefer," the general said, "to be India...."

Visions of India went through their hostile minds. They looked down from
their horses over Tietjens's in West Sussex, over a house with a
high-pitched, tiled roof with deep windows of the grey local stone. He
nevertheless saw names like Akh-bar Khan, Alexander of Macedon, the son
of Philip, Delhi, the Massacre at Cawnpore.... His mind, given over from
boyhood to the contemplation of the largest jewel in the British Crown,
spewed up those romances. He was member for the West Cleveland Division
and a thorn in the side of the Government. They _must_ give him India.
They knew that if they did not he could publish revelations as to the
closing days of the late war.... He would naturally never do that. One
does not blackmail even a Government.

Still, to all intents, he _was_ India.

Sylvia also was aware that he was to all intents and purposes India. She
saw receptions in Government Houses, in which, habited with a tiara, she
too would be INDIA.... As someone said in Shakespeare:

                       "_I am dying, Egypt, dying! Only_
               _I will importune Death a while until_
               _Of many thousand kisses this poor last_
               _Is laid upon thy lips_...."

She imagined it would be agreeable, supposing her to betray this old
Pantaloon India, to have a lover, gasping at her feet, exclaiming: "I am
dying, India, dying...." And she with her tiara, very tall. In white,
probably. Probably satin!

The general said:

"You know you cannot possibly divorce my godson. You are a Roman
Catholic."

She said, always with her smile:

"Oh, _can't_ I?... Besides it would be of the greatest advantage to
Michael to have for a stepfather the Field-Marshal Commanding...."

He said with impotent irritation:

"I wish you would settle whether that boy's name is Michael or Mark!"

She said:

"He calls himself Mark.... I call him Michael because I hate the name of
Mark...."

She regarded Campion with real hatred. She said to herself that upon
occasion she would be exemplarily revenged upon him. "Michael" was a
Satterthwaite name--her father's; "Mark," the name for a Tietjens eldest
son. The boy had originally been baptized and registered as Michael
Tietjens. At his reception into the Roman Church he had been baptized
"Michael Mark." Then had followed the only real deep humiliation of her
life. After his Papist baptism the boy had asked to be called Mark. She
had asked him if he really meant that. After a long pause--the dreadful
long pauses of children before they render a verdict!--he had said that
he intended to call himself Mark from then on.... By the name of his
father's brother, of his father's father, grandfather,
great-grandfather.... By the name of the irascible apostle of the lion
and the sword.... The Satterthwaites, his mother's family, might go by
the board.

For herself, she hated the name of Mark. If there was one man in the
world whom she hated because he was insensible of her attraction it was
Mark Tietjens who lay beneath the thatched roof beneath her eyes.... Her
boy, however, intended, with a child's cruelty, to call himself Mark
Tietjens....

The general grumbled:

"There is no keeping track with you.... You say now you would be
humiliated to be Lady Tietjens after that Frenchwoman.... But you have
always said that that Frenchwoman is only the concubine of Sir Mark. I
heard you tell your maid so only yesterday.... You say one thing, then
you say another.... What is one to believe?"

She regarded him with sunny condescension. He grumbled on:

"One thing, then another.... You say you cannot divorce my godson
because you are a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless, you begin divorce
proceedings and throw all the mud you can over the miserable fellow.
Then you remember your creed and don't go on.... What sort of game is
this?" ... She regarded him still ironically but with good humour across
the neck of her horse.

He said:

"There's _really_ no fathoming you.... A little time ago--for months on
end, you were dying of ... of internal cancer, in short...."

She commented with the utmost good temper:

"I didn't want that girl to be Christopher's mistress.... You would
think that no man with any imagination at all _could_ ... I mean with
his wife in that condition.... But, of course, when she insisted....
Well, I wasn't going to stop in bed, in retreat, all my life...."

She laughed good-humouredly at her companion.

"I don't believe you know anything about women," she said. "Why should
you? Naturally Mark Tietjens married his concubine. Men always do as a
sort of death-bed offering. You will eventually marry Mrs. Partridge if
I do not choose to go to India. You think you would not, but you
would.... As for me, I think it would be better for Michael if his
mother were Lady Edward Campion--of India--than if she were merely Lady
Tietjens the second of Groby, with a dowager who was once a
cross-Channel fly-by-night...." She laughed and added: "Anyhow, the
sisters at the Blessed Child said that they never saw so many
lilies--symbols of purity--as there were at my tea-parties when I was
dying.... You'll admit yourself you never saw anything so ravishing as
me amongst the lilies and the tea-cups with the great crucifix above my
head.... You were singularly moved! You swore you would cut
Christopher's throat yourself on the day the detective told us that he
was really living here with that girl...."

The general exclaimed:

"About the Dower House at Groby.... It's really damned awkward.... You
swore to me that when you let Groby to that American madwoman I could
have the Dower House and keep my horses in Groby stables. But now it
appears I can't.... It appears ..."

"It appears," Sylvia said, "that Mark Tietjens means to leave the Dower
House at the disposal of his French concubine.... Anyhow, you can afford
a house of your own. You're rich enough!"

The general groaned:

"Rich enough! My God!"

She said:

"You have still--trust _you!_--your younger son's settlement. You have
still your general's pay. You have the interest on the grant the nation
made you at the end of the war. You have four hundred a year as a member
of Parliament. You have cadged on me for your keep and your man's keep
and your horses' and grooms' at Groby for years and years...."

Immense dejection covered the face of her companion. He said:

"Sylvia.... Consider the expenses of my constituency.... One would
almost say you hated me!"

Her eyes continued to devour the orchard and garden that were spread out
below her. A furrow of raw, newly-turned earth ran from almost beneath
their horses' hoofs nearly vertically to the house below. She said:

"I suppose that is where they get their water-supply. From the spring
above here. Cramp the carpenter says they are always having trouble with
the pipes!"

The general exclaimed:

"Oh, Sylvia. And you told Mrs. de Bray Pape that they had no
water-supply so they could not take a bath!"

Sylvia said:

"If I hadn't she would never have thought of cutting down Groby Great
Tree.... Don't you see that for Mrs. de Bray Pape people who do not take
baths are outside the law? So, though she's not really courageous, she
will risk cutting down their old trees...." She added: "Yes, I almost
believe I do hate misers, and you are more next door to a miser than
anyone else I ever honoured with my acquaintance...." She added further:
"But I should advise you to calm yourself. If I let you marry me you
will have my Satterthwaite pickings. Not to mention the Groby pickings
till Michael comes of age, and the--what is it?--ten thousand a year you
will get from India. If out of all that you cannot skimp enough to make
up for house-room at my expense at Groby you are not half the miser I
took you for!"

A number of horses, with Lord Fittleworth and Gunning, came up from the
soft track outside the side of the garden and on to the hard road that
bordered the garden's top. Gunning sat one horse without his feet in the
stirrups and had the bridles of two others over his elbows. They were
the horses of Mrs. de Bray Pape, Mrs. Lowther and Mark Tietjens. The
garden with its quince-trees, the old house with its immensely
high-pitched roof such as is seen in countries where wood was once
plentiful, the thatch of Mark Tietjens' shelter and the famous four
counties, ran from the other side of the hedge out to infinity. An
aeroplane droned down towards them, many miles away. Up from the road
ran a slope covered with bracken, to many great beech trees, along a
wire hedge. That was the summit of Cooper's Common. In the stillness the
hoofs of all those horses made a noise like that of desultorily
approaching cavalry. Gunning halted his horses at a little distance; the
beast Sylvia rode was too ill-tempered to be approached.

Lord Fittleworth rode up to the general and said:

"God damn it, Campion, ought Helen Lowther to be down there? Her
ladyship will give me no rest for a fortnight!" He shouted at Gunning:
"Here you, blast you, you old scoundrel, where's the gate Speeding
complains you have been interfering with?" He added to the general:
"This old villain was in my service for thirty years, yet he's always
counter-swinging the gates in your godson's beastly fields. Of course a
man has to look after his master's interests, but we shall have to come
to some arrangement. We can't go on like this." He added to Sylvia:

"It isn't the sort of place Helen ought to go to, is it? All sorts of
people living with all sorts ... If what you say is true!"

The Earl of Fittleworth gave in all places the impression that he wore a
scarlet tail-coat, a white stock with a fox-hunting pin, white buckskin
breeches, a rather painful eyeglass and a silk top-hat attached to his
person by a silken cord. Actually he was wearing a square, high, black,
felt hat, pepper-and-salt tweeds and no eyeglass. Still, he screwed up
one eye to look at you, and his lucid dark pupils, his contracted
swarthy face with its little bristling black-grey moustache, gave him,
perched on his immense horse, the air of a querulous but very masterful
monkey.

He considered that he was out of earshot of Gunning and so continued to
the other two: "Oughtn't to give away masters before their servants....
But it _isn't_ any place for the niece of the President of a Show that
Cammie has most of her money in. Anyhow she will comb my whiskers!"
Before marrying the Earl, Lady Fittleworth had been Miss Camden Grimm.
"Regular Aga ... Agapemone, so you say. A queer go for old Mark at his
age."

The general said to Fittleworth:

"Here, I say, she says I am a regular miser.... You don't have any
complaints, say, from your keepers that I don't tip enough? Tell her,
will you? That's the real sign of a miser!"

Fittleworth said to Sylvia:

"You don't mind my talking like that of your husband's establishment, do
you?" He added that in the old days they would not have talked like that
before a lady about her husband. Or perhaps, by Jove, they would have!
His grandfather had had a ...

Sylvia was of opinion that Helen Lowther could look after herself. Her
husband was said not to pay her the attentions that a lady had a right
to expect of a husband. So if Christopher ...

She took an appraising sideways glance at Fittleworth. That peer was
going slightly purple under his brown skin. He gazed out over the
landscape and swallowed in his throat. She felt that her time for making
a decision had come. Times changed, the world changed; she felt heavier
in the mornings than she had ever used to. She had had a long, ingenious
talk with Fittleworth the night before, on a long terrace. She had been
ingenious even for her; but she was aware that afterwards Fittleworth
had had a long bedroom talk with his Cammie. Over even the greatest
houses a certain sense of suspense broods when the Master is talking to
the Mistress. The Master and the Mistress--upon a word, usually from the
Master--take themselves off, and the house-guests, at any rate in a
small party, straggle, are uncertain as to who gives the signal to
retire, suppress yawns even. Finally the butler approaches the most
intimate guests and says that the Countess will not be coming down
again.

That night Sylvia had shot her bolt. On the terrace she had drawn for
the Earl a picture of the menage upon whose roof she now looked down. It
stretched out below her, that little domain, as if she were a goddess
dominating its destinies. But she was not so certain of that. The dusky
purple under Fittleworth's skin showed no diminution. He continued to
gaze away over his territory, reading it as if it were in a book--a
clump of trees gone here, the red roof of a new villa grown up there in
among the trees, a hop-oast with its characteristic cowl gone from a
knoll. He was getting ready to say something. She had asked him the
night before to root that family out of that slope.

Naturally not in so many words. But she had drawn such a picture of
Christopher and Mark as made it, if the peer believed her, almost a
necessity for a conscientious nobleman to do the best to rid his
countryside of a plague-spot.... The point was whether Fittleworth would
choose to believe her because she was a beautiful woman with a thrilling
voice. He was terribly domestic and attached to his Transatlantic
female, as only very wicked dark men late in life can contrive to be,
when they come of very wicked, haughty and influential houses. They
have, as it were, attended on the caprices of so many opera singers and
famous professionals that when, later in life, they take capricious or
influential wives, they get the knack of very stiffly but minutely
showing every sort of elaborate deference to their life-partners. That
is born with them.

So that the fate of that garden and that high-pitched roof was, in fact,
in the hands of Cammie Fittleworth--in so far as great peers to-day have
influence over the fates of their neighbours. And it is to be presumed
that they have some.

But all men are curious creatures. Fittleworth stiffened at queer
places. He had done so last night. He had stood a good deal. It had to
be remembered that Mark Tietjens was an old acquaintance of his--not as
intimate as he would have been if the Earl had had children, for Mark
preferred houses of married people who had children. But the Earl knew
Mark very well.... Now a man listening to gossip about another man whom
he knows very well will go pretty far towards believing what a beautiful
woman will tell him. 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.

So that in inventing or hinting at a ruinous, concealed harem, with
consequent disease to account for Mark's physical condition and apparent
ruin, she thought she was not going altogether too far. She had, at any
rate, been ready to chance it. It is the sort of thing a man will
believe ... about his best friend even. He will say: "Only think.... All
the while old X ... was appearing such a quiet codger he was really ..."
And the words rivet conviction.

So that appeared to get through.

Her revelations as to Christopher's financial habits had not appeared to
do so well. The Earl had listened with his head on one side, whilst she
had let him gather that Christopher lived on women--on the former Mrs.
Duchemin, now Lady Macmaster, for instance. Yes, to that the Earl had
listened with deference, and it had seemed a fairly safe allegation to
make. Old Duchemin was known to have left a pot of money to his widow.
She had a very nice little place not six or seven miles away from where
they stood.

And it had seemed natural to bring in Edith Ethel, for, not so long ago,
Lady Macmaster had paid Sylvia a visit. It was about the late
Macmaster's debt to Christopher. That was a point about which Lady
Macmaster was and always had seemed to be a little cracky. She had
actually visited Sylvia in order to see if Sylvia would not use her
influence with Christopher. To get him to remit the debt. Even in the
old days Lady Macmaster had been used to worry Sylvia about that.

Apparently Christopher had not carried his idiotcy as far as might be
expected. He had dragged that wretched girl down into those penurious
surroundings, but he was not going to let her and the child she appeared
to be going to have suffer actual starvation, or even too great worry.
And apparently, to satisfy a rather uneasy vanity, years before
Macmaster had given Christopher a charge on his life insurance.
Macmaster, as she well knew, had spunged unmercifully on her husband,
and Christopher had certainly regarded the money he had advanced as a
gift. She herself had many times upbraided him about it; it had appeared
to her one of Christopher's worst unbearablenesses.

