"Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethanDas war ein schweigsams Reiten . . ."
"Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethanDas war ein schweigsams Reiten . . ."
he said aloud.
How could you translate that: you couldn't translate it: no one could translate Heine:
"It was the summer night came over me:That was silent riding . . ."
"It was the summer night came over me:That was silent riding . . ."
A voice cut into his warm, drowsy thought:
"Oh, youdoexist. But you've spoken too late. I've run into the horse." He must have been speaking aloud. He had felt the horse quivering at the end of the reins. The horse, too, was used to her by now. It had hardly stirred . . . He wondered when he had left off singing "John Peel." . . . He said:
"Come along, then: have you found anything?"
The answer came:
"Something . . . But you can't talk in this stuff . . . I'll just . . ."
The voice died away as if a door had shut. He waited: consciously waiting: as an occupation! Contritely and to make a noise he rattled the whip-stock in its bucket. The horse started and he had to check in quickly: a damn fool he was. Of course a horse would start if you rattled a whip-stock. He called out:
"Are you all right?" The cart might have knocked her down. He had, however, broken the convention. Her voice came from a great distance:
"I'm all right. Trying the other side . . ."
His last thought came back to him. He had broken their convention: he had exhibited concern: like any other man. . . . He said to himself:
"By God! Why not take a holiday: why not break all conventions?"
They erected themselves intangibly and irrefragably. He had not known this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to: and already the convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she warm and clinging. . . . Yet she was obviously as cool a hand as himself: cooler no doubt, for at bottom he was certainly a sentimentalist.
A convention of the most imbecile type . . . Then break all conventions: with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight hours . . . almost exactly forty-eight hours till he started for Dover. . . .
"And I must to the greenwood go,Alone: a banished man!"
"And I must to the greenwood go,Alone: a banished man!"
By the descending moon: it being then just after cockcrow of midsummer night—what sentimentality!—it must be half-past four on Sunday. He had worked out that to catch the morning Ostend boat at Dover he must leave the Wannops' at 5.15 on Tuesday morning, in a motor for the junction. . . . What incredible cross-country train connections! Five hours for not forty miles, He had then forty-eight and three-quarter hours! Let them be a holiday! A holiday from himself above all: a holiday from his standards: from his convention with himself. From clear observation: from exact thought: from knocking over all the skittles of the exactitudes of others: from the suppression of emotions. . . . From all the wearinesses that made him intolerable to himself. . . . He felt his limbs lengthen, as if they too had relaxed.
Well, already he had had six and a half hours of it. They had started at 10 and, like any other man, he had enjoyed the drive, though it had been difficult to keep the beastly cart balanced, the girl had had to sit behind with her arm round the other girl who screamed at every oak tree. . . .
But he had—if he put himself to the question—mooned along under the absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven: to the scent of hay: to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of course—in June he changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a heron twice, overhead. They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn stacks, of heavy, rounded oaks, of hop oasts that are half church tower, half finger-post. And the road silver grey, and the night warm. . . . It was midsummer night that had done that to him. . . .
Hat mir's angethan.Das war ein schweigsames Reiten.. . .
Hat mir's angethan.Das war ein schweigsames Reiten.. . .
Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the parson's, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had talked very little. . . . Not unpleasant people the parson's: an uncle of the girl's: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but without the individuality . . . A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a man. All in candlelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat up some stairs . . . a great deal of laughter of girls . . . then a re-start an hour later than had been scheduled. . . . Well, it hadn't mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them: the good horse—reallyit was a good horse!—putting its shoulders into the work. . . .
They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train. . . .
There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near their off-lamp.
"What a large bat!" she had said. "Noctilux major. . ."
He said:
"Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn't itphalœna. . ." She had answered:
"From White . . . TheNatural History of Selborneis the only natural history I ever read. . . ."
"He's the last English writer that could write," said Tietjens.
"He calls the downs 'those majestic and amusing mountains,'" she said. "Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? Phal . . . i . . . i . . . na! To rhyme with Dinah!"
"It's 'sublimeand amusing mountains,' not 'majestic and amusing,'" Tietjens said. "I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys of to-day, from the German."
She answered:
"You would! Father used to say it made him sick."
"Cæsar equals Kaiser," Tietjens said. . . .
"Bother your Germans," she said, "they're no ethnologists; they're rotten at philology!" She added: "Father used to say so," to take away from an appearance of pedantry.
A silence then! She had right over her head a rug that her aunt had lent her; a silhouette beside him, with a cocky nose turned up straight out of the descending black mass. But for the square toque she would have had the silhouette of a Manchester cotton-hand: the toque gave it a different line; like the fillet of Diana. It was piquant and agreeable to ride beside a quite silent lady in the darkness of the thick Weald that let next to no moonlight through. The horse's hoofs went clock, clock: a good horse. The near lamp illuminated the russet figure of a man with a sack on his back, pressed into the hedge, a blinking lurcher beside him.
"Keeper between the blankets!" Tietjens said to himself: "All these south country keepers sleep all night. . . . And then you give them a five quid tip for the week-end shoot. . . ." He determined that, as to that, too he would put his foot down. No more week-ends with Sylvia in the mansions of the Chosen People. . . .
The girl said suddenly; they had run into a clearing of the deep underwoods:
"I'm not stuffy with you over that Latin, though you were unnecessarily rude. And I'm not sleepy. I'm loving it all."
He hesitated for a minute. It was a silly-girl thing to say. She didn't usually say silly-girl things. He ought to snub her for her own sake. . . .
