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. He 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. Surely the Maintenon was a hundred years before the other. 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 moonstruck. 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 recognised 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 debatable!
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 brain 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 much 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 Léonie 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 beginning. He had first seen Marie Léonie on the stage of Covent Garden. He had gone to Covent Garden in attendance on his step-mother, 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 step-mother who very seldom found herself in Town. And there, in the second row of the ballet he had seen Marie Léonie – 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, 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 tomtits 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, Mark, himself, might not be as he was if Christopher 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 Léonie’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 agonised motions with his throat: swallowing at 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 dependants – 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 she, very likely, had not listened to what Mrs. Cramp had said about his, Mark’s, condition. During the one or two interviews he had had years ago 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 a 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 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 everyone 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 on 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 fe
llow’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 springald 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 – shamefaced – 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 legal 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?