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 lost prints? … Four parallelograms of faint, silly colour. Promised for to-morrow morning. The margins needed breadcrumbing… . 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 bees-waxing! 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! 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 Léonie had!
Marie Léonie 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 Léonie. 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 what condition the other pair would be in 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 tythe-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 never had 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 undergarments, sitting with dear Mark – before 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 when, added on to all the other, there should be the bottles, and the bandagings and the bathing before the fire with the warm, warm water and feeling 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 Captain 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 ever been 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 memories 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 soldier boy!
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, bye the bye, remember to tell Marie Léonie 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 Léonie 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 at Tietjens’s. It was like being tied to buffaloes!
And yet… . How you wanted them to change!
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 plough-lands. 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, later, 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 blear-eyed 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 bloodsucker – 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 eye-sore… . 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 that 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 Léonie 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 Léonie. But she was not going to. She had the sense that hostile presences were creeping up the paths and Marie Léonie had given her the afternoon off … For the sake of the future, Marie Léonie had said. And she had said that she had once expected her own future to offer the reading of Æschylus beside the Ægean sea. Then Marie Léonie had kissed her and said she knew that she, Valentine would never rob her of her belongings after Mark died!
An unsolicited testimonial, that; but of course Marie Léonie would desire her not to lose the affections of Christopher: Marie Léonie would say to herself that in that case Christopher might take up with a woman who would want to rob Marie Léonie 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 Léonie 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… . 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 m
oney 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 who was faced with the necessity for denying his gods and she 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 Léonie for Mark to pay a couple of pounds more a week for their board and lodging and as Marie Léonie had perforce taken over the housekeeping they had found things easing off a little. Marie Léonie 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!