He had said:
"I'm rather loving it too!" She was looking at him; her nose had disappeared from the silhouette. He hadn't been able to help it; the moon had been just above her head; unknown stars all round her; the night was warm. Besides, a really manly man may condescend at times! He rather owes it to himself. . . .
She said:
"That was nice of you! You might have hinted that the rotten drive was taking you away from your so important work. . . ."
"Oh, I can think as I drive," he said. She said:
"Oh!" and then: "The reason why I'm unconcerned over your rudeness about my Latin is that I know I'm a much better Latinist than you. You can't quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in. . . . It'svastum, notlongum. . . 'Terra tribus scopulis vastum procurrit' . . . It'salto, notcaelo. . . 'Uvidus ex alto desilientis. . . .' How could Ovid have writtenex caelo? The 'c' after the 'x' sets your teeth on edge."
Tietjens said:
"Excogitabo!"
"That's purely canine!" she said with contempt.
"Besides," Tietjens said, "longumis much better thanvastum. I hate cant adjectives like 'vast.' . . ."
"It's like your modesty to correct Ovid," she exclaimed. "Yet you say Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets tobepoets. That's because theyweresentimental and used adjectives likevastum. . . . What's 'Sad tears mixed with kisses' but the sheerest sentimentality!"
"It ought, you know," Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, "to be 'Kisses mingled with sad tears' . . . 'Tristibus et lacrimis oscula mixta dabis. . . .'"
"I'm hanged if I ever could," she exclaimed explosively. "A man like you could die in a ditch and I'd never come near. You're desiccated even for a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans."
"Oh, well, I'm a mathematician," Tietjens said. "Classics is not my line!"
"Itisn't," she answered tartly.
A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words:
"You used 'mingled' instead of 'mixed' to translatemixta. I shouldn't think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they're as rotten at that as at everything else, father used to say."
"Your father was Balliol, of course," Tietjens said with the snuffy contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment and an olive branch.
Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still between him and the moon, remarked:
"I don't know if you know that for some minutes we've been running nearly due west. We ought to be going south-east by a bit south. I suppose youdoknow this road. . . ."
"Every inch of it," she said, "I've been on it over and over again on my motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross road is called Grandfather's Wantways. We've got eleven miles and a quarter still to do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it goes in and out amongst them; hundreds of them. You know the exports of the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles and chimney backs. The railings round St. Paul's are made of Sussex iron."
"I knew that, of course," Tietjens said: "I come of an iron county myself. . . . Why didn't you let me run the girl over in the side-car, it would have been quicker?"
"Because," she said, "three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the milestone at Hog's Corner: doing forty."
"It must have been a pretty tidy smash!" Tietjens said. "Your mother wasn't aboard?"
"No," the girl said, "suffragette literature. The side-car was full. Itwasa pretty tidy smash. Hadn't you observed I still limp a little?" . . .
A few minutes later she said:
"I haven't the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to notice the road. And I don't care. . . . Here's a signpost though; pull into it. . . ."
The lamps would not, however, shine on the arms of the post; they were burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and, going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering ghostlinesses. . . .
The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was astonishing; it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it: ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly. The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket.
"Did you do that on purpose?" he asked the girl. "Or can't you hold a horse?"
"I can't drive a horse," the girl said; "I'm afraid of them. I can't drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because Iknewyou'd say you'd rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with me."
"Then do you mind," Tietjens said, "telling me if you know this road at all?"
"Not a bit!" she answered cheerfully. "I never drove it in my life. I looked it up on the map before we started because I'm sick to death of the road we went by. There's a one-horse 'bus from Rye to Tenterden, and I've walked from Tenterden to my uncle's over and over again. . . ."
"We shall probably be out all night then," Tietjens said. "Do you mind? The horse may be tired. . . ."
She said:
"Oh, the poor horse! . . . Imeantus to be out all night. . . . But the poor horse. . . . What a brute I was not to think of it."
"We're thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn't read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere. . . ." Tietjens said. "This is the road to Uddlemere."
"Oh, that was Grandfather's Wantways all right," she declared. "I know it well. It's called 'Grandfather's' because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran'fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845—the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that."
Tietjens sat patiently: He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.
"Would you mind," he said then, "telling me . . ."
"If," she interrupted, "that was really Gran'fer Wantways: midland English. 'Vent' equals four cross-roads: high Frenchcarrefour. . . . Or, perhaps, that isn't the right word. But it's the way your mind works. . . ."
"You have, of course, often walked from your uncle's to Gran'fer's Wantways," Tietjens said, "with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old toll-gate house. That's how you know the story of Grand'fer. You said you had never driven it; but youhavewalked it. That's the wayyourmind works, isn't it?"
She said: "Oh!"
"Then," Tietjens went on, "would you mind telling me—for the sake of the poor horse—whether Uddlemere is or isn't on our road home. I take it you don't know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is the right road."
"The touch of pathos," the girl said, "is a wrong note. It's you who're in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn't. . . ."
Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:
"Itisthe right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You wouldn't let the horse go another five steps if it wasn't. You're as soppy about horses as . . . as I am."
"There's at least that bond of sympathy between us," she said drily. "Gran'fer's Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from 'O'er the mere.' Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: 'O'er the mere.' Obviously absurd! . . . Putrid! 'O'er the' by Grimm's law impossible as 'Udi'; 'mere' not a middle Low German word at all. . . ."
"Why," Tietjens said, "are you giving me all this information?"
"Because," the girl said, "it's the way your mind works. . . . It picks up useless facts as silver after you've polished it picks up sulphur vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them. . . . I've never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up again out of bones. That's what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist. . . ."
"I know of course," Tietjens said.