But apparently the charge on the life insurance still existed and was
now a charge on that miserable fellow's rather extensive estate. At any
rate, the insurance company refused to pay over any money to the widow
until the charge was satisfied.... And the thought that Christopher was
doing for that girl what, she was convinced, he never would have done
for herself had added a new impulse to Sylvia's bitterness. Indeed, her
bitterness had by now given way almost entirely to a mere spirit of
tormentingness--she wanted to torture that girl out of her mind. That
was why she was there now. She imagined Valentine under the high roof
suffering tortures because she, Sylvia, was looking down over the hedge.

But the visit of Lady Macmaster had certainly revived her bitterness as
it had suggested to her new schemes of making herself a nuisance to the
household below her. Lady Macmaster, in widow's weeds of the most
portentous crape, that gave to her at once the elegance and the direness
of a funeral horse, had really seemed more than a little out of her
mind. She had asked Sylvia's opinion of all sorts of expedients for
making Christopher loosen his grip, and she had continued her
supplications even in correspondence. At last she had hit on a singular
expedient.... Some years before, apparently, Edith Ethel had had an
affair of the heart with a distinguished Scottish Littrateur, now
deceased. Edith Ethel, as was well known, had acted the Egeria to quite
a number of Scottish men of letters. That was natural; the Macmasters'
establishment was Scottish, Macmaster had been a Critic and had had
Government funds for the relief of indigent men of letters, and Edith
Ethel was passionately cultured. You could see that even in the forms
her crape took and in how she arranged it around her when she sat or
agitatedly rose to wring her hands.

But the letters of this particular Scot had out-passed the language of
ordinary Egerianishness. They spoke of Lady Macmaster's eyes, arms,
shoulders, feminine aura.... These letters Lady Macmaster proposed to
entrust to Christopher for sale to Transatlantic collectors. She said
they ought to fetch 30,000 at least, and with the ten per cent.
commission that Christopher might take, he might consider himself as
amply repaid for the four thousand odd that Macmaster's estate owed him.

And this had appeared to Sylvia to be so eccentric an expedient that she
had felt the utmost pleasure in suggesting that Edith Ethel should drive
up to Tietjens's with her letters and have an interview--if possible
with Valentine Wannop in the absence of Tietjens. This, she calculated,
would worry her rival quite a little--and even if it did not do that,
she, Sylvia, would trust herself to obtain subsequently from Edith Ethel
a great many grotesque details as to the Wannop's exhausted appearance,
shabby clothing, worn hands.

For it is to be remembered that one of the chief torments of the woman
who has been abandoned by a man is the sheer thirst of curiosity for
material details as to how that man subsequently lives. Sylvia Tietjens,
for a great number of years, had tormented her husband. She would have
said herself that she had been a thorn in his flesh. That was largely
because he had seemed to her never to be inclined to take his own part.
If you live with a person who suffers from being put upon a good deal,
and if that person will not assert his own rights, you are apt to
believe that your standards as gentleman and Christian are below his,
and the experience is lastingly disagreeable. But, in any case, Sylvia
Tietjens had had reason to believe that for many years, for better or
for worse--and mostly for worse--she had been the dominating influence
over Christopher Tietjens. Now, except for extraneous annoyances, she
was aware that she could no longer influence him either for evil or for
good. He was a solid, four-square lump of meal sacks too heavy for her
hauling about.

So that the only real pleasure that she had was when, at night, in a
circle of cosy friends, she could assert that she was not even yet out
of his confidence. Normally she would not--the members of her circle
would not have--made confidantes of her ex-husband's domestics. But she
had had to chance whether the details of Christopher's menage as
revealed by the wife of his carpenter would prove to her friends
sufficiently amusing to make her friends forget the social trespass she
committed in consorting with her husband's dependents, and she had to
chance whether the carpenter's wife would not see that, by proclaiming
her wrongs over the fact that her husband had left her, she was
proclaiming her own unattractiveness.

She had hitherto chanced both, but the time, she was aware, was at hand
when she would have to ask herself whether she would not be better off
if she were what the French call _range_ as the wife of the
Commander-in-Chief in India than as a free-lance woman owing her
popularity entirely to her own exertions. It would be slightly
ignominious to owe part of her prestige to a pantaloon like General Lord
Edward Campion, K.C.B., but how restful might it not be! To keep your
place in a society of Marjies and Beatties--and even of Cammies, like
the Countess of Fittleworth--meant constant exertion and watchfulness,
even if you were comfortably wealthy and well-born--and it meant still
more exertion when your staple capital for entertainment was the
domestic misfortunes of a husband that did not like you.

She might well point out to Marjie, Lady Stern, that her husband's
clothes lacked buttons and the wife of his companion all imaginable
chic; she might well point out to Beattie, Lady Elsbacher, that
according to her husband's carpenter's wife, the interior of her
husband's home resembled a cave encumbered with packing cases in
dark-coloured wood, whereas in her day ... Or she might even point out
to Cammie, Lady Fittleworth, to Mrs. de Bray Pape and Mrs. Lowther,
that, having a defective water-supply, her husband's woman probably
provided him only with difficulty with baths.... But every now and then
someone--as had been the case once or twice with the three American
ladies--would point out, a little tentatively, that her husband was by
now Tietjens of Groby to all intents and purposes. And people--and in
particular American ladies--would attach particular importance before
her to English Country gentlemen who had turned down titles and the
like. Her husband had not turned down a title; he had not been able to,
for much as Mark had desired to refuse a baronetcy at the last moment he
had been given to understand that he couldn't. But her husband had
practically turned down a whole great estate, and the romantic aspect of
that feat was beginning to filter through to her friends. For all her
assertions that his seeming poverty was due to dissolute living and
consequent bankruptcy, her friends would occasionally ask her whether in
fact his poverty was not simply a voluntary affair, the result either of
a wager or a strain of mysticism. They would point out that the fact
that she and her son at least had all the symptoms of considerable
wealth looked like a sign rather that Christopher did not desire wealth,
or was generous, than that he had no longer money to throw away....

There were symptoms of that sort of questioning of the mind rising up in
the American ladies whom Cammie Fittleworth liked to have staying with
her. Hitherto Sylvia had managed to squash them. After all, the Tietjens
household below her feet was a singular affair for those who had not the
clue to its mystery. She had the clue herself; she knew both about the
silent feud between the two brothers and about their attitude to life.
And if it enraged her that Christopher should despise the things that
money could buy and that she so valued, it none the less gratified her
to know that, in the end, she was to be regarded as responsible for that
silent feud and the renunciation that it had caused. It was her tongue
that had set going the discreditable stories that Mark had once believed
against his brother.

But if she was to retain her power to blast that household with her
tongue, she felt she ought to have details. She must have corroborative
details. Otherwise she could not so very convincingly put over her
picture of abandoned corruption. You might have thought that in her
coercing Mrs. de Bray Pape and her son into making that rather
outrageous visit, and in awakening Mrs. Lowther's innocent curiosity as
to the contents of the cottage, she had been inspired solely by the
desire to torment Valentine Wannop. But she was aware that there was
more than that to it. She might get details of all sorts of queernesses
that, triumphantly, to other groups of listeners she could retail as
proof of her intimacy with that household.

If her listeners showed any signs of saying that it was queer that a man
like Christopher, who appeared like a kindly group of sacks, should
actually be a triply crossed being, compounded of a Lovelace, Pandarus
and a Satyr, she could always answer: "Ah, but what can you expect of
people who have hams drying in their drawing-room!" Or if others alleged
that it was queer, if Valentine Wannop had Christopher as much under her
thumb as she was said to have, even by Sylvia, that she should still
allow Christopher to run an Agapemone in what was, after all, her own
house, Sylvia would have liked to be able to reply: "Ah, but what can
you expect of a woman upon whose stairs you will find, side by side, a
hairbrush, a frying-pan and a copy of Sappho!"

That was the sort of detail that Sylvia needed. The one item she had:
The Tietjens, she knew from Mrs. Carpenter Cramp, had an immense
fireplace in their living-room and, after the time-honoured custom, they
smoked their hams in that chimney. But to people who did not know that
smoking hams in great chimneys was a time-honoured custom, the assertion
that Christopher was the sort of person who dried hams in his
drawing-room would bring up images of your finding yourself in a sort of
place where hams reclined on the sofa-cushions. Even that was not a
proof to the reflective that the perpetrator was a Sadic lunatic--but
few people are reflective and at any rate it was queer, and one
queerness might be taken as implying another.

But as to Valentine she could not get details enough. You had to prove
that she was a bad housekeeper and a blue-stocking in order that it
should be apparent that Christopher was miserable--and you had to prove
that Christopher was miserable in order to make it apparent that the
hold that Valentine Wannop certainly had over him was something unholy.
For that it was necessary to have details of misplaced hairbrushes,
frying-pans and copies of Sappho.

It had, however, been difficult to get those details. Mrs. Cramp, when
appealed to, had made it rather plain that, far from being a bad
housekeeper, Valentine Wannop did no housekeeping at all, whereas Marie
Lonie--Lady Mark--was a perfect devil of a _mnagre_. Apparently Mrs.
Cramp was allowed no further into the dwelling than the
wash-house--because of half-pounds of sugar and dusters that Mrs. Cramp,
in the character of charwoman, had believed to be her perquisites. Marie
Lonie hadn't.

The local doctor and the parson, both of whom visited the house, had
contributed only palely-coloured portraits of the young woman. Sylvia
had gone to call on them, and making use of the Fittleworth
gis--hinting that Lady Cammie wanted details of her humbler neighbours
for her own instruction--Sylvia had tried to get behind the professional
secrecy that distinguished parsons and doctors. But she had not got much
behind. The parson gave her the idea that he thought Valentine rather a
jolly girl, very hospitable and with a fine tap of cider at disposal and
fond of reading under trees--the classics mostly. Very much interested
also in rock-plants as you could see by the bank under Tietjens's
windows.... Their house was always called Tietjens's. Sylvia had never
been under those windows, and that enraged her.

From the doctor Sylvia, for a faint flash, gained the impression that
Valentine enjoyed rather poor health. But it had been only an impression
arising from the fact that the doctor saw her every day--and it was
rather discounted by the other fact that the doctor said that his daily
visits were for Mark, who might be expected to pop off at any moment. So
he needed careful watching. A little excitement and he was done for....
Otherwise Valentine seemed to have a sharp eye for old furniture, as the
doctor knew to his cost, for in a small way, he collected himself. And
he said that at small cottage sales and for small objects Valentine
could drive a bargain that Tietjens himself never achieved.

Otherwise, from both the doctor and the parson, she had an impression of
Tietjens's as a queer household--queer because it was so humdrum and
united. She really herself had expected something more exciting! Really.
It did not seem possible that Christopher should settle down into
tranquil devotion to brother and mistress after the years of emotion she
had given him. It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying-pan
into--a duckpond.

So, as she looked at the red flush on Fittleworth's face, an almost mad
moment of impatience had overcome her. This fellow was about the only
man who had ever had the guts to stand up to her.... A fox-hunting
squire: an extinct animal!

The trouble was, you could not tell quite how extinct he was. He might
be able to bite as hard as a fox. Otherwise she would be running down,
right now, running down that zigzag orange path to that forbidden land.

That she had hitherto never dared. From a social point of view it would
have been outrageous, but she was prepared to chance that. She was sure
enough of her place in Society, and if people will excuse a man's
leaving his wife, they will excuse the wife's making at least one or two
demonstrations that are a bit thick. But she had simply not dared to
meet Christopher: he might cut her.

Perhaps he would not. He was a gentleman and gentlemen do not actually
cut women with whom they have slept.... But he might.... She might go
down there, and in a dim, low room be making some sort of
stipulation--God knew what, the first that came into her head--to
Valentine. You can always make up some sort of reason for approaching
the woman who has supplanted you. But he might come in, mooning in, and
suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy--oh, adorable--face of stone.

That was what you would not dare to face. That would be death. She could
imagine him going out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Leaving the
whole establishment indifferently to her, closing only himself in
invisible bonds--denied to her by the angel with the flaming sword!...
That was what he would do. And that before the other woman. He had come
once very near it, and she had hardly recovered from it. That pretended
illness had not been so much pretended as all that! She had smiled
angelically, under the great crucifix, in the convent that had been her
nursing home--angelically, amongst lilies, upon the general, the
sisters, the many callers that gradually came to her teas. But she had
had to think that Christopher was probably in the arms of his girl and
he had let her go when she had, certainly physically, needed his help.

But that had not been a calm occasion, in that dark empty house.... And
he had not, at that date, enjoyed the favours, the domesticity, of that
young woman. He hadn't had a chance of comparison, so the turning down
had not counted. He had treated her barbarously--as social counters go
it had been helpful to her--but only at the strong urge of a young woman
driven to fury: that could be palliated. It hardly indeed affected her
now as a reverse. Looked at reasonably: if a man comes home intending to
go to bed with a young woman who has bewitched him for a number of years
and finds another woman who tells him that she has cancer, and then does
a very creditable faint from the top of the stairs and thus--in spite of
practice and of being as hard as nails--puts her ankle out of joint, he
has got to choose between the one and the other. And the other in this
case had been vigorous, determined on her man, even vituperative.
Obviously Christopher was not the sort of man who would _like_ seducing
a young woman whilst his wife was dying of internal cancer, let alone a
sprained ankle. But the young woman had arrived at a stage when she did
not care for any delicacies or their dictates.

No. That she had been able to live down. But if now the same thing
happened, in dim, quiet daylight, in a tranquil old room ... that she
would not be able to face. It is one thing to acknowledge that your man
has gone--there is no irrevocability about going. He may come back when
the other woman is insignificant, a blue-stocking, entirely un-chic....
But if he took the step--the responsibility--of cutting you, that would
be to put between you a barrier that no amount of weariness with your
rival could overstep.

