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’s 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. They all 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. Wallstones 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. 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!
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 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 vegetables. Marie Léonie’s Mistigris would probably get it and, since it was Friday, Marie Léonie 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 disease was incurred by consorting with public women of a cheap kind. He had never consorted with any woman in his life but Marie Léonie 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 catspaw. 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 Fé.’
Mark wondered: why Santa Fé? That was probably because Mr. Pape had olive-tree plantations in that part of the United States. Valentine had told him over the letter that Mr. Pape was the largest olive-oil merchant in the world. He cornered all the olive-oil and all the straw-covered 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 Pape’s!’ Mark wondered where Christopher got his knowledge, 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 other fellows who used it for disposing of smuggled 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 haygrass was really worse. Or no better. If everyone 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 himself 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 by now – 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 domestic 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 Scarboro’. 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 Scot’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 descent from 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 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 Léonie’s… .
The boy’s voice was, precisely, apologising 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 dis
likable. The French who were sensible people had cut her head off, so they presumably disliked her… .
He had been dining at Marie Léonie’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 Léonie 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 Léonie 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 Léonie 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 proposed.
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 step-mother 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! …