"Of course you know," the girl said. "You know everything. . . . And you've worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life.Youwant to be a Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you'll never stir a finger except to say I told you so."
She touched him suddenly on the arm:
"Don'tmind me!" she said. "It's reaction. I'm so happy. I'm so happy."
He said:
"That's all right! That's all right!" But for a minute or two it wasn't really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities—even merely with the velvet. He added: "Your mother works you very hard."
She exclaimed:
"How youunderstand. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!" She said: "Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day's work for slips of the pen. . . . And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety. . . . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose motherhadgone to prison. . . . Oh, I'd have gone mad. . . . Week-days and Sundays. . . ." She stopped: "I'm apologising, really," she went on. "Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all. . . . Itdidmake you a rather awful figure, you know . . . and the relief to find you're . . . oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. . . . I'd dreaded this drive. . . . I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn't let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart. . . . I could still . . ."
"You couldn't," Tietjens said. "You couldn't see the cart."
They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale. . . . They agreed that they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous. . . . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea. . . . Tietjens had said:
"You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse. . . ." She had plunged in . . .
And he had sat, feeling he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts—intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler's epigrams. You couldn't have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or if not that, the claret. . . . The claret in south country inns was often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept. . . .
On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife's maid at Dover. . . .
He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men; free of his conventions, his strait waist-coatings. . . .
The girl said:
"I'm coming up now! I've found out something. . . ." He watched intently the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the impenetrability of mist to the eye.
Her otter skin cap had beads of dew: beads of dew were on her hair beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.
Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:
"Steady, the Buffs!" in his surprise.
She said:
"Well, you might as well have given me a hand." "I found," she went on, "a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and then the lamp went out. We're not on the marsh because we're between quick hedges. That's all I've found. . . . But I've worked out what makes me so tart with you. . . ."
He couldn't believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to catch her to him and had been foiled by her. . . . She ought to be indignant, amused, even pleased. . . . She ought to show some emotion. . . .
She said:
"It was your silencing me with that absurd non-sequitur about the Pimlico clothing factory. It was an insult to my intelligence."
"You recognised that it was a fallacy!" Tietjens said. He was looking hard at her. He didn't know what had happened to him. She took a long look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was as if for a moment destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him. "Can't," he argued with destiny, "a man want to kiss a schoolgirl in a scuffle. . . ." His own voice, a caricature of his own voice, seemed to come to him: "Gentlemen don't . . ." He exclaimed:
"Don't gentlemen? . . ." and then stopped because he realised that he had spoken aloud.
She said:
"Oh,gentlemendo!" she said, "use fallacies to glide over tight places in arguments. And they browbeat schoolgirls with them. It's that, that underneath, has been exasperating me with you. You regarded me at that date—three-quarters of a day ago—as a schoolgirl."
Tietjens said:
"I don't now!" He added: "Heaven knows I don't now!"
She said: "No; you don't now!"
He said:
"It didn't need your putting up all that blue stocking erudition to convince me. . . ."
"Blue stocking!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "There's nothing of the blue stocking about me. I know Latin because father spoke it with us. It was your pompous blue socks I was pulling."
Suddenly she began to laugh. Tietjens was feeling sick, physically sick. She went on laughing. He stuttered:
"What is it?"
"The sun!" she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun; not a red sun: shining, burnished.
"I don't see . . ." Tietjens said.
"What there is to laugh at?" she asked. "It's the day! . . . The longest day's begun . . . and to-morrow's as long. . . . The summer solstice, you know. . . . After to-morrow the days shorten towards winter. But to-morrow's as long. . . . I'm so glad . . ."
"That we've got through the night? . . ." Tietjens asked.
She looked at him for a long time. "You're not so dreadfully ugly, really," she said.
Tietjens said:
"What's that church?"
Rising out of the mist on a fantastically green knoll, a quarter of a mile away, was an unnoticeable place of worship: an oak shingle tower roof that shone grey like lead: an impossibly bright weathercock, brighter than the sun. Dark elms all round it, holding wetnesses of mist.
"Icklesham!" she cried softly. "Oh, we're nearly home. Just above Mountby . . . That's the Mountby drive. . . ."
Trees existed, black and hoary with the dripping mist. Trees in the hedgerow and the avenue that led to Mountby: it made a right-angle just before coming into the road and the road went away at right-angles across the gate.
"You'll have to pull to the left before you reach the avenue," the girl said. "Or as like as not the horse will walk right up to the house. The higgler who had him used to buy Lady Claudine's eggs. . . ."
Tietjens exclaimed barbarously:
"Damn Mountby. I wish we'd never come near it," and he whipped the horse into a sudden trot. The hoofs sounded suddenly loud. She placed her hand on his gloved driving hand. Had it been his flesh she wouldn't have done it.
She said:
"My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever . . . But you're a good man. And very clever. . . . You will get through. . . ."
Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them: mathematically straight, just rising from the mist. He shouted: mad: the blood in his head. His shout was drowned by the scream of the horse: he had swung it to the left. The cart turned up: the horse emerged from the mist: head and shoulders: pawing. A stone sea-horse from the fountain of Versailles! Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity: the girl looking at it, leaning slightly forward.
The horse didn't come over backwards: he had loosened the reins. It wasn't there any more. The damndest thing thatcouldhappen! He had known it would happen. He said:
"We're all right now!" There was a crash and scraping: like twenty tea-trays: a prolonged sound. They must be scraping along the mud-guard of the invisible car. He had the pressure of the horse's mouth: the horse was away: going hell for leather. He increased the pressure. The girl said:
"I know I'm all right with you."