Impatience grew upon her. The fellow was away in an aeroplane. Gone
North. It was the only time she had ever _known_ of him as having gone
away. It was her only chance of running down those orange zigzags. And
now--it was all Lombard Street to a China apple that Fittleworth
intended to disapprove of her running down. And you could not ignore
Fittleworth.


                               CHAPTER II

No, you could not ignore Fittleworth. As a fox-hunting squire he might
be an extinct monster--though, then again, he might not: there was no
knowing. But as a wicked, dark adept with bad women, and one come of a
race that had been adepts with women good and bad for generations, he
was about as dangerous a person as you could find. That gross, slow,
earthy, obstinate fellow Gunning could stand grouchily up to
Fittleworth, answer him back and chance what Fittleworth could do to
him. So could any cottager. But then they were his people. She wasn't
... she, Sylvia Tietjens, and she did not believe she could afford to
outface him. Nor could half England.

Old Campion wanted India--probably she herself wanted Campion to have
India. Groby Great Tree was cut down, and if you have not the
distinction, if you rid yourself of the distinction, of Groby Great Tree
just to wound a man to the heart--you may as well take India. Times were
changing, but there was no knowing how the circumstances of a man like
Fittleworth changed. He sat his horse like a monkey and gazed out over
his land as his people had done for generations, bastard or legitimate.
And it was all very well to regard him as merely a country squire
married to a Transatlantic nobody and so out of it. He hopped up to
London--he and his Cammie too--and he passed unnoticeably about the best
places and could drop a word or so here and there; and for all the
Countess' foreign and unknown origin, she had access to ears to which it
was dangerous to have access--dangerous for aspirants to India. Campion
might have his war-services and his constituency. But Cammie Fittleworth
was popular in the right places, and Fittleworth had his hounds and,
when it came even to constituencies, the tradesmen of a couple of
counties. And was wicked.

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. It was a comic affair--but it was the sort of affair that you
had to admit. God is probably--and very rightly--on the side of the
stuffy domesticities. Otherwise the world could not continue--the
children would not be healthy. And certainly God desired the production
of large crops of healthy children. Mind doctors of to-day said that all
cases of nervous breakdown occurred in persons whose parents had not led
harmonious lives.

So Fittleworth might well have been selected as the lightning conductor
over the house of Tietjens. And the selection was quite a good one on
the part of the Unseen Powers. And no doubt predestined. There was no
accident about Mark's being under the gis--if that was what you called
it--of the Earl. Mark had for long been one of the powers of the land,
so had Fittleworth. They had moved in the same spheres--the rather
mysterious spheres of Good People--who ruled the destinies of the nation
in so far as the more decorative and more splendid jobs were concerned.
They must have met about, here and there, constantly for years. And no
doubt Mark had indicated that it was in that neighbourhood that he
wanted to end his days simply because he wanted to be near the
Fittleworths, who could be relied on to look after his Marie Lonie and
the rest of them.

For the matter of that, Fittleworth himself, like God, was on the side
of the stuffy domesticities and on the side of women who were in the act
of producing healthy children. Early in life he had had a woman to whom
he was said to have been hopelessly attached and whom he had acquired in
romantic circumstances--a famous dancer whom he had snapped up under the
nose of a very Great Person indeed. And the woman had died in
childbirth--or had given birth to an infant child and gone mad and
committed suicide after that achievement. At any rate, for months and
months, Fittleworth's friends had had to sit up night after night with
him so that he might not kill himself.

Later--after he had married Cammie in the search for a domesticity that,
except for his hounds, he too had made really almost stuffy--he had
interested himself--and of course his Countess--in the cause of
providing tranquil conditions for women before childbirth. They had put
up a perfectly lovely lying-in almshouse right under their own windows,
down there.

So there it was--and, as she took her sideways glance at Fittleworth,
high up there in the air beside her, she was perfectly aware that she
might be in for such a duel with him as had seldom yet fallen to her
lot.

He had begun by saying: "God damn it, Campion, ought Helen Lowther to be
down there?" Then he had put it, as upon her, Sylvia's information, that
the cottage was in effect a disorderly house. But he had added: "If what
you say is true?"

That of course was distinctly dangerous, for Fittleworth probably knew
quite well that it had been at her, Sylvia's, instigation that Helen
Lowther _was_ down there. And he was letting her know that if it _was_
at her instigation and if the house was really in her belief a brothel
his Countess would be frightfully displeased. Frightfully.

Helen Lowther was of no particular importance, except to the
Countess--and of course to Michael. She was one of those not
unattractive Americans that drift over here and enjoy themselves with
frightfully simple things. She liked visiting ruins and chattering about
nothing in particular, and galloping on the downs and talking to old
servants, and she liked the adoration of Michael. Probably she would
have turned down the adoration of anyone older.

And the Countess probably liked to protect her innocence. The Countess
was fiftyish now, and of a generation that preserved a certain stiffness
along with a certain old-fashioned broadness of mind and outspokenness.
She was of a class of American that had once seemed outrageously wealthy
and who, if in the present stage of things they did not seem
overwhelming, yet retained an aspect of impressive comfort and social
authority, and she moved in a set most of whose individuals, American,
English, or even French, were of much the same class as herself. She
tolerated--she even liked--Sylvia, but she might well be mad if from
under her roof Helen Lowther, who was in her charge, should come into
social contact with an irregular couple. You never knew when that point
of view might not crop up in women of that date and class.

Sylvia, however, had chanced it. She had to--and in the end it was only
pulling the string of one more shower-bath. It was a shower-bath
formidably charged--but in the end that was her vocation in life, and,
if Campion had to lose India, she could always pursue her vocation in
other countrysides. She was tired, but not as tired as all that!

So Sylvia had chanced saying that she supposed Helen Lowther could look
after herself, and had added a salacious quip to keep the speech in
character. She knew nothing really of Helen Lowther's husband, who was
probably a lean man with some dim avocation, but he could not be very
_impressionn_, or he would not let his attractive young wife roam for
ever over Europe.

His Lordship gave no further sign beyond repeating that if that fellow
was the sort of fellow Mrs. Tietjens said he was, her Ladyship would
properly curl his whiskers. And, in face of that, Sylvia simply had to
make a concession to the extent of saying that she did not see why Helen
Lowther could not visit a show cottage that was known, apparently over
half America. And perhaps buy some old sticks.

His Lordship removed his gaze from the distant hills, and turned a cool,
rather impertinent glance on her. He said:

"Ah, if it's only that ..." and nothing more. And she chanced it again:

"If," she said slowly too, "you think Helen Lowther is in need of
protection I don't mind if I go down and look after her myself!"

The general, who had tried several interjections, now exclaimed:

"Surely you wouldn't meet that fellow!" ... And that rather spoilt it.

For Fittleworth could take the opportunity to leave her to what he was
at liberty to regard as the directions of her natural protector.
Otherwise he must have said something to give away his attitude. So she
had to give away more of her own with the words:

"Christopher is not down there. He has taken an aeroplane to York--to
save Groby Great Tree. Your man Speeding saw him when he went to get
your saddle. Getting into a plane." She added: "But he's too late. Mrs.
de Bray Pape had a letter the day before yesterday to say the tree had
been cut down. At her orders!"

Fittleworth said: "Good God!" Nothing more. The general regarded him as
one fearing to be struck by lightning. Campion had already told her over
and over again that Fittleworth would rage like a town bull at the bare
idea that the tenant of a furnished house should interfere with its
owner's timber.... But he merely continued to look away, communing with
the handle of his crop. That called, Sylvia knew, for another
concession, and she said:

"Now Mrs. de Bray Pape has got cold feet. Horribly cold feet. That's why
she's down there. She's got the idea that Mark may have her put in
prison!" She added further:

"She wanted to take my boy Michael with her to intercede. As the heir he
has some right to a view!"

And from those speeches of hers Sylvia had the measure of her dread of
that silent man. Perhaps she was more tired than she thought, and the
idea of India more attractive.

At that point Fittleworth exclaimed:

"Damn it all, I've got to settle the hash of that fellow Gunning!"

He turned his horse's head along the road and beckoned the general
towards him with his crop handle. The general gazed back at her
appealingly, but Sylvia knew that she had to stop there and await
Fittleworth's verdict from the general's lips. She wasn't even to have
any duel of _sous-entendus_ with Fittleworth.

She clenched her fingers on her crop and looked towards Gunning.... If
she was going to be asked by the Countess through old Campion to pack
up, bag and baggage, and leave the house she would at least get what she
could out of that fellow whom she had never yet managed to approach.

The horses of the general and Fittleworth, relieved to be out of the
neighbourhood of Sylvia's chestnut, minced companionably along the road,
the mare liking her companion.

"This fellow Gunning," his Lordship began.... He continued with great
animation: "About these gates.... You are aware that my estate carpenter
repairs ..."

Those were the last words she heard, and she imagined Fittleworth
continuing for a long time about his bothering gates in order to put
Campion quite off his guard--and no doubt for the sake of manners. Then
he would drop in some shot that would be terrible to the old general. He
might even cross-question him as to facts, with sly, side questions,
looking away over the country.

For that she cared very little. She did not pretend to be a historian:
she entertained rather than instructed. And she had conceded enough to
Fittleworth. Or perhaps it was to Cammie. Cammie was a great, fat,
good-natured dark thing with pockets under her liquid eyes. But she had
a will. And by telling Fittleworth that she had not incited Helen
Lowther and the two others to make an incursion into the Tietjens'
household Sylvia was aware that she had weakened.

She hadn't intended to weaken. It had happened. She had intended to
chance conveying the idea that she intended to worry Christopher and his
companion into leaving that country.

The heavy man with the three horses approached slowly, with the air of a
small army in the narrow road. He was grubby and unbuttoned, but he
regarded her intently with eyes a little bloodshot. He said from a
distance something that she did not altogether understand. It was about
her chestnut. He was asking her to back that ere chestnut's tail into
the hedge. She was not used to being spoken to by the lower classes. She
kept her horse along the road. In that way the fellow could not pass.
She knew what was the matter. Her chestnut would lash out at Gunning's
charges if they got near her stern. In the hunting season it wore a
large K on its tail.

Nevertheless the fellow must be a good man with horses: otherwise he
would not be perched on one with the stirrups crossed over the saddle in
front of him and lead two others. She did not know that she would care
to do that herself nowadays; there had been a time when she would have.
She had intended to slip down from the chestnut and hand it, too, over
to Gunning. Once she was down on the road he could not very well refuse.
But she felt disinclined--to cock her leg over the saddle. He looked
like a fellow who could refuse.

He refused. She had asked him to hold her horse whilst she went down and
spoke to his master. He had made no motion towards her; he had continued
to stare fixedly at her. She had said:

"You're Captain Tietjens' servant, aren't you? I'm his wife. Staying
with Lord Fittleworth!"

He had made no answer and no movement except to draw the back of his
right hand across his left nostril--for lack of a handkerchief. He said
something incomprehensible--but not conciliatory. Then he began a longer
speech. That she understood. It was to the effect that he had been
thirty years, boy and man, with his Lordship and the rest of his time
with th' Cahptn. He also pointed out that there was a hitching post and
chain by the gate there. But he did not advise her to hitch to it. The
chestnut would kick to flinders any cart that came along the road. And
the mere idea of the chestnut lashing out and injuring itself caused her
to shudder; she was a good horsewoman.

The conversation went with long pauses. She was in no hurry; she would
have to wait till Campion or Fittleworth came back--with the verdict
probably. The fellow when he used short sentences was incomprehensible
because of his dialect. When he spoke longer she got a word or two out
of it.

It troubled her a little, now, that Edith Ethel might be coming along
the road. Practically she had promised to meet her at that spot and at
about that moment, Edith Ethel proposing to sell her love-letters to
Christopher--or through him.... The night before she had told
Fittleworth that Christopher had bought the place below her with money
he had from Lady Macmaster because Lady Macmaster had been his mistress.
Fittleworth had boggled at that ... it had been at that moment that he
had gone rather stiff to her.

As a matter of fact Christopher had bought that place out of a windfall.
Years before--before even she had married him--he had had a legacy from
an aunt, and in his visionary way had invested it in some Colonial--very
likely Canadian--property or invention or tramway concession, because he
considered that some remote place, owing to its geographical position on
some road--was going to grow. Apparently during the war it had grown,
and the completely forgotten investment had paid nine and sixpence in
the pound. Out of the blue. It could not be helped. With a monetary
record of visionariness and generosity such as Christopher had behind
him some chickens must now and then come home--some visionary investment
turn out sound, some debtor turn honest. She understood even that some
colonel who had died on Armistice night and to whom Christopher had lent
a good sum in hundreds had turned honest. At any rate his executors had
written to ask her for Christopher's address with a view to making
payments. She hadn't at the time known Christopher's address, but no
doubt they had got it from the War Office or somewhere.

With windfalls like those he had kept afloat, for she did not believe
the old-furniture business as much as paid its way. She had heard
through Mrs. Cramp that the American partner had embezzled most of the
money that should have gone to Christopher. You should not do business
with Americans. Christopher, it is true, had years ago--during the
war--predicted an American invasion--as he always predicted everything.
He had, indeed, said that if you wanted to have money you must get it
from where money was going to, so that if you wanted to sell you must
prepare to sell what they wanted. And they wanted old furniture more
than anything else. That was why there were so many of them here. She
didn't mind. She was already beginning a little campaign with Mrs. de
Bray Pape to make her refurnish Groby--to make her export all the clumsy
eighteen-forty mahogany that the great house contained to Santa F, or
wherever it was that Mr. Pape lived alone; and to refurnish with Louis
Quatorze as befitted the spiritual descendant of the Maintenon. The
worst of it was that Mr. Pape was stingy.