They were suddenly in bright sunlight: cart: horse: commonplace hedgerows. They were going uphill: a steep brae. He wasn't certain she hadn't said: "Dear!" or "My dear!" Was it possible after so short . . .? But it had been a long night. He was, no doubt, saving her life too. He increased his pressure on the horse's mouth gently: up to all his twelve stone: all his strength. The hill told too. Steep, white road between shaven grass banks!
Stop; damn you! Poor beast . . . The girl fell out of the cart. No! jumped clear! Out to the animal's head. It threw its head up. Nearly off her feet: she was holding the bit. . . . She couldn't! Tender mouth . . . afraid of horses. . . . He said:
"Horse cut!" Her face like a little white blancmange!
"Come quick," she said.
"I must hold a minute," he said, "might go off if I let go to get down. Badly cut?"
"Blood running down solid! Like an apron," she said.
He was at last at her side. It was true. But not so much like an apron. More like a red, varnished stocking. He said:
"You've a white petticoat on. Get over the hedge; jump it, and take it off . . ."
"Tear it into strips?" she asked. "Yes!"
He called to her; she was suspended halfway up the bank:
"Tear one half off first. The rest into strips."
She said: "All right!" She didn't go over the quickset as neatly as he had expected. No take off. But she was over. . . .
The horse, trembling, was looking down, its nostrils distended, at the blood pooling from its near foot. The cut was just on the shoulder. He put his left arm right over the horse's eyes. The horse stood it, almost with a sigh of relief. . . . A wonderful magnetism with horses. Perhaps with women too? God knew. He was almost certain she had said "Dear."
She said: "Here." He caught a round ball of whitish, stuff. He undid it. Thank God: what sense! A long, strong, white band. . . . What the devil was the hissing. . . . A small, closed car with crumpled mud-guards: noiseless nearly: gleaming black . . . God curse it: it passed them: stopped ten yards down . . . the horse rearing back: mad! Clean mad . . . something like a scarlet and white cockatoo, fluttering out of the small car door . . . a general. In full tog. White feathers! Ninety medals! Scarlet coat! Black trousers with red stripe. Spurs too, by God!
Tietjens said:
"God damn you, you bloody swine. Go away!"
The apparition, past the horse's blinkers, said:
"I can, at least, hold the horse for you. I went past to get you out of Claudine's sight."
"Damn good-natured of you," Tietjens said as rudely as he could. "You'll have to pay for the horse."
The General exclaimed:
"Damn it all! Why should I? You were driving your beastly camel right into my drive."
"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said.
"I was on private ground," the General shouted. "Besides I did." An enraged, scarlet scarecrow, very thin, he was holding the horse's bridle. Tietjens was extending the half petticoat, with a measuring eye, before the horse's chest. The General said:
"Look here! I've got to take the escort for the Royal party at St. Peter-in-Manor, Dover. They're laying the Buff's colours on the altar or something."
"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said. "Why didn't you bring your chauffeur? He's a capable man. . . . You talk very big about the widow and child. But when it comes to robbing them of fifty quid by slaughtering their horse . . ."
The General said:
"What the devil were you doing coming into our drive at five in the morning?"
Tietjens, who had applied the half petticoat to the horse's chest, exclaimed:
"Pick up that thing and give it me." A thin roll of linen was at his feet: it had rolled down from the hedge.
"Can I leave the horse?" the General asked.
"Of course you can," Tietjens said. "If I can't quiet a horse better than you can run a car . . ."
He bound the new linen strips over the petticoat: the horse dropped its head, smelling his hand. The General, behind Tietjens, stood back on his heels, grasping his gold-mounted sword. Tietjens went on twisting and twisting the bandage.
"Look here," the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens' ear, "what am I to tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl."
"Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter hounds," Tietjens said; "that's a matutinal job. . . ."
The General's voice had a really pathetic intonation:
"On a Sunday!" he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: "I shall tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin's church at Pett."
"If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession, do," Tietjens said. "But you'll have to pay for the horse."
"I'm damned if I will," the General shouted. "I tell you you were driving into my drive."
"Then Ishall," Tietjens said, "and you know the construction you'll put onthat."
He straightened his back to look at the horse.
"Go away," he said, "say what you like. Do what you like! But as you go through Rye send up the horse-ambulance from the vet's. Don't forget that. I'm going to save this horse. . . ."
"You know, Chris," the General said, "you're the most wonderful hand with a horse . . . There isn't another man in England . . ."
"I know it," Tietjens said. "Go away. And send up that ambulance. . . . There's your sister getting out of your car. . . ."
The General began:
"I've an awful lot to get explained . . ." But, at a thin scream of: "General! General!" he pressed on his sword hilt to keep it from between his long, black, scarlet-striped legs, and running to the car pushed back into its door a befeathered, black bolster. He waved his hand to Tietjens:
"I'll send the ambulance," he called.
The horse, its upper leg swathed with criss-crosses of white through which a purple stain was slowly penetrating, stood motionless, its head hanging down, mule-like, under the blinding sun. To ease it Tietjens began to undo the trace. The girl hopped over the hedge and, scrambling down, began to help him.
"Well.Myreputation's gone," she said cheerfully.
"I know what Lady Claudine is. . . . Why did you try to quarrel with the General? . . ."
"Oh, you'd better," Tietjens said wretchedly, "have a law-suit with him. It'll account for . . . for your not going to Mountby . . ."
"You think of everything," she said.
They wheeled the cart backwards off the motionless horse. Tietjens moved it two yards forward—to get it out of sight of its own blood. Then they sat down side by side on the slope of the bank.
"Tell me about Groby," the girl said at last.
Tietjens began to tell her about his home. . . . There was, in front of it, an avenue that turned into the road at right angles. Just like the one at Mountby.
"My great-great-grandfather made it," Tietjens said. "He liked privacy and didn't want the house visible by vulgar people on the road . . . just like the fellow who planned Mountby, no doubt. . . . But it's beastly dangerous with motors. We shall have to alter it . . . just at the bottom of a dip. We can't have horses hurt. . . . You'll see . . ." It came suddenly into his head that he wasn't perhaps the father of the child who was actually the heir to that beloved place over which generation after generation had brooded. Ever since Dutch William! A damn Nonconformist swine!
On the bank his knees were almost level with his chin. He felt himself slipping down.
"If I ever take you there . . ." he began.
"Oh, but you never will," she said.
The child wasn't his. The heir to Groby! All his brother's were childless . . . There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count twenty-three. And there came up a whispering roar. . . . But not his child! Perhaps he hadn't even the power to beget children. His married brothers hadn't. . . . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss Wannop had her arm over his shoulder.
"My dear!" she said, "you won't ever take me to Groby . . . It's perhaps . . . oh . . . short acquaintance; but I feel you're the splendidest . . ."
He thought: "Itisrather short acquaintance."
He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall, eel-skin, blonde figure of his wife. . . .
The girl said:
"There's a fly coming!" and removed her arm.
A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted a pound to take them to Mrs. Wannop's, waked out of his beauty sleep and all. The knacker's cart was following.
"You'll take Miss Wannop home at once," Tietjens said, "she's got her mother's breakfast to see to. . . . I shan't leave the horse till the knacker's van comes."
The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip.
"Aye," he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket. "Always the gentleman . . . a merciful man is merciful also to his beast. . . . But I wouldn't leave my little wooden 'ut, nor miss my breakfast, for no beast. . . . Some do and some . . . do not."
He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique conveyance.
Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight, beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at last, a lot of blood.
Tietjens said:
"I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want the money. . . ."
He said:
"But it wouldn't be playing the game!"
A long time afterwards he said:
"Damn all principles!" And then:
"But one has to keep on going. . . . Principles are like a skeleton map of a country—you know whether you're going east or north."
The knacker's cart lumbered round the corner.
Sylvia Tietjens rose from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along it, carrying her plate. She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her skirts as long as she possibly could: she didn't, she said, with her height, intend to be taken for a girl guide. She hadn't, in complexion, in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute. You couldn't discover in the skin of her face any deadness: in her eyes the shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had purposely increased her air of scornful insolence. That was because she felt that her hold over men increased to the measure of her coldness. Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was Sylvia's pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all the women in it realised with mortification—that they needn't! For if coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: "Nothing doing!" as barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn't more plainly have conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured rubbish.
Once, on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire, where the moors come above the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a man had bidden her observe the demeanour of the herring gulls below. They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with none of the dignity of gulls. Some of them even let fall the herrings that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the blue motion. The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a pale flame against the sky was a bird. The man told her that that was some sort of fish-eagle or hawk. Its normal habit was to chase the gulls which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water. At the moment the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it had been.
Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle. It pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet screamed and dropped their herrings . . . The whole affair reminded her of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard. . . . Not that there was the breath of a scandal against herself; that she very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice men—the "really nice men" of commerce—was her hobby.
She practiced every kind of "turning down" on these creatures: the really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal's brown eyes, the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and the admirable records—as long as you didn't enquiretooclosely. Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man—shehadsmiled at him in mistake for some one more trustable—had followed in a taxi, hard on her motor, and flushed with wine, glory and the firm conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common property, had burst into her door from the public stairs. . . . She had overtopped him by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: achaud-froideffect. He had come in like a stallion, red eyed, and all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other.
Yet she hadn't really told him more than the way one should behave to the wives of one's brother officers then actually in the line, a point of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh. But it must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother—when his mother had been much younger, of course—speaking from paradise, and his conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness. This, however, had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn't, therefore, interested her. She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains.
She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressement which a man would develop about herself at the first glance—the amount and the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on introduction couldn't conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner, diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket, diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so, rather more quickly away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong—from the milder note to the more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of "turnings down." The poor fellows next day would change their bootmakers, their sock merchants, their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts: they would sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that calamity came from the fact that she hadn't deigned to look into their eyes. . . . Perhaps hadn't dared was the right word!
Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have been. She knew that, like her intimates—all the Elizabeths, Alixs, and Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly journals—she was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their intimacy as of their eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed paper. They went about in bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather boas floating above them, though to be sure no oneworefeather boas; they shortened their hairs and their skirts and flattened, as far as possible, their chest developments, whichdoesgive, oh, you know . . . acertain. . . They adopted demeanours as like as possible—and yet how unlike—to those of waitresses in tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads in police court reports of raids whatthoseare! Probably they were, in action, as respectable as any body of women;morerespectable, probably, than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly spotless by comparison with their own upper servants whose morals, merely as recorded in the divorce court statistics—thatshe had from Tietjens—would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that she was sure her butler would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an angel—and, as such, delicately minded—wouldn't have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan's offences. . . .
And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn't really even believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn't believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call themaîtresse en tîtreof any particular man. Passion wasn't, at least, their strong suit: they left that to more—or to less—august circles. The Duke of A . . . and all the little A's . . . might be the children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B . . . instead of the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A . . . Mr. C, the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E . . . The Whig front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes trading off these—again French—collages sérieuxagainst the matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and Mr. G. . . . But those amorous of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the parties to them didn't, for one thing, photograph well, being old, uglyish and terribly, badly dressed. They were matter rather for the memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for fifty years. . . .