She was, indeed, in a fine taking that morning--Mrs. de Bray Pape. In
hauling out the stump of Groby Great Tree the wood-cutters had
apparently brought down two-thirds of the ball-room exterior wall, and
that vast, gloomy room, with its immense lustres, was wrecked, along
with the old school-rooms above it. As far as she could make out from
the steward's letter Christopher's boyhood's bedroom had practically
disappeared.... Well, if Groby Great Tree did not like Groby House it
had finely taken its dying revenge.... A nice shock Christopher would
get! Anyhow, Mrs. de Bray Pape had already pretty well mangled the great
dovecote in erecting in it a new power station.

But apparently it was going to mangle the de Bray Papes to the tune of a
pretty penny, and apparently Mr. Pape might be expected to give his wife
no end of a time.... Well, you can't expect to be God's Vice-gerent of
England without barking your shins on old, hard things.

No doubt Mark knew all about it by now. Perhaps it had killed him. She
hoped it hadn't, because she still hoped to play him some tidy little
tricks before she had done with him.... If he were dead or dying beneath
that parallelogram of thatch down among the apple boughs all sorts of
things might be going to happen. Quite inconvenient things.

There would be the title. She quite definitely did not want the title,
and it would become more difficult to injure Christopher. People with
titles and great possessions are vastly more difficult to discredit than
impoverished commoners, because the scale of morality changes. Titles
and great possessions expose you to great temptations: it is scandalous,
on the other hand, that the indigent should have any fun!

So that, sitting rather restfully in the sunlight on her horse, Sylvia
felt like a general who is losing the fruits of victory. She did not
much care. She had got down Groby Great Tree: that was as nasty a blow
as the Tietjenses had had in ten generations.

But then a queer, disagreeable thought went through her mind, just as
Gunning at last made again a semi-comprehensible remark. Perhaps in
letting Groby Great Tree be cut down God was lifting the ban off the
Tietjenses. He might well.

Gunning, however, had said something like:

"Sheddn gaw dahn theer. Ride Boldro up to farm n put he in loose box."
She gathered that if she would ride her horse to some farm he could be
put in a loose box and she could rest in the farmer's parlour. Gunning
was looking at her with a queer intent look. She could not just think
what it meant.

Suddenly it reminded her of her childhood. Her father had had a head
gardener just as gnarled and just as apparently autocratic. That was it.
She had not been much in the country for thirty years. Apparently
country people had not changed much. Times change; people not so much.

For it came back to her with sudden extraordinary clearness. The side of
a greenhouse, down there in the west where she had been "Miss Sylvia, oh
Miss _Sylvia_!" for a whole army of protesting retainers, and that old,
brown, gnarled fellow who was equally Mr. Carter for them all, except
her father. Mr. Carter had been potting geranium shoots and she had been
a little teasing a white kitten. She was thirteen, with immense plaits
of blonde hair. The kitten had escaped from her and was rubbing itself,
its back arched, against the leggings of Mr. Carter, who had a special
affection for it. She had proposed--merely to torment Mr. Carter--to do
something to the kitten, to force its paws into walnut shells perhaps.
She had so little meant to hurt the kitten that she had forgotten what
it was she had proposed to do. And suddenly the heavy man, his bloodshot
eyes fairly blazing, had threatened if she so much as blew on that
kitten's fur to thrash her on a part of her anatomy on which public
schoolboys rather than young ladies are usually chastised ... so that
she would not be able to sit down for a week, he had said.

Oddly enough, it had given her a queer pleasure, that returned always
with the recollection. She had never otherwise in her life been
threatened with physical violence, and she knew that within herself the
emotion had often and often existed: If only Christopher would thrash
her within an inch of her life.... Or yes--there had been Drake.... He
had half-killed her: on the night before her wedding to Christopher. She
had feared for the child within her! That emotion had been unbearable!

She said to Gunning--and she felt for all the world as if she were
trying a torment on Mr. Carter of years ago:

"I don't see why I need go to the farm. I can perfectly well ride
Boldero down this path. I must certainly speak to your master."

She had really no immediate notion of doing anything of the sort, but
she turned her horse towards the wicket gate that was a little beyond
Gunning.

He scrambled off his horse with singular velocity and under the necks of
those he led. It was like the running of an elephant, and, with all the
reins bunched before him, he almost fell with his back on the little
wicket towards whose latch she had been extending the handle of her
crop.... She had not meant to raise it. She swore she had not meant to
raise it. The veins stood out in his hairy open neck and shoulders. He
said: No, she didn'!

Her chestnut was reaching its teeth out towards the led horses. She was
not certain that he heard her when she asked if he did not know that she
was the wife of the Captain, his master, and guest of Lord Fittleworth,
his ex-master. Mr. Carter certainly had not heard her years ago when she
had reminded him that she was his master's daughter. He had gone on
fulminating. Gunning was doing that too--but more slowly and heavily. He
said first that the Cahptn would tan her hide if she so much as
disturbed his brother by a look; he would hide her within an inch of her
life. As he had done already.

Sylvia said that by God he never had; if he said he had he lied. Her
immediate reaction was to resent the implication that she was not as
good a man as Christopher. He seemed to have been boasting that he had
physically corrected her.

Gunning continued dryly:

"You put it in th' papers yourself. My ol' missus read it me. Powerful
set on Sir Mark's comfort, the Cahptn is. Threw you downstairs, the
Cahptn did, n give you cancer. It doesn show!"

That was the worst of attracting chivalrous attentions from professional
people. She had begun divorce proceedings against Christopher, in the
way of a petition for restitution of conjugal rights, compounding with
the shade of Father Consett and her conscience as a Roman Catholic by
arguing that a petition for the restoration of your husband from a
Strange Woman is not the same as divorce proceedings. In England at that
date it was a preliminary and caused as much publicity as the real thing
to which she had no intention of proceeding. It caused quite a terrific
lot of publicity, because her counsel in his enthusiasm for the beauty
and wit of his client--in his chambers the dark, Gaelic, youthful K.C.
had been impressively sentimental in his enthusiasm--learned counsel had
overstepped the rather sober bounds of the preliminary aspects of these
cases. He knew that Sylvia's aim was not divorce but the casting of all
possible obloquy on Christopher, and in his fervid Erse oratory he had
cast as much mud as an enthusiastic terrier with its hind legs out of a
fox's hole. It had embarrassed Sylvia herself, sitting brilliantly in
court. And it had roused the judge, who knew something of the case,
having, like half London of his class, taken tea with the dying Sylvia
beneath the crucifix and amongst the lilies of the nursing home that was
also a convent. The judge had protested against the oratory of Mr.
Sylvian Hatt, but Mr. Hatt had got in already a lurid picture of
Christopher and Valentine in a dark, empty house on Armistice night
throwing Sylvia downstairs and so occasioning in her a fell disease from
which, under the court's eyes, she was fading. This had distressed
Sylvia herself, for, rather with the idea of showing the court and the
world in general what a fool Christopher was to have left her for a
little brown sparrow, she had chosen to appear all radiance and health.
She had hoped for the appearance of Valentine in court. It had not
occurred.

The judge had asked Mr. Hatt if he really proposed to bring in evidence
that Captain Tietjens and Miss Wannop had enticed Mrs. Tietjens into a
dark house--and on a shake of the head that Sylvia had not been able to
refrain from giving Mr. Hatt, the judge had made some extremely rude
remarks to her counsel. Mr. Hatt was at that time standing as
parliamentary candidate for a Midland Borough and was anxious to attract
as much publicity as that or any other case would give him. He had
therefore gone bald-headed for the judge, even accusing him of being
indifferent to the sufferings he was causing to Mr. Hatt's fainting
client. Rightly handled, impertinence to a judge will gain quite a
number of votes on the Radical side of Midland constituencies, judges
being supposed to be all Tories.

Anyhow, the case had been a fiasco from Sylvia's point of view, and for
the first time in her life she had felt mortification; in addition she
had felt a great deal of religious trepidation. 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. She had precipitately left the
court when Mr. Hatt had for the second time appealed for pity for
her--but she had not been able to stop it.... Pity! She appeal for pity!
She had regarded herself--she had certainly desired to be regarded--as
the sword of the Lord smiting the craven and the traitor--to Beauty! And
was it to be supported that she was to be regarded as such a fool as to
be decoyed into an empty house! Or as to let herself be thrown down
stairs! ... But _qui facit per alium_ is herself responsible, and there
she had been in a position as mortifying as would have been that of any
city clerk's wife. The florid periods of Mr. Hatt had made her shiver
all over, and she had never spoken to him again.

And her position had been broadcasted all over England--and now, here in
the mouth of this gross henchman, it had recurred. At the most
inconvenient moment. For the thought suddenly recurred, sweeping over
with immense force: God had changed sides at the cutting down of Groby
Great Tree.

The first intimation she had had that God might change sides had
occurred in that hateful court, and had, as it were, been prophesied by
Father Consett. That dark saint and martyr was in Heaven, having died
for the Faith, and undoubtedly he had the ear of God. He had prophesied
that she would toy with the temporal courts; immediately she had felt
herself degraded, as if strength had gone out from her.

Strength had undoubtedly gone out from her. Never before in her life had
her mind not sprung to an emergency. It was all very well to say that
she could not move physically either backwards or forwards for fear of
causing a stampede amongst all those horses and that therefore her
mental uncertainty might be excused. But it was the finger of God--or of
Father Consett who, as saint and martyr, was the agent of God.... Or
perhaps God Himself was here really taking a hand for the protection of
His Christopher, who was undoubtedly an Anglican saint.... The Almighty
might well be dissatisfied with the other relatively amiable saint's
conduct of the case, for surely Father Consett might be expected to have
a soft spot for her, whereas you could not expect the Almighty to be
unfair even to Anglicans.... At any rate up over the landscape, the
hills, the sky, she felt the shadow of Father Consett, the arms extended
as if on a gigantic cruciform--and then, above and behind that, an ...
an August Will!

Gunning, his bloodshot eyes fixed on her, moved his lips vindictively.
She had, in face of those ghostly manifestations across hills and sky, a
moment of real panic. Such as she had felt when they had been shelling
near the hotel in France, when she had sat amidst palms with Christopher
under a glass roof.... A mad desire to run--or as if your soul ran about
inside you like a parcel of rats in a pit awaiting an unseen terrier.

What was she to do? What the devil was she to do?... She felt an
itch.... She felt the very devil of a desire to confront at least Mark
Tietjens ... even if it should kill the fellow. Surely God could not be
unfair! What was she given beauty for--the dangerous remains of
beauty!--if not to impress it on the unimpressible! She ought to be
given the chance at least once more to try her irresistible ram against
that immovable post before ... She was aware....

Gunning was saying something to the effect that if she caused Mrs.
Valentine to have a miscarriage or an idiot child, Is Lordship woul flay
all the flesh off er bones with is own ridin crop. Is Lordship ad fair
done it to im, Gunning, isself when e lef is missis then eight and a arf
munce gone to live with old Mother Cressy! The child was bore dead.

The words conveyed little to her.... She was aware.... She was aware....
What was she aware of?... She was aware that God--or perhaps it was
Father Consett that so arranged it, more diplomatically, the
dear!--desired that she should apply to Rome for the dissolution of her
marriage with Christopher, and that she should then apply to the civil
courts. She thought that probably God desired that Christopher should be
freed as early as possible, Father Consett suggesting to Him the less
stringent course.

A fantastic object was descending at a fly-crawl the hill-road that went
almost vertically up to the farm amongst the beeches. She did not care!

Gunning was saying that that wer why Is Lordship giv im th sack. Took
away the cottage an ten bob a week that is Lordship allowed to all as
had been in his service thritty yeer.

She said: "What! What's that?" ... Then it came back to her that Gunning
had suggested that she might give Valentine a miscarriage.... Her breath
made a little clittering sound, like the trituration of barley ears, in
her throat; her gloved hands, reins and all, were over her eyes,
smelling of morocco leather; she felt as if within her a shelf dropped
away--as the platform drops away from beneath the feet of a convict they
are hanging. She said: "Could ..." Then her mind stopped, the clittering
sound in her throat continuing. Louder. Louder.

Descending the hill at the fly's pace was the impossible. A black
basket-work pony phaeton: the pony--you always look at the horse
first--four hands too big; as round as a barrel, as shining as a
mahogany dining-table, pacing for all the world like a _haute cole_
circus steed, and in a panic bumping its behind into that black vehicle.
It eased her to see.... But ... fantastically horrible, behind that
grotesque coward of a horse, holding the reins, was a black thing, like
a funeral charger; beside it a top hat, a white face, a buff waistcoat,
black coat, a thin, Jewish beard. In front of that a bare, blond head,
the hair rather long--on the front seat, back to the view. Trust Edith
Ethel to be accompanied by a boy-poet cicisbeo! Training Mr. Ruggles for
his future condition as consort!

She exclaimed to Gunning:

"By God, if you do not let me pass, I will cut your face in half...."

It was justified! This in effect was too much--on the part of Gunning
and God and Father Consett. All of a heap they had given her perplexity,
immobility and a dreadful thought that was griping her vitals....
Dreadful! Dreadful!

She must get down to the cottage. She must get down to the cottage.

She said to Gunning:

"You damn fool.... You _damn_ fool.... I want to save ..."

He moved up--interminably--sweating and hairy, from the gate on which he
had been leaning, so that he no longer barred her way. She trotted
smartly past him and cantered beautifully down the slope. It came to her
from the bloodshot glance that his eyes gave her that he would like to
outrage her with ferocity. She felt pleasure.

She came off her horse like a circus performer to the sound of "Mrs.
Tietjens! Mrs. Tietjens," in several voices from above. She let the
chestnut go to hell.

It seemed queer that it did not seem queer. A shed of log-parings set
upright, the gate banging behind her. Apple-branches spreading down;
grass up to the middle of her grey breeches. It was Tom Tiddler's
Ground; it was near a place called Gemmenich on the Fourth of August,
1914!... But just quietude: quietude.

Mark regarded her boy's outline with beady, inquisitive eyes. She bent
her switch into a half hoop before her. She heard herself say:

"Where are all these fools? I want to get them out of here!"

He continued to regard her: beadily: his head like mahogany against the
pillows. An apple-bough caught in her hair.

She said:

"Damn it all, I had Groby Great Tree cut down: not that tin Maintenon.
But, as God is my Saviour, I would not tear another woman's child in the
womb!"

He said:

"You poor bitch! You poor bitch! The riding has done it!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

She swore to herself afterwards that she had heard him say that, for at
the time she had had too many emotions to regard his speaking as
unusual. She took, indeed, a prolonged turn in the woods before she felt
equal to facing the others. Tietjens's had its woods onto which the
garden gave directly.

Her main bitterness was that they had this peace. She was cutting the
painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning. It
was the fact that her friend Bobbie's husband, Sir Gabriel
Blantyre--formerly Bosenheim--was cutting down expenses like a lunatic.
In her world there was the writing on the wall. Here they could afford
to call her a poor bitch--and be in the right of it, as like as not!


                              CHAPTER III

Valentine was awakened by the shrill overtones of the voice of the
little maid coming through the open window. She had fallen asleep over
the words: "_Saepe te in somnis vidi!_" to a vision of white limbs in
the purple Adriatic. Eventually the child's voice said:

"We only sez 'mem' to friends of the family!" shrilly and
self-assertively.

She was at the casement, dizzy and sickish with the change of position
and the haste--and violently impatient of her condition. Of humanity she
perceived only the top of a three-cornered grey hat and a grey panniered
skirt in downward perspective. The sloping tiles of the potting-shed hid
the little maid; aligned small lettuce plants, like rosettes on the dark
earth, ran from under the window, closed by a wall of sticked peas,
behind them the woods, slender grey ash trunks going to a great height.
They were needed for shelter. They would have to change their bedroom:
they could not have a night nursery that faced the north. The spring
onions needed pricking out: she had meant to put the garden pellitory
into the rocks in the half-circle; but the operation had daunted her.
Pushing the little roots into crevices with her fingers; removing
stones, trowelling in artificial manure, stooping, dirtying her fingers
would make her retch....

She was suddenly intensely distressed at the thought of the lost
coloured prints. She had searched the whole house--all imaginable
drawers, cupboards, presses. It was like their fate that, when they had
at last got a good--an English--client, their first commission from her
should go wrong. She thought again of every imaginable, unsearched
parallelogram in the house, standing erect, her head up, neglecting to
look down on the intruder.

She considered all their customers to be intruders. It was true that
Christopher's gifts lay in the way of old-furniture dealing--and
farming. But farming was ruinous. Obviously if you sold old furniture
straight out of use in your own house, it fetched better prices than
from a shop. She did not deny Christopher's ingenuity--or that he was
right to rely on her hardihood. He had at least the right so to rely.
Nor did she mean to let him down. Only ...

She passionately desired little Chrissie to be born in that bed with the
thin fine posts, his blond head with the thin, fine hair on those
pillows. She passionately desired that he should lie with blue eyes
gazing at those curtains on the low windows.... _Those!_ With those
peacocks and globes. Surely a child should lie gazing at what his mother
had seen, whilst she was awaiting him!

And, where were those prints?... Four parallelograms of faint, silly
colour. Promised for to-morrow morning. The margins needed
bread-crumbing.... She imagined her chin brushing gently, gently back
and forward on the floss of his head; she imagined holding him in the
air as, in that bed, she lay, her arms extended upwards, her hair spread
on those pillows! Flowers perhaps spread on that quilt. Lavender!

But if Christopher reported that one of those dreadful people with
querulous voices wanted a bedroom complete?...

If she begged him to retain it for her. Well, he would. He prized her
above money. She thought--ah, she knew--that he prized the child within
her above the world.

Nevertheless, she imagined that she would go all on to the end with her
longings unvoiced.... Because there was the game.... His game ... oh,
hang it, _their_ game! And you have to think whether it is worse for the
unborn child to have a mother with unsatisfied longings, or a father
beaten at his ... No, you must not call it a game.... Still, roosters
beaten by other roosters lose their masculinity.... Like roosters,
men.... Then, for a child to have a father lacking masculinity ... for
the sake of some peacock and globe curtains, spindly bed-posts, old, old
glass tumblers with thumb-mark indentations....

On the other hand, for the mother the soft feeling that those things
give!... The room had a barrel-shaped ceiling, following the lines of
the roof almost up to the roof-tree; dark oak beams, beeswaxed--ah, that
beeswaxing! Tiny, low windows almost down to the oaken floor.... You
would say, too much of the show-place: but you lived into it. You lived
yourself into it in spite of the Americans who took, sometimes
embarrassed, peeps from the doorway.

Would they have to peek into the nursery? Oh, God, who knew? What would
He decree? It was an extraordinary thing to live with Americans all over
you, dropping down in aeroplanes, seeming to come up out of the
earth.... There, all of a sudden, you didn't know how....

That woman below the window was one, now. How in the world had she got
below that window?... But there were so many entrances--from the
spinney, from the Common, through the fourteen-acre, down from the
road.... You never knew who was coming. It was eerie; at times she
shivered over it. You seemed to be beset--with stealthy people, creeping
up all the paths....

Apparently the little tweeny was disputing the right of that American
woman to call herself a friend of the family and thus to be addressed as
"Mem!" The American was asserting her descent from Madame de
Maintenon.... It was astonishing the descents they all had! She herself
was descended from the surgeon-butler to Henry VII--Henry the
Somethingth. And, of course, from the great Professor Wannop, beloved of
lady-educators and by ladies whom he had educated.... And Christopher
was eleventh Tietjens of Groby--with an eventual burgomaster of
Scheveningen or somewhere in some century or other: time of Alva. Number
one came over with Dutch William, the Protestant Hero!... If he had not
come, and if Professor Wannop had not educated her, Valentine Wannop--or
educated her differently--she would not have ... Ah, but she would have!
If there had not been any HE, looking like a great Dutch _treckschluyt_
or whatever you call it--she would have had to invent one to live with
in open sin.... But her father might have educated her so as to have--at
least presentable underclothes....

He could have educated her so as to be able to say--oh, but tactfully:

"Look here, you.... Examine my ... my _cache-corsets_.... Wouldn't some
new ones be better than a new pedigree sow?"... The fellow never had
looked at her ... _cache-corsets_. Marie Lonie had!

Marie Lonie was of opinion that she would lose Christopher if she did
not deluge herself with a perfume called Houbigant and wear pink silk
next the skin. _Elle ne demandait pas mieux_--but she could not borrow
twenty pounds from Marie Lonie. Nor yet forty.... Because, although
Christopher might never notice the condition of her all-wools, he jolly
well would be struck by the ocean of Houbigant and the surf of pink....
She would give the world for them.... But he would notice--and then she
might lose his love. Because she had borrowed the forty pounds. On the
other hand, she might lose it because of the all-wools. And heaven knew
in what condition the other pair would be when they came back from Mrs.
Cramp's newest laundry attentions.... You could never teach Mrs. Cramp
that wool must not be put into boiling water!

Oh God, she ought to lie between lavendered linen sheets with little
Chrissie on soft, pink silk, air-cushionish bosoms!... Little Chrissie,
descended from surgeon-butler--surgeon-barber, to be correct!--and
burgomaster. Not to mention the world-famous Professor Wannop.... Who
was to become ... who was to become, if it was as she wished it.... But
she did not know what she wished, because she did not know what was to
become of England or the world.... But if he became what Christopher
wished he would be a contemplative parson farming his own tithe-fields
and with a Greek Testament in folio under his arm.... A sort of White of
Selborne.... Selborne was only thirty miles away, but they had had never
the time to go there.... As who should say: _Je n'ai jamais vu
Carcassonne_.... For, if they had never found time, because of pigs,
hens, pea-sticking, sales, sellings, mending all-wool under-garments,
sitting with dear Mark--before little Chrissie came with the floss silk
on his palpitating soft poll and his spinning pebble-blue eyes: if they
had never found time now, before, how in the world would there be time
with, added on to all the other, the bottles, and the bandagings and the
bathing before the fire with the warm, warm water, and feeling and the
slubbing of the soap-saturated flannel on the adorable, adorable limbs?
And Christopher looking on.... He would never find time to go to
Selborne, nor Arundel, nor Carcassonne, nor after the Strange Woman....
Never. Never!

He had been away now for a day and a half. But it was known between
them--without speaking!--that he would never be away for a day and a
half again. Now, before her pains began he could ... seize the
opportunity! Well, he had seized it with a vengeance.... A day and a
half! To go to Wilbraham sale! With nothing much that they wanted....
She believed ... she believed that he had gone to Groby in an
aeroplane.... He had once mentioned that. Or she knew that he had
thought of it. Because the day before yesterday when he had been almost
out of his mind about the letting of Groby, he had suddenly looked up at
an aeroplane and had remained looking at it for long, silent.... Another
woman it could not be....

He had forgotten about those prints. That was dreadful. She knew that he
had forgotten about them. How could he, when they wanted to get a good,
English client, for the sake of little Chrissie? How could he? How could
he? It is true that he was almost out of his mind about Groby and Groby
Great Tree. He had begun to talk about that in his sleep, as for years,
at times, he had talked, dreadfully, about the war.

"_Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze_.... Bring the Major a candle," he
would shout dreadfully beside her in the blackness. And she would know
that he was remembering the sound of picks in the earth beneath the
trenches. And he would groan and sweat dreadfully, and she would not
dare to wake him.... And there had been the matter of the boy,
Aranjuez', eye. It appeared that he had run away over a shifting
landscape, screaming and holding his hand to his eye. After Christopher
had carried him out of a hole.... Mrs. Aranjuez had been rude to her at
the Armistice night dinner.... The first time in her life that
anyone--except of course Edith Ethel--had been ever rude to her. Of
course you did not count Edith Ethel Duchemin, Lady Macmaster!... But
it's queer: your man saves the life of a boy at the desperate risk of
his own. Without that there would not have been any Mrs. Aranjuez: then
Mrs. Aranjuez is the first person that ever in your life is rude to you.
Leaving permanent traces that made you shudder in the night! Hideous
eyes!

Yet, but for a miracle there might have been no Christopher. Little
Aranjuez--it had been because he had talked to her for so long, praising
Christopher, that Mrs. Aranjuez had been rude to her!--little Aranjuez
had said that the German bullets had gone over them as thick as the
swarm of bees that came out when Gunning cut the leg off the skep with
his scythe!... Well, there might have been no Christopher. Then there
would have been no Valentine Wannop! She could not have lived.... But
Mrs. Aranjuez should not have been rude to her. The woman must have seen
with half an eye that Valentine Wannop could not live without
Christopher.... Then, why should she fear for her little, imploring,
eyeless creature!

It was queer. You would almost say that there was a Provvy who delighted
to torment you with: "If it hadn't been that ..." Christopher probably
believed that there was a Provvy or he would not dream for his little
Chrissie a country parsonage.... He proposed, if they ever made any
money, to buy a living for him--if possible near Salisbury.... What was
the name of the place? ... a pretty name.... Buy a living where George
Herbert had been parson....

She must, by the by, remember to tell Marie Lonie that it was the Black
Orpington labelled 42 not the Red 16 that she had put the setting of
Indian Runners under. She had found that Red 16 was not really broody,
though she had come on afterwards. It was queer that Marie Lonie had
not the courage to put eggs under broody hens because they pecked her,
whereas she, Valentine, had no courage to take the chickens when the
settings hatched, because of the shells and gumminesses that might be in
the nests.... Yet neither of them wanted courage.... Hang it all,
neither of them wanted courage, or they would not be living with
Tietjenses. It was like being tied to buffaloes!

And yet ... How you wanted them to charge!

Bremersyde.... No, that was the home of the Haigs.... Tide what will and
tide what tide, there shall be Haigs at Bremersyde.... Perhaps it was
Bemersyde!... Bemerton, then. George Herbert, rector of Bemerton, near
Wilton, Salisbury.... That was what Chrissie was to be like.... She was
to imagine herself sitting with her cheek on Chrissie's floss-silk head,
looking into the fire and seeing in the coals, Chrissie, walking under
elms beside ploughlands. _Elle ne demandait_, really, _pas mieux_!

If the country would stand it!...

Christopher presumably believed in England as he believed in
Provvy--because the land was pleasant and green and comely. It would
breed true. In spite of showers of Americans descended from Tiglath
Pileser and Queen Elizabeth, and the end of the industrial system and
the statistics of the shipping trade, England with its pleasant, green
comeliness would go on breeding George Herberts with Gunnings to look
after them.... Of course with Gunnings!

The Gunnings of the land were the rocks on which the lighthouse was
built--as Christopher saw it. And Christopher was always right.
Sometimes a little previous. But always right. Always right. The rocks
had been there a million years before the lighthouse was built: the
lighthouse made a deuce of a movable flashing--but it was a mere
butterfly. The rocks would be there a million years after the light went
for the last time out.

A Gunning would be, in the course of years, painted blue, a
Druid-worshipper, a Duke Robert of Normandy, illiterately burning towns
and begetting bastards--and eventually--actually at the moment--a man of
all works, half-full of fidelity, half blatant, hairy. A retainer you
would retain as long as you were prosperous and dispensed hard cider and
overlooked his peccadilloes with women. He would go on....