The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard of such country houses, but she didn't know of any. She imagined that they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had patronymics ending in schen . . . stein . . . and baum. There were getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She had in her that much of the papist.
Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord mayors and common councilmen. They were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne—of champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual circumstances—fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental lewdness.
In her own case—years ago now—she had certainly been taken advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed: intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When; in a scare that had been as much her mother's as her own, she had led Tietjens on and married him in Paris to be out of the way—though it was fortunate that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the scene of her mother's marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an ostensible reason!—there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been very near death. She had wanted death.
And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper—her mother's influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House, her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were recorded in gazettes—nay, she had only involuntarily to think of that night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into her palms and groan slightly. . . . She had to invent a chronic stitch in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and seemed to herself to degrade her. . . .
The miserable memory would come, ghost-like, at any time, anywhere. She would see Drake's face, dark against the white things; she would feel the thin night-gown lipping off her shoulder; but most of all she would seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the longing for the brute who had mangled her: the dreadful pain of the mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him. . . . She had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake. . . .
Her "turnings down" then of the really nice men, if it were a sport, was a sport not without a spice of danger. She imagined that, after a success, she must feel much of the exhilaration that men told her they felt after bringing off a clean right and left, and no doubt she felt some of the emotions that the same young men felt when they were out shooting with beginners. Her personal chastity she now cherished much as she cherished her personal cleanliness and persevered in her Swedish exercises after her baths before an open window, her rides afterwards, and her long nights of dancing which she would pursue in any room that was decently ventilated. Indeed, the two sides of life were, in her mind, intimately connected: she kept herself attractive by her skilfully selected exercises and cleanlinesses: and the same fatigues, healthful as they were, kept her in the mood for chastity of life. She had done so ever since her return to her husband; and this not because of any attachment to her husband or to virtue as such, as because she had made the pact with herself out of caprice and meant to keep it. Shehadto have men at her feet: that was, as it were, the price of her—purely social—daily bread: as it was the price of the daily bread of her intimates. She was, and had been for many years, absolutely continent. And so very likely were, and had been, all her Moiras, and Megs, and Lady Marjories—but she was perfectly aware that they had to have, above their assemblies as it were, a light vapour of the airs and habits of the brothel. The public demanded that . . . a light vapour, like the slight traces of steam that she had seen, glutinously adhering to the top of the water in the crocodile-houses of the Zoo.
It was, indeed, the price; and she was aware that she had been lucky. Not many of the hastily-married young women of her set really kept their heads above waterinher set: for a season you would read that Lady Marjorie and Captain Hunt, after her presentation at Court on the occasion of her marriage, were to be seen at Roehampton, at Goodwood and the like: photographs of the young couple, striding along with the palings of the Row behind them, would appear for a month or so. Then the records of their fashionable doings would transfer themselves to the lists of the attendants and attachés of distant vice-regal courts in tropics bad for the complexion. "And then no more of he and she," as Sylvia put it.
In her case it hadn't been so bad, but it had been nearish. She had had the advantage of being an only daughter of a very rich woman: her husband wasn't just any Captain Hunt to stick on a vice-regal staff. He was in a first-class office and when Angélique wrote notes on the young menage she could—Angélique's ideas of these things being hazy—always refer to the husband as the future Lord Chancellor or Ambassador to Vienna. And their little, frightfully expensive establishment—to which her mother, who had lived with them had very handsomely contributed—had floated them over the first dangerous two years. They had entertained like mad, and two much-canvassed scandals had had their beginnings in Sylvia's small drawing-room. She had been quite established when she had gone off with Perowne. . . .
And coming back had not been so difficult. She had expected it would be, but it hadn't. Tietjens had stipulated for large rooms in Gray's Inn. That hadn't seemed to her to be reasonable; but she imagined that he wanted to be near his friend and, though she had no gratitude to Tietjens for taking her back and nothing but repulsion from the idea of living in his house, as they were making a bargain, she owed it to herself to be fair. She had never swindled a railway company, brought dutiable scent past a custom-house or represented to a second-hand dealer that her clothes were less worn than they were, though with her prestige she could actually have done this. It was fair that Tietjens should live where he wished and live there they did, their very tall windows looking straight into those of Macmaster across the Georgian quadrangle.
They had two floors of a great building, and that gave them a great deal of space, the breakfast-room, in which during the war they also lunched, was an immense room, completely lined with books that were nearly all calf-backed, with an immense mirror over an immense, carved, yellow and white marble mantelpiece, and three windows that, in their great height, with the spideriness of their divisions and their old, bulging glass—some of the panes were faintly violet in age—gave to the room an eighteenth century distinction. It suited, she admitted, Tietjens, who was an eighteenth century figure of the Dr. Johnson type—the only eighteenth century type of which she knew, except for that of the beau something who wore white satin and ruffles, went to Bath and must have been indescribably tiresome.
Above, she had a great white drawing-room, with fixings that she knew were eighteenth century and to be respected. For Tietjens—again she admitted—had a marvellous gift for old furniture: he despised it as such, but he knew it down to the ground. Once when her friend Lady Moira had been deploring the expense of having her new, little house furnished from top to toe under the advice of Sir John Robertson, the specialist (the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some American), Tietjens, who had come in to tea and had been listening without speaking, had said, with the soft good nature, rather sentimental in tone, that once in a blue moon he would bestow on her prettiest friends:
"You had better let me do it for you."