The point was whether the time had come for another Herbert of Bemerton.
Christopher thought it had: he was always right; always right. But
previous. He had predicted the swarms of Americans buying up old things.
Offering fabulous prices. He was right. The trouble was they did not pay
when they offered the fabulous prices: when they did pay they were as
mean as ... she was going to say Job. But she did not know that Job was
particularly mean. That lady down below the window would probably want
to buy the signed cabinet of Barker of 1762 for half the price of one
bought in a New York department store and manufactured yesterday.... And
she would tell Valentine she was a blood-sucker, even if--to suppose the
ridiculous!--Valentine let her have it at her own price. On the other
hand, Mr. Schatzweiler talked of fantastic prices....

Oh, Mr. Schatzweiler, Mr. Schatzweiler, if you would only pay us ten per
cent. of what you owe us I could have all the pink fluffies, and three
new gowns, and keep the little old lace for Chrissie--and have a proper
dairy and not milk goats. And cut the losses over the confounded pigs,
and put up a range of glass in the sunk garden where it would not be an
eyesore.... As it was ...

The age of fairy-tales was not, of course, past. They had had windfalls:
lovely windfalls when infinite ease had seemed to stretch out before
them.... A great windfall when they had bought this place; little ones
for the pigs and old mare.... Christopher was the sort of fellow; he had
sowed so many golden grains that he could not be always reaping
whirlwinds. There must be some halcyon days....

Only it was deucedly awkward now--with Chrissie coming and Marie Lonie
hinting all day that, as she was losing her figure, if she could not get
the grease stains out of her skirt she would lose the affections of
Christopher. And they had not got a stiver.... Christopher had cabled
Schatzweiler.... But what was the use of that?... Schatzweiler would be
finely dished if she lost the affections of Christopher--because poor
old Chris could not run any old junk shop without her.... She imagined
cabling Schatzweiler--about the four stains on the skirt and the
necessity for elegant lying-in gowns. Or else he would lose
Christopher's assistance....

The conversation down below raised its tones. She heard the tweeny maid
ask why if the American lady was a friend of the family she did not know
Er Ladyship theere?... Of course it was easy to understand: These people
came, all of them, with letters of introduction from Schatzweiler. Then
they insisted that they were friends of the family. It was perhaps nice
of them--because most English people would not want to know
old-furniture dealers.

The lady below exclaimed in a high voice:

"That Lady Mark Tietjens! That! Mercy me, I thought it was the cook!"

She, Valentine, ought to go down and help Marie Lonie. But she was not
going to. She had the sense that hostile presences were creeping up the
path and Marie Lonie had given her the afternoon off.... For the sake
of the future, Marie Lonie had said. And _she_ had said that she had
once expected her own future to offer the reading of Aeschylus beside
the Aegean sea. Then Marie Lonie had kissed her and said she knew that
Valentine would never rob her of her belongings after Mark died!

An unsolicited testimonial, that. But of course Marie Lonie would
desire her not to lose the affections of Christopher. Marie Lonie would
say to herself that in that case Christopher might take up with a woman
who _would_ want to rob Marie Lonie of her possessions after Mark
died....

The woman down below announced herself as Mrs. de Bray Pape, descendant
of the Maintenon, and wanted to know if Marie Lonie did not think it
reasonable to cut down a tree that overhung your house. Valentine
desired to spring to the window: she sprang to the old panelled door and
furiously turned the key in the lock. She ought not to have turned the
key so carelessly: it had a knack of needing five or ten minutes
manipulation before you could unlock the door again.... But she ought to
have sprung to the window and cried out to Mrs. de Bray Pape: "If you so
much as touch a leaf of Groby Great Tree we will serve you with
injunctions that it will take half your life and money to deal with!"

She ought to have done that to save Christopher's reason. But she could
not: she could not! It was one thing living with all the tranquillity of
conscience in the world in open sin. It was another, confronting elderly
Americans who knew the fact. She was determined to remain shut in there.
An Englishman's house may no longer be his castle--but an Englishwoman's
castle is certainly her own bedroom. When once, four months or so ago,
the existence of little Chrissie being manifest, she had expressed to
Christopher the idea that they ought no longer to go stodging along in
penury, the case being so grave: they ought to take some of the Groby
money--for the sake of future generations....

Well, she had been run down.... At that stage of parturition, call it, a
woman is run down and hysterical.... It had seemed to her overwhelmingly
the fact that a breeding woman ought to have pink fluffy things next her
quivering skin and sprayings of say, Houbigant, all over her shoulders
and hair. For the sake of the child's health.

So she had let out violently at poor wretched old Chris, faced with the
necessity for denying his gods, and had slammed to and furiously locked
that door. Her castle had been her bedroom with a vengeance then--for
Christopher had been unable to get in or she to get out. He had had to
whisper through the keyhole that he gave in: he was dreadfully concerned
for her. He had said that he hoped she would try to stick it a little
longer, but, if she would not, he would take Mark's money.

Naturally she had not let him--but she _had_ arranged with Marie Lonie
for Mark to pay a couple of pounds more a week for their board and
lodging, and as Marie Lonie had perforce taken over the housekeeping,
they had found things easing off a little. Marie Lonie had run the
house for thirty shillings a week less than she, Valentine, had ever
been able to do--and run it streets better. Streets and streets! So they
had had money at least nearly to complete their equipments of table
linen and the layette.... The long and complicated annals!

It was queer that her heart was nearly as much in Christopher's game as
was his own. As house-mother, she ought to have grabbed after the last
penny--and goodness knew the life was strain enough. Why do women back
their men in unreasonable romanticisms? You might say that it was
because, if their men had their masculinities abated--like defeated
roosters!--the women would suffer in intimacies.... Ah, but it wasn't
that! Nor was it merely that they wanted the buffaloes to which they
were attached to charge.

It was really that she had followed the convolutions of her man's mind.
And ardently approved. She disapproved with him of riches, of the rich,
of the frame of mind that riches confer. If the war had done nothing
else for them--for those two of them--it had induced them, at least, to
install Frugality as a deity. They desired to live hard, even if it
deprived them of the leisure in which to think high! She agreed with him
that if a ruling class loses the capacity to rule--or the desire!--it
should abdicate from its privileges and get underground.

And having accepted that as a principle, she could follow the rest of
his cloudy obsessions and obstinacies.

Perhaps she would not have backed him up in his long struggle with dear
Mark if she had not considered that their main necessity was to live
high.... And she was aware that why, really, she had sprung to the door
rather than to the window had been that she had not desired to make an
unfair move in that long chess game. On behalf of Christopher. If she
had had to see Mrs. de Bray Pape or to speak to her it would have been
disagreeable to have that descendant of a king's companion look at her
with the accusing eyes of one who thinks: "You live with a man without
being married to him!" Mrs. de Bray Pape's ancestress had been able to
force the king to marry her.... But that she would have chanced: they
had paid penalty enough for having broken the rules of the Club. She
could carry her head high enough: not obtrusively high, but
sufficiently! For, in effect, they had surrendered Groby in order to
live together and had endured sprays of obloquy that seemed never to
cease to splash over the garden hedges.

No, she would have faced Mrs. de Bray Pape. But she would hardly, given
Christopher's half-crazed condition, have kept herself from threatening
Mrs. Pape with dreadful legal consequences if she touched Groby Great
Tree. That would have been to interfere in the silent Northern struggle
between the brothers. That she would never do, even to save
Christopher's reason--unless she were jumped into it!... That Mark did
not intend to interfere between Mrs. Pape and the tree she knew--for
when she had read Mrs. Pape's letter to him he had signified as much to
her by means of his eyes.... Mark she loved and respected because he was
a dear--and because he had backed her through thick and thin. Without
him ... There had been a moment on that dreadful night ... She prayed
God that she would not have to think again of that dreadful night.... If
she had to see Sylvia again she would go mad, and the child within
her.... Deep, deep within her the blight would fall on the little thread
of brain!

Mrs. de Bray Pape, God be thanked, provided a diversion for her mind.
She was speaking French with an eccentricity that could not be ignored.

Valentine could see, without looking out of the window, Marie Lonie's
blank face and the equal blankness with which she must have indicated
that she did not intend to understand. She imagined her standing,
motionless, pinafored and unmerciful before the other lady, who beneath
the three-cornered hat was stuttering out:

"Lady Tietjens, mwaw, Madam de Bray Pape, desire coo-pay la arbre...."

Valentine could hear Marie Lonie's steely tones saying:

"On dit 'l'arbre,' Madame!"

And then the high voice of the little maid:

"Called us 'the pore,' she did, your ladyship.... Ast us why we could
not take example!"

Then a voice, soft for these people, and with modulations:

"Sir Mark seems to be perspiring a great deal. I was so free as to wipe
..."

As, above, Valentine said: "Oh, Heaven!" Marie Lonie cried out: "Mon
Dieu!" and there was a rush of skirts and pinafore.

Marie Lonie was rushing past a white, breeched figure, saying:

"Vous, une trangre, avez os...."

A shining, red-cheeked boy was stumbling slightly from before her. He
said, after her back:

"Mrs. Lowther's handkerchief is the smallest, softest ..." He added to
the young woman in white: "We'd better go away.... Please let's go
away.... It's not sporting...." A singularly familiar face; a singularly
moving voice. "For God's sake let us go away...." Who said "For God's
sake!" like that--with staring blue eyes?

She was at the door frantically twisting at the great iron key; the lock
was of very old hammered iron work. The doctor ought to be telephoned
to. He had said that if Mark had fever or profuse sweats, he should be
telephoned to at once. Marie Lonie would be with him; it was her,
Valentine's, duty to telephone. The key would not turn; she hurt her
hand in the effort. But part of her emotion was due to that
bright-cheeked boy. Why should he have said that it was not sporting of
them to be there? Why had he exclaimed for God's sake to go away? The
key would not turn. It stayed solid, like a piece of the old lock....
Who was the boy like? She rammed her shoulder against the unyielding
door. She must not do that. She cried out.

From the window--she had gone to the window intending to tell the girl
to set up a ladder for her, but it would be more sensible to tell her to
telephone!--she could see Mrs. de Bray Pape. She was still haranguing
the girl. And then on the path, beyond the lettuces and the newly
sticked peas, arose a very tall figure. A very tall figure. Portentous.
By some trick of the slope figures there always appeared very tall....
This appeared leisurely: almost hesitant. Like the apparition of the
statue of the Commander in Don Juan, somehow. It appeared to be
preoccupied with its glove: undoing its glove.... Very tall, but with
too much slightness of the legs.... A woman in hunting-breeches! Grey
against the tall ash-stems of the spinney. You could not see her face
because you were above her, in the window, and her head was bent down!
In the name of God!...

There wafted over her a sense of the dreadful darkness in the old house
at Gray's Inn on that dreadful night.... She must not think of that
dreadful night because of little Chrissie deep within her. She felt as
if she held the child covered in her arms, as if she were looking
upwards, bending down over the child. Actually she was looking
downwards.... Then she had been looking upwards--up the dark stairs. At
a marble statue: the white figure of a woman: the Nike ... the Winged
Victory. It is like that on the stairs of the Louvre. She must think of
the Louvre: not Gray's Inn. There were, in a Pompeian anteroom, Etruscan
tombs, with guardians in uniform, their hands behind their backs.
Strolling about as if they expected you to steal a tomb!...

She had--they had--been staring up the stairs. The house had seemed
unnaturally silent when they had entered. Unnaturally.... How can you
seem more silent than silent. But you _can_! They had seemed to tiptoe.
She had, at least. Then light had shone above--coming from an opened
door above. In the light the white figure that said it had cancer!

She must not think about these things!

Such rage and despair had swept over her as she had never before known.
She had cried to Christopher, dark, beside her: that the woman lied. She
had not got cancer....

She must not think about these things.

The woman on the path--in grey riding things--approached slowly. The
head still bent down. Undoubtedly she had silk underthings beneath all
that grey cloth.... Well, _they_--Christopher and Valentine--gave her
them.

It was queer how calm she was. That of course was Sylvia Tietjens. Let
it be. She had fought for her man before and so she could again; the
Russians should not have ... The old jingle ran in her calm head....

But she was desperately perturbed: trembling. At the thought of that
dreadful night. Christopher had wanted to go with Sylvia after she had
fallen down stairs. A good theatre fall, but not good enough. But she
had shouted: No! He was never going with Sylvia again. _Finis Sylvi et
magna_.... In the black night ... They had gone on firing maroons. They
could be heard!

Well, she was calm. The sight of that figure was not going to hurt the
tiny brain that worked deep within her womb. Nor the tiny limbs! She was
going to slub the warm, soap-transfused flannel onto those little legs
in the warm of the great hearth.... Nine hams up that chimney! Chrissie
looking up and laughing.... That woman would never again do that! Not to
a child of Christopher's. Not to any man's child, belike!

That had been that woman's son! With a girl in white breeches!... Well,
who was she, Valentine, to prevent a son's seeing his father. She felt
on her arm the weight of her own son. With that there she could confront
the world.

It was queer! That woman's face was all blurred.... Blubberingly! The
features swollen, the eyes red.... Ah, she had been thinking, looking at
the garden and the stillness: "If I had given Christopher that I should
have kept him!" But she would never have kept him. Had she been the one
woman in all the world he would never have looked at her. Not after he
had seen her, Valentine Wannop!

Sylvia had looked up, contemplatively--as if into the very window. But
she could not see into the window. She must have seen Mrs. de Bray Pape
and the girl, for it became apparent why she had taken off her glove.
She now had a gold vanity box in her hand: looking in at the mirror and
moving her right hand swiftly before her face.... Remember: it was _we_
who gave her that gold thing. Remember! Remember it hard!

Sudden anger came over her. That woman must never come into their
house-place, before whose hearth she was to bathe the little Chrissie!
Never! Never! The place would be polluted. She knew, only by that, how
she loathed and recoiled from that woman.