Taking a look round Sylvia's great drawing-room, with the white panels, the Chinese lacquer screens, the red lacquer and ormolu cabinets and the immense blue and pink carpet (and Sylvia knew that if only for the three panels by a fellow called Fragonard, bought just before Fragonards had been boomed by the late King, her drawing-room was something remarkable). Lady Moira had said to Tietjens, rather flutteringly and almost with the voice with which she began one of her affairs:
"Oh, if you onlywould."
He had done it, and he had done it for a quarter of the estimate of Sir John Robertson. He had done it without effort, as if with a roll or two of his elephantine shoulders, for he seemed to know what was in every dealer's and auctioneer's catalogue by looking at the green halfpenny stamp on the wrapper. And, still more astonishingly, he had made love to Lady Moira—they had stopped twice with the Moiras in Gloucestershire and the Moiras had three times week-ended with Mrs. Satterthwaite as the Tietjens'invités. . . . Tietjens had made love to Lady Moira quite prettily and sufficiently to tide Moira over until she was ready to begin her affair with Sir William Heathly.
For the matter of that, Sir John Robertson, the specialist in old furniture, challenged by Lady Moira to pick holes in her beautiful house, had gone there, poked his large spectacles against cabinets, smelt the varnish of table tops and bitten the backs of chairs in his ancient and short-sighted way, and had then told Lady Moira that Tietjens had bought her nothing that wasn't worth a bit more than he had given for it. This increased their respect for the old fellow: it explained his several millions. For, if the old fellow proposed to make out of a friend like Moira a profit of 300 per cent.—limiting it to that out of sheer affection for a pretty woman—what wouldn't he make out of a natural—and national—enemy like a United States senator!
And the old man took a great fancy to Tietjens himself—which Tietjens, to Sylvia's bewilderment, did not resent. The old man would come in to tea and, if Tietjens were present, would stay for hours talking about old furniture. Tietjens would listen without talking. Sir John would expatiate over and over again about this to Mrs. Tietjens. It was extraordinary. Tietjens went purely by instinct: by taking a glance at a thing and chancing its price. According to Sir John one of the most remarkable feats of the furniture trade had been Tietjens' purchase of the Hemingway bureau for Lady Moira. Tietjens, in his dislikeful way, had bought this at a cottage sale for £3 10s., and had told Lady Moira it was the best piece she would ever possess: Lady Moira had gone to the sale with him. Other dealers present had hardly looked at it: Tietjens certainly hadn't opened it. But at Lady Moira's, poking his spectacles into the upper part of the glazed piece, Sir John had put his nose straight on the little bit of inserted yellow wood by a hinge, bearing signature, name and date: "Jno. Hemingway, Bath, 1784." Sylvia remembered them because Sir John told her so often. It was a lost "piece" that the furnishing world had been after for many years.
For that exploit the old man seemed to love Tietjens. That he loved Sylvia herself, she was quite aware. He fluttered round her tremulously, gave fantastic entertainments in her honour and was the only man she had never turned down. He had a harem, so it was said, in an enormous house at Brighton or somewhere. But it was another sort of love he bestowed on Tietjens: the rather pathetic love that the aged bestow on their possible successors in office.
Once Sir John came into tea and quite formally and with a sort of portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should come into partnership with him with the reversion of the business—not, of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking a detail or two of Sir John's proposed arrangement. Then he had said, with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a pretty woman, that he didn't think it would do. There would be too much beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him than his office . . . but there was too much beastly money about it.
Once more, a little to Sylvia's surprise—but men are queer creatures!—Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable, though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn't have Tietjens he couldn't; and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia a message to the effect that if ever Tietjensdidcome to be in want of money . . .
Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people—as they sometimes did—told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of caprice—like her own and, since she knew that most of her own manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of thinking much about him.
But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had discussed the change at Lobscheid—or rather when Sylvia had unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!—he had predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the affair of her mother's cousin's opera box that had most impressed her. He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering with her social level, and he was convinced that he was not going to. He had thought about it a good deal.
She hadn't much listened to him. She had thought, firstly, that he was a fool and, secondly, that hedidmean to hurt her. And she acknowledged that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with another man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his name and the shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms. Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure.
But at Lobscheid he had talked a lot of nonsense, as it had seemed to her: a mixture of prophecy and politics. The Chancellor of the Exchequer of that date had been putting pressure on the great landlords: the great landlords had been replying by cutting down their establishments and closing their town houses—not to any great extent, but enough to make a very effective gesture of it, and so as to raise a considerable clamour from footmen and milliners. The Tietjens—both of them—were of the great landowning class: they could adopt that gesture of shutting up their Mayfair house and going to live in a wilderness. All the more if they made their wilderness a thoroughly comfortable affair!
He had counselled her to present this aspect of the matter to her mother's cousin, the morosely portentous Rugeley. Rugeley was a great landowner—almost the greatest of all; and he was a landowner obsessed with a sense of his duties both to his dependants and his even remote relatives. Sylvia had only, Tietjens said, to go to the Duke and tell him that the Chancellor's exactions had forced them to this move, but that they had done it partly as a protest, and the Duke would accept it almost as a personal tribute to himself.Hecouldn't, even as a protest, be expected to shut up Mexborough or reduce his expenses. But, if his humbler relatives spiritedly did, he would almost certainly make it up to them. And Rugeley's favours were on the portentous scale of everything about him. "I shouldn't wonder," Tietjens had said, "if he didn't lend you the Rugeley box to entertain in."
And that is exactly what had happened.