She was at the lock. The key turned.... See what emotion at the thought
of harm to your unborn child can do for you! Subconsciously her right
hand had remembered how you pressed the key upwards when you made it
turn.... She must not run down the narrow stairs. The telephone was in a
niche on the inner side of the great ingle. The room was dim: very long,
very low. The Barker cabinet looked very rich, with its green, yellow
and scarlet inlays. She was leaning sideways in the nook between the
immense fireplace and the room wall, the telephone receiver at her ear.
She looked down her long room--it opened into the dining-room, a great
beam between. It was dark, gleaming, rich with old beeswaxed woods....
_Elle ne demandait pas mieux_ ... the phrase of Marie Lonie occurred
constantly to her mind.... She did not ask better--if only the things
were to be regarded as theirs! She looked into the distant future when
things would spread out tranquilly before them. They would have a little
money, a little peace. Things would spread out ... like a plain seen
from a hill. In the meantime they had to keep all on going.... She did
not, in effect, grumble at that ... as long as strength and health held
out.

The doctor--she pictured him, long, sandy and very pleasant, suffering
too from an incurable disease and debts, life being like that!--the
doctor asked cheerfully how Mark was. She said she did not know. He was
said to have been profusely sweating.... Yes, it was possible that he
might have been having a disagreeable interview. The doctor said: "Tut!
Tut! And yourself?" He had a Scotch accent, the sandy man.... She
suggested that he might bring along a bromide. He said: "They've been
bothering you. Don't let them!" She said she had been asleep--but they
probably would. She added: "Perhaps you would come quickly!" ... Sister
Anne! Sister Anne! For God's sake, Sister Anne! If she could get a
bromide into her it would pass like a dream.

It was passing like a dream. Perhaps the Virgin Mary exists.... If she
does not we must invent her to look after mothers who could not ... But
she could! She, Valentine Wannop!

The light from the doorway that was open onto the garden was obscured. A
highwayman in skirts with panniers stood in the room against the light.
It said:

"You're the saleswoman, I guess. This is a most insanitary place, and I
hear you have no bath. Show me some things. In the Louie Kaator's
style." ... It guessed that it was going to refurnish Groby in Louis
Quatorze style. Did she, Valentine, as saleswoman, suppose that
They--her employers--would meet her in the expense. Mr. Pape had had
serious losses in Miami. They must not suppose that the Papes could be
bled white. This place ought to be pulled down as unfit for human
habitation and a model workman's cottage built in its place. People who
sold things to rich Americans in this country were sharks. She herself
was descended spiritually from Madame de Maintenon. It would be all
different if Marie Antoinette had treated the Maintenon better. She,
Mrs. de Bray Pape, would have the authority in the country that she
ought to have. She had been told that she would be made to pay an
immense sum for having cut down Groby Great Tree. Of course the side
wall of the house had fallen in. These old houses could not stand up to
modern inventions. She, Mrs. de Bray Pape, had employed the latest
Australian form of tree-stump extractor--the Wee Whizz Bang.... But did
she, as saleswoman but doubtless more intimate with her employers than
was necessary, considering the reputation of that establishment ... did
she consider?...

Valentine's heart started. The light from the doorway was again
obscured. Marie Lonie ran panting in. Sister Anne, in effect! She said:
"Le tlphone! Vite!"

Valentine said:

"J'ai dj tlphon.... Le docteur sera ici dans quelques minutes....
Je te prie de rester  ct de moi!" ... I beg you to remain beside me!
Selfish! Selfish! But there was a child to be born.... Anyhow Marie
Lonie could not have got out of that door. It was blocked.... Ah!

Sylvia Tietjens was looking down on Valentine. You could hardly see her
face against the light.... Well, it did not amount to more than that....
She was looking down because she was so tall; you could not see her face
against the light. Mrs. de Bray Pape was explaining what spiritual
descent from grands seigneurs did for you.

She was bending her eyes on Valentine. That was the phrase. She said to
Mrs. de Bray Pape:

"For God's sake hold your _damned_ tongue. Get out of here!"

Mrs. de Bray Pape had not understood. For the matter of that neither did
Valentine take it in. A thin voice from a distance thrilled:

"Mother!... Mo ... ther!"

She--IT--for it was like a statue.... Marvellous how she had made her
face up. Three minutes before it had been a mush!... It was flawless
now; dark-shadowed under the eyes! And sorrowful! And tremendously
dignified. And kind!... Damn! Damn! Damn!

It occurred to Valentine that this was only the second time that she had
ever seen that face.... Its stillness now was terrible! What was she
waiting for before she began the Billingsgate that they were both going
to indulge in before all these people?... For she, Valentine, had her
back against the wall! She heard herself begin to say:

"You have spoilt ..." She could not continue. You cannot very well tell
a person that their loathsomeness is so infectious as to spoil your
baby's bathing-place! It is not done!

Marie Lonie said in French to Mrs. de Bray Pape that Mrs. Tietjens did
not require her presence. Mrs. de Bray Pape did not understand. It is
difficult for a Maintenon to understand that her presence is not
required!

The first time that she, Valentine, had seen that face, in Edith Ethel's
drawing-room, she had thought how kind ... how blindingly kind it was.
When the lips had approached her mother's cheek the tears had been in
Valentine's eyes. It had said--that face of a statue!--that it must kiss
Mrs. Wannop for her kindness to Christopher.... Damn it, it might as
well kiss her, Valentine, now!... There would have been no Christopher
to-day but for her!

It said--it was so perfectly expressionless that you could continue to
call it "it"--it said, coldly and without halt, to Mrs. de Bray Pape:

"You hear! The lady of the house does not require your presence. Please
go away!"

Mrs. de Bray Pape was explaining that she had been telling the
saleswoman that she intended to refurnish Groby in the Louie Kaator's
style.

It occurred to Valentine that this position had its comicalities: Marie
Lonie did not know that woman; Mrs. de Bray Pape did not know her,
Valentine. They would miss a good deal of the jam!... But where was the
jam! Jam yesterday, jam to-morrow.... That figure had said "Mrs.
Tietjens!" In sarcasm, then? In delicacy?

She caught at the telephone shelf; it was dark. The baby had moved
within her.... It wanted her to be called "Mrs. Tietjens!" Someone was
calling "Valentine!" Someone else was calling "Mother!" A softer voice
said: "Mrs. Tietjens!" What things they chose to say! The first voice
was Edith Ethel's!

Dark!... Marie Lonie said in her ear: "Tiens toi debout, ma chrie!"

Dark, dark night; cold, cold snow--Harsh, harsh wind, and lo!--Where
shall we shepherds go, God's son to find?

Edith Ethel was reading to Mrs. de Bray Pape from a letter. She said:
"As an American of culture, you will be interested.... From the great
poet!" ... A gentleman held a top-hat in front of his face, as if he
were in church. Thin, with dull eyes and a Jewish beard! Jews keep their
hats on in church....

Apparently she, Valentine Wannop, was going to be denounced before the
congregation! Did they bring a scarlet letter.... They were Puritans
enough, she and Christopher. The voice of the man with the Jewish
beard--Sylvia Tietjens had removed the letter from the fingers of Edith
Ethel.... Not much changed, Edith Ethel! Face a _little_ lined. And
pale. And suddenly reduced to silence--the voice of the man with the
beard said:

"After all! It does make a difference. He is virtually Tietjens of ..."
He began to push his way backwards, outwards. A man trying to leave
through the crowd at the church door. He turned to say to her oddly:

"_Madame_ ... eh ... Tietjens! Par_don!_"

Attempting a French accent.

Edith Ethel remarked:

"I wanted to say to Valentine: if I effect the sale personally I do not
see that the commission should be payable."

Sylvia Tietjens said: They could discuss that outside. Valentine was
aware that, some time before, a boy's voice had said: "Mother, is this
sporting?" It occurred to Valentine to wonder if it was sporting of
people to call her "Mrs. Tietjens" under Sylvia Tietjens' nose. Of
course she had to be Mrs. Tietjens before the servants. She heard
herself say:

"I am sorry Mr. Ruggles called me Mrs. Tietjens before you!"

The eyes of the statue were, if possible, doubly bent on her!

It said drily:

"An the King will ha'e my heid I carena what ye do wi' my ..." It was a
saying common to both Mark and Christopher ... That was bitter. She was
reminding her, Valentine, that she had previously enjoyed Tietjens'
intimacies--before her, Valentine!

But the voice went on:

"I wanted to get those people out.... And to see ..." It spoke very
slowly. Marmoreally. The flowers in the jug on the fald-stool needed
more water. Marigolds. Orange.... A woman is upset when her child moves
within her. Sometimes more, sometimes less. She must have been very
upset: there had been a lot of people in the room; she knew neither how
they had come nor how they had gone. She said to Marie Lonie:

"Dr. Span is bringing some bromide.... I can't find those ..."

Marie Lonie was looking at that figure: her eyes stuck out of her head
like Christopher's. She said, as still as a cat watching a mouse:

"Qui est elle? C'est bien la femme?"

It looked queerly like a pilgrim in a ballet, now, that figure against
the light--the long legs slightly bent gave that effect. Actually this
was the third time she had seen it--but in the dark house she had not
really seen the face.... The features had been contorted and thus not
the real features: these were the real features. There was about that
figure something timid. And noble. It said:

"Sporting! Michael said: 'Be sporting, mother!' ... Be sporting...." It
raised its hand as if to shake a fist at heaven. The hand struck the
beam across the ceiling: that roof was so low. And dear! It said: "It
was Father Consett really.... They can all, soon, call you Mrs.
Tietjens. Before God, I came to drive those people out.... But I wanted
to see how it was you kept him...."

Sylvia Tietjens was keeping her head turned aside, drooping. Hiding a
tendency to tears, no doubt. She said to the floor:

"I say again, as God hears me, I never thought to harm your child....
His child.... But any woman's.... Not harm a child.... I have a fine
one, but I wanted another.... Their littleness.... The riding has done
it...." Someone sobbed!

She looked loweringly then at Valentine:

"It's Father Consett in heaven that has done this. Saint and martyr:
desiring soft things! I can almost see his shadow across these walls now
it's growing dark. You hung him: you did not even shoot him, though I
_say_ you shot him to save my feelings.... And it's you who will be
going on through all the years...."

She bit into a small handkerchief that she had in her hand, concealed.
She said: "Damn it, I'm playing pimp to Tietjens of Groby--leaving my
husband to you!..."

Someone again sobbed.

It occurred to Valentine that Christopher had left those prints at old
Hunt's sale in a jar on the field. They had not wanted the jar. Then
Christopher had told a dealer called Hudnut that he could have that jar
and some others as against a little carting service.... He would be
tired, when he got back, Christopher. He would have, nevertheless, to go
to Hudnut's: Gunning could not be trusted. But they must not disappoint
Lady Robinson....

Marie Lonie said:

"C'est lamentable qu'un seul homme puisse inspirer deux telles passions
dans deux telles femmes.... C'est le martyre de notre vie!"

Yes, it was lamentable that a man could inspire two such passions in two
women. Marie Lonie went to look after Mark. There was no Sylvia
Tietjens. They say joy never kills. She fell straight down onto the
ground, lumpishly!

... It was lucky they had the Bussorah rug, otherwise Chrissie ... They
must have some money.... Poor ... poor....


                               CHAPTER IV

Mark Tietjens had lain considering the satisfaction of a great night he
had lately passed. Or perhaps not lately: at some time.

Lying out there in the black nights, the sky seemed enormous. You could
understand how somewhere heaven could be concealed in it. And tranquil
at times. Then you felt the earth wheeling through infinity.

Night birds cried overhead: herons, duck, swans even: the owls kept
closer to the ground, beating along the hedgegrows. Beasts became busy
in the long grass. They rustled busily; then paused for long. No doubt a
rabbit ran till it found an attractive plantain. Then it nibbled for a
long time without audible movement. Now and then cattle lowed, or many
lambs--frightened by a fox maybe....

But there would be nevertheless long silences.... A stoat would get onto
the track of the rabbit. They would run, run, run brushing through the
long grass, then out into the short meadow and round and round, the
rabbit squealing. Loudly at first.

In the dim illumination of his night-light, dormice would climb up the
posts of his shelter. They would remain regarding him with beads of
eyes. When the rabbits squealed they would hunch themselves together and
shiver. They knew it meant S-t-o-a-t = stoat! Their turn soon!

He despised himself a little for attending to these minuti--as if one
were talking down to a child.... On his great night the whole cattle of
the county had been struck with panic; you heard them crashing down
through the hedges and miles down into the silent valleys.

No! He had never been one to waste his time and mind on small mammals
and small birds.... The Flora and Fauna of Blankshire!... Not for him.
It was big movements interested him: "wherein manifesteth itself the
voice of God!" ... Very likely that was true. Transport. Panic in cattle
over whole counties. In people over whole continents.

Once, years--oh, years and years--ago, when he had been aged twelve and
on a visit to Grandfather, he had taken a gun to Redcar sands from
Groby, over the moors, and with one shot he had brought down two terns,
a sandpiper and a herring gull. Grandfather had been so delighted with
his prowess--though naturally the shot had been a fluke--that he had the
things stuffed, and there they were in Groby Nursery to this day. The
herring gull stiff on a mossy rock; the sandpiper doing obeisance before
it, the terns flying, one on each side. Probably that was the only
memorial to him, Mark Tietjens, at Groby. The younger children had been
wont to refer with awe to "Mark's bag" for long years afterwards. The
painted background had shewn Bamborough Castle with lashings of foam and
blue sky. It was a far cry from Redcar to Bamborough--but that was the
only background the bird-stuffing chap in Middlesbrough could paint for
sea-birds. For larks and the like he had a cornfield in the Vale of
York; for nightingales, poplar trees.... Never heard that nightingales
were particularly partial to poplars!