The Duke—who must have kept a register of his remotest cousins—had, shortly before their return to London, heard that this young couple had parted with every prospect of a large and disagreeable scandal. He had approached Mrs. Satterthwaite—for whom he had a gloomy affection—and he had been pleased to hear that the rumour was a gross libel. So that, when the young couple actually turned up again—from Russia!—Rugeley, who perceived that they were not only together, but to all appearances quite united, was determined not only to make it up to them, but to show, in order to abash their libellers as signal a mark of his favour as he could without inconvenience to himself. He, therefore, twice—being a widower—invited Mrs. Satterthwaite to entertain for him, Sylvia to invite the guests, and then had Mrs. Tietjens' name placed on the roll of those who could have the Rugeley box at the opera, on application at the Rugeley estate office, when it wasn't wanted. This was a very great privilege and Sylvia had known how to make the most if it.
On the other hand, on the occasion of their conversation at Lobscheid, Tietjens had prophesied what at the time seemed to her a lot of tosh. It had been two or three years before, but Tietjens had said that about the time grouse-shooting began, in 1914, a European conflagration would take place which would shut up half the houses in Mayfair and beggar their inhabitants. He had patiently supported his prophecy with financial statistics as to the approaching bankruptcy of various European powers and the growingly acquisitive skill and rapacity of the inhabitants of Great Britain. She had listened to that with some attention: it had seemed to her rather like the usual nonsense talked in country houses—where, irritatingly, he never talked. But she liked to be able to have a picturesque fact or two with which to support herself when she too, to hold attention, wanted to issue moving statements as to revolutions, anarchies and strife in the offing. And she had noticed that when she magpied Tietjens' conversations more serious men in responsible positions were apt to argue with her and to pay her more attention than before. . . .
And now, walking along the table with her plate in her hand, she could not but acknowledge that, triumphantly—and very comfortably for her!—Tietjens had been right! In the third year of the war it was very convenient to have a dwelling, cheap, comfortable, almost august and so easy to work that you could have, at a pinch, run it with one maid, though the faithful Hullo Central had not let it come to that yet. . . .
Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad: she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens' head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace.
"I'm bored," she said. "Bored! Bored!"
Tietjens had moved slightly as she had thrown: the cutlets and most of the salad leaves had gone over his shoulder. But one, couched, very green leaf was on his shoulder-strap, and the oil and vinegar from the plate—Sylviaknewthat she took too much of all condiments—had splashed from the revers of his tunic to his green staff-badges. She was glad that she had hit him as much as that: it meant that her marksmanship had not been quite rotten. She was glad, too, that she had missed him. She was also supremely indifferent. It had occurred to her to do it and she had done it. Of that she was glad!
She looked at herself for some time in the mirror of bluish depths. She pressed her immense bandeaux with both hands on to her ears. She was all right: high-featured: alabaster complexion—but that was mostly the mirror's doing—beautiful, long, cool hands—what man's forehead wouldn't long for them? . . . And that hair! What man wouldn't think of it, unloosed on white shoulders! . . . Well, Tietjens wouldn't! Or, perhaps, he did . . . she hoped he did, curse him, for he never saw that sight. Obviously sometimes, at night, with a little whisky taken he must want to!
She rang the bell and bade Hullo Central sweep the plateful from the carpet; Hullo Central, tall and dark, looking with wide-open eyes, motionlessly at nothing.
Sylvia went along the bookshelves, pausing over a book back, "Vitae Hominum Notiss. . ." in gilt, irregular capitals pressed deep into the old leather. At the first long window she supported herself by the blind-cord. She looked out and back into the room.
"There's that veiled woman!" she said, "going into eleven. . . . It's two o'clock, of course. . . ."
She looked at her husband's back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn't going to miss a motion or a stiffening.
"I've found out who it is!" she said, "and who she goes to. I got it out of the porter." She waited. Then she added:
"It's the woman you travelled down from Bishop's Auckland with. On the day war was declared."
Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing.
His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust heaps. He said:
"So you saw me!" But that, too, was mere politeness.
She said:
"Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine's saw you! It was old Campion who said she was a Mrs. . . . I've forgotten the name."
Tietjens said:
"I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the corridor!"
She said:
"Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster's, or the mistress of both of you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common. . . . She's got a mad husband, hasn't she? A clergyman."
Tietjens said:
"She hasn't!"
Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in these discussions never manœuvred for position, said:
"She has been Mrs. Macmaster over six months."
Sylvia said:
"She married him then the day after her husband's death."
She drew a long breath and added:
"I don't care. . . . She has been coming here every Friday for three years. . . . I tell you I shall expose her unless that little beast pays you to-morrow the money he owes you. . . . God knows you need it!" She said then hurriedly, for she didn't know how Tietjens might take that proposition:
"Mrs. Wannop rang up this morning to know who was . . . oh! . . . the evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. Who, by the by, is Mrs. Wannop's secretary? She wants to see you this afternoon. About war babies!"
Tietjens said:
"Mrs. Wannop hasn't got a secretary. It's her daughter who does her ringing-up."
"The girl," Sylvia said, "you were so potty about at that horrible afternoon Macmaster gave. Has she had a war baby by you? They all say she's your mistress."
Tietjens said:
"No, Miss Wannop isn't my mistress. Her mother has had a commission to write an article about war babies. I told her yesterday there weren't any war babies to speak of, and she's upset because she won't be able to make a sensational article. She wants to try and make me change my mind."
Sylvia said:
"ItwasMiss Wannop at that beastly affair of your friend's?" Sylvia asked. "And I suppose the woman who received was Mrs. What's-er-name: your other mistress. An unpleasant show. I don't think much of your taste. The one where all the horrible geniuses in London were? There was a man like a rabbit talked to me about how to write poetry."