.... Nightingales disturbed the majesty of great nights. For two months
out of the year, more or less, according to the nature of the season. He
wasn't decrying the beauty of their voices. Hearing them you felt like
seeing a good horse win the St. Leger. No other things in the world
could do it--just as there was no place in the world like Newmarket
Heath on a breezy day.... But they limited the night. It was true that
nightingales deep down in the spinney near where Gunning's hut must
be--say a quarter of a mile away--could make you think of great
distance, echoing up through the deep woods. Woods dripping with dew
beneath the moon.... And air-raids not so long ago! The moon brought
air-raids and its shining was discouraged.... Yes, nightingales made you
think of distance, just as the night-jar for ever crepitating from
twilight to dawn seemed to measure a fragment of eternity.... But only
fragments! The great night was itself eternity and the Infinite.... The
spirit of God walking on the firmament.

Cruel beggars, nightingales: they abused one another with distended
throats all through the nights. Between the gusts of gales you could
hear them shouting on--telling their sitting hens that they--each
one--were the devils of fellows, the other chap, down the hill by
Gunning's hut, being a bedraggled, louse-eaten braggart.... Sex
ferocity.

Gunning lived in a bottom, in a squatter's cottage, they said. With a
thatch like Robinson Crusoe's bonnet. A wise-woman's cottage. He lived
with the wise-woman, a chalk-white faced slattern.... And a
granddaughter of the wise-woman whom, because she had a cleft palate and
only half a brain, the parish, half out of commiseration, half for
economy, had nominated mistress in the school up the hill. No one knew
whether Gunning slept with the wise-woman or the granddaughter; for one
or the other he had left his missus and Fittleworth had tanned his hide
and taken his cottage from him. He thrashed them both impartially with a
hunting thong every Saturday night--to learn them, and to remind them
that for them he had lost his cottage and the ten bob a week Fittleworth
allowed such hinds as had been in his service thirty years.... Sex
ferocity again!

    "_And how shall I thy true love know from another one?_
     _Oh, by his cockled hat and staff and by his sandalled shoon!_"

An undoubted pilgrim had suggested irresistibly the lines to him!... It
was naturally that bitch Sylvia. Wet eyes she had!... Then some
psychological crisis was going on inside her. Good for her.

Good for Val and Chris, possibly. There was no real knowing.... Oh, but
there was. Hear to that: the bitch-pack giving tongue! Heard ye ever the
like to that, sirs? She had had Groby Great Tree torn down.... But, as
God was her maker, she would not tear another woman's child within
her....

He felt himself begin to perspire.... Well, if Sylvia had come to that,
his, Mark's, occupation was gone. He would no longer have to go on
willing against her; she would drop into the sea in the wake of their
family vessel and be lost to view.... But, damn it, she must have
suffered to be brought to that pitch.... Poor bitch! Poor bitch! The
riding had done it.... She ran away, a handkerchief to her eyes.

He felt satisfaction and impatience. There was some place to which he
desired to get back. But there were also things to be done: to be
thought out.... If God was beginning to temper the wind to these flayed
lambs ... Then ... He could not remember what he wanted to think
about.... It was--no, not exasperating. Numb! He felt himself
responsible for their happiness. He wanted them to go rubbing along,
smooth with the rough, for many long, unmarked years.... He wanted Marie
Lonie to stay with Valentine until after her deliverance and then to go
to the Dower House at Groby. She was Lady Tietjens. She knew she was
Lady Tietjens, and she would like it. Besides, she would be a thorn in
the flesh of Mrs.... He could not remember the name....

He wished that Christopher would get rid of his Jewish partner so as to
addle a little brass. It was their failing as Tietjenses that they liked
toadies.... He himself had bitched all their lives by having that fellow
Ruggles sharing his rooms. Because he could not have borne to share with
an equal, and Ruggles was half Jew, half Scotchman. Christopher had had,
for toadies, firstly Macmaster, a Scot, and then this American Jew.
Otherwise he, Mark, was reconciled with things. Christopher, no doubt,
was wise in his choice. He had achieved a position in which he
might--with just a little more to it--anticipate jogging away to the end
of time, leaving descendants to carry on the country without swank.

Ah.... It came to his mind to remember, almost with pain. He had
accepted nephew Mark as nephew Mark: a strong slip. A good boy. But
there was the point ... the point!... The boy had the right sort of
breeches.... But if there were incest....

Crawling through a hedge after a rabbit was thinkable. Father had been
in the churchyard to shoot rabbits to oblige the vicar. There was no
doubt of that. He did not want rabbits.... But supposing he had mis-hit
a bunny and the little beast had been throwing gymnastics on the other
side of the quickset? Father would have crawled through then, rather
than go all the way to the lych-gate and round. Decent men put their
mis-hits out of their agony as soon as possible. Then there was motive.
And as for not putting his gun out of action before crawling through the
quickset.... Many good, plucked men had died like that.... _And father
had grown absent-minded!_... There had been farmer Lowther had so died;
and Pease of Lobhall; and Pease of Cullercoats. All good plucked
farmers.... Crawling through hedges rather than go round, and with their
guns at full cock! And not absent-minded men.... But he remembered that,
just now, he had remembered that father had grown absent-minded. He
would put a paper in one of his waistcoat pockets and fumble for it in
all his other pockets a moment after: he would push his spectacles up
onto his forehead and search all the room for them; he would place his
knife and fork in his plate and, whilst talking, take another knife and
fork from beside it and begin again to eat.... Mark remembered that his
father had done that twice during the last meal they had eaten
together--whilst he, Mark, had been presenting the fellow Ruggles's
account of Christopher's misdeeds....

Then it would not be incumbent on him, Mark, to go up to his father in
Heaven and say: Hullo, sir. I understand you had a daughter by the wife
of your best friend, she being now with child by your son.... Rather
ghostly so to introduce yourself to the awful ghost of your father....
Of course you would be a ghost yourself. Still, with your billycock hat,
umbrella and racing-glasses, not an awful ghost!... And to say to your
father: "I understand that you committed suicide!"

Against the rules of the Club.... For I consider it no grief to be going
there where so many great men have preceded me. Sophocles that, wasn't
it? So, on his authority, it was a damn good club....

But he did not have to anticipate that _mauvais quart d'heure_! Dad
quite obviously did not commit suicide. He wasn't the man to do so. So
Valentine was not his daughter and there was no incest. It is all very
well to say that you care little about incest. The Greeks made a hell of
a tragic row about it.... Certainly it was a weight off the chest if you
could think there had been none. He had always been able to look
Christopher in the eyes--but he would be able to do it better than ever
now. Comfortably! It is uncomfortable to look a man in the eyes and
think: You sleep between incestuous sheets....

That then was over. The worst of it rolled up together. No suicide. No
incest. No by-blow at Groby.... A Papist there.... Though how you could
be a Papist and a Marxian Communist passed his, Mark's,
comprehension.... A Papist at Groby and Groby Great Tree down.... The
curse was perhaps off the family!

That was a superstitious way to look at it--but you must have a pattern
to interpret things by. You can't really get your mind to work without
it. The blacksmith said: By hammer and hand all art doth stand!... He,
Mark Tietjens, for many years interpreted all life in terms of
Transport.... Transport, be thou my God.... A damn good God.... And in
the end, after a hell of a lot of thought and of work, the epitaph of
him, Mark Tietjens, ought by rights to be: "_Here lies one whose name
was writ in sea-birds!_"... As good an epitaph as another.

He must get it through to Christopher that Marie Lonie should have that
case, with Bamborough and all, in her bedroom at Groby Dower House. It
was the last permanent record of her man.... But Christopher would know
that....

It was coming back. A lot of things were coming back.... He could see
Redcar Sands running up towards Sunderland, grey, grey. Not so many
factory chimneys then, working for him, Mark Tietjens! Not so many! And
the sand-pipers running in the thin of the tide, bowing as they ran; and
the shovellers turning over stones and the terns floating above the
viscous sea....

But it was great nights to which he would now turn his attention. Great
black nights above the purple moors.... Great black nights above the
Edgware Road, where Marie Lonie lived ... because, above the blaze of
lights of the old Apollo's front, you had a sense of immense black
spaces....

Who said he was perspiring a great deal? Well, he _was_ perspiring!

Marie Lonie, young, was bending over him.... Young, young, as he had
first seen her on the stage of Covent Garden ... In white!... Doing
agreeable things to his face with a perfume like that of Heaven
itself!... And laughing sideways as Marie Lonie had laughed when first
he presented himself before her in his billycock hat and umbrella!...
The fine, fair hair! The soft voice!

But this was silly.... That was nephew Mark with his cherry-red face and
staring eyes.... And this was his light of love!... Naturally. Like
uncle, like nephew. He would pick up with the same type of woman as his
uncle. That made it certain that he was no by-blow! Pretty piece against
the apple-boughs!

He wanted great nights, then!--Young Mark, though, should not pick up
with a woman older than himself. Christopher had done that, and look!

Still: things were takking oop!... Do you remember the Yorkshireman who
stood with his chin just out of the water on Ararat Top as Noah
approached. And: "It's boon to tak oop!" said the Yorkshireman.... It's
bound to clear up!

A great night, with room enough for Heaven to be hidden there from our
not too perspicacious eyes.... It was said that an earthquake shock
imperceptible to our senses set those cattle and sheep and horses and
pigs crashing through all the hedges of the county. And it was queer:
before they had so started lowing and moving Mark was now ready to swear
that he had heard a rushing sound. He probably had not! One could so
easily self-deceive oneself! The cattle had been panicked because they
had been sensible of the presence of the Almighty walking upon the
firmament....

Damn it all: there were a lot of things coming back. He could have sworn
he heard the voice of Ruggles say: "After all, he is virtually Tietjens
of Groby!"... By no fault of yours, old cock! But now you will be
cadging up to him.... Now there speaks Edith Ethel Macmaster! A lot of
voices passing behind his head. Damn it all, could they all be ghosts
drifting before the wind!... Or, damn it all, was he himself dead!...
No, you were probably not profane when you were dead.

He would have given the world to sit up and turn his head round and see.
Of course he _could_, but that would give the show away! He credited
himself with being too cunning an old fox for that! To have thrown dust
in their eyes for all these years! He could have chuckled!

Fittleworth seemed to have come down into the garden and to be
remonstrating with these people. What the devil could Fittleworth want?
It was like a pantomime. Fittleworth, in effect, was looking at him. He
said:

"Hello, old bean...." Marie Lonie was looking beside his elbow. He
said: "I've driven all these goats out of your hen-roost."...
Good-looking fellow Fittleworth. His Lola Vivaria had been a
garden-peach. Died in child-birth. No doubt that was why he had troubled
to come. Fittleworth said: Cammie said to give Mark her love for old
time's sake. Her dear love! And as soon as he was well to bring her
ladyship down....

Damn this sweat. With its beastly tickling he would grimace and give the
show away. But he would like Marie Lonie to go to the Fittleworth's.
Marie Lonie said something to Fittleworth.

"Yes, yes, me lady!" says Fittleworth. Damn it, he did look like a
monkey as some people said.... But if the monkeys we were descended from
were as good-looking ... Probably he had good-looking legs.... How
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good
tidings to Zion.... Fittleworth added earnestly and distinctly that
Sylvia--Sylvia Tietjens--_begged_ Mark to understand that she had not
sent that flock of idiots down here. Sylvia also said that she was going
to divorce his, Mark's, brother and dissolve her marriage with the
sanction of Rome.... So they would all be a happy family down there,
soon.... Anything Cammie could do.... Because of Mark's unforgettable
services to the nation....

Name was written in ... Lettest thou thy servant ... divorce in peace!

Marie Lonie begged Fittleworth to go away now. Fittleworth said he
would, but joy never kills! So long, old ... old friend!

The clubs they had been in together.... But one went to a far better
Club than ... His breathing was a little troublesome.... It was darkish,
then light again.

Christopher was at the foot of his bed. Holding a bicycle and a lump of
wood. Aromatic wood: a chunk sawn from a tree. His face was white: his
eyes stuck out. Blue pebbles. He gazed at his brother and said:

"Half Groby wall is down. Your bedroom's wrecked. I found your case of
sea-birds thrown on a rubble heap."

It was as well that one's services were unforgettable!

Valentine was there, panting as if she had been running. She exclaimed
to Christopher:

"You left the prints for Lady Robinson in a jar you gave to Hudnut the
dealer. How could you? Oh, how could you? How are we going to feed and
clothe a child if you do such things?"

He lifted his bicycle wearily round. You could see he was dreadfully
weary, the poor devil. Mark almost said:

"Let him off: the poor devil's worn out!"

Heavily, like a dejected bull-dog, Christopher made for the gate. As he
went up the green path beyond the hedge, Valentine began to sob.

"How are we to live? How are we ever to live?"

"Now I must speak," Mark said.

He said:

"Did ye ever hear tell o' t' Yorkshireman ... On Mount Ara ... Ara ..."

He had not spoken for so long. His tongue appeared to fill his mouth;
his mouth to be twisted to one side. It was growing dark. He said:

"Put your ear close to my mouth...." She cried out. He whispered:

          "'_'Twas the mid o' the night and the barnies grat_
            _And the mither beneath the mauld heard that_....'

An old song. My nurse sang it.... Never thou let thy child weep for thy
sharp tongue to thy good man.... A good man! Groby Great Tree is
down...." He said: "Hold my hand!"

She inserted her hand beneath the sheet and his hand closed on hers.
Then it relaxed.

She nearly cried out for Marie Lonie.

The tall, sandy, much-liked doctor came through the gate.

She said:

"He spoke just now.... It has been a torturing afternoon.... Now I'm
afraid ... I'm afraid he's ..."

The doctor reached his hand beneath the sheet, leaning sideways. He
said:

"Go get you to bed.... I will come and examine you...."

She said:

"Perhaps it would be best not to tell Lady Tietjens that he spoke....
She would like to have had his last words.... But she did not need them
as much as I."

                                THE END

Paris, _7th June_--Avignon, _1st August_--St. Lawrence River, _24th
September_--New York, _12th November_.--MCMXXVII.




                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

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[End of Last Post, by Ford Madox Ford]
