Part + 

II + 

I + 

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

“If I divorce Christopher, will you marry me?” + 

He exclaimed with the vehemence of a shocked hen: + 

“Good God, no!” + 

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

So he exclaimed: + 

“Good God, no!” and using a little-finger touch on his snaffle-rein, made his mare recoil from Sylvia Tietjens’ chestnut. + 

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

“You can’t, you know,” she said, “expect to put an idea out of my head just by flurrying the horses.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“A man,” the general said between “Come ups” to his mare, “does not marry his⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

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

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

Sylvia leant over to stroke the neck of the chestnut. + 

“A man,” she said, “cannot marry any other man’s wife.⁠ ⁠… But if you think that I am going to be the second Lady Tietjens after that⁠ ⁠… French prostitute⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You would prefer,” the general said, “to be India.⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

Still, to all intents, he was India. + 

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

“I am dying, Egypt, dying! Only + 

I will importune Death a while until + 

Of many thousand kisses this poor last + 

Is laid upon thy lips.⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

The general said: + 

“You know you cannot possibly divorce my godson. You are a Roman Catholic.” + 

She said, always with her smile: + 

“Oh, can’t I?⁠ ⁠… Besides it would be of the greatest advantage to Michael to have for a stepfather the Field-Marshal Commanding.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He said with impotent irritation: + 

“I wish you would settle whether that boy’s name is Michael or Mark!” + 

She said: + 

“He calls himself Mark.⁠ ⁠… I call him Michael because I hate the name of Mark.⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

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

The general grumbled: + 

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

She regarded him with sunny condescension. He grumbled on: + 

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

He said: + 

“There’s really no fathoming you.⁠ ⁠… A little time ago⁠—for months on end, you were dying of⁠ ⁠… of internal cancer, in short.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She commented with the utmost good temper: + 

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

She laughed good-humouredly at her companion. + 

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

The general exclaimed: + 

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

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

The general groaned: + 

“Rich enough! My God!” + 

She said: + 

“You have still⁠—trust you!⁠—your younger son’s settlement. You have still your general’s pay. You have the interest on the grant the nation made you at the end of the war. You have four hundred a year as a member of Parliament. You have cadged on me for your keep and your man’s keep and your horses’ and grooms’ at Groby for years and years.⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

“Sylvia.⁠ ⁠… Consider the expenses of my constituency.⁠ ⁠… One would almost say you hated me!” + 

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

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

The general exclaimed: + 

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

Sylvia said: + 

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

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

Lord Fittleworth rode up to the general and said: + 

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

“It isn’t the sort of place Helen ought to go to, is it? All sorts of people living with all sorts⁠ ⁠… If what you say is true!” + 

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

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

The general said to Fittleworth: + 

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

Fittleworth said to Sylvia: + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

But all men are curious creatures. Fittleworth stiffened at queer places. He had done so last night. He had stood a good deal. It had to be remembered that Mark Tietjens was an old acquaintance of his⁠—not as intimate as he would have been if the Earl had had children, for Mark preferred houses of married people who had children. But the Earl knew Mark very well.⁠ ⁠… Now a man listening to gossip about another man whom he knows very well will go pretty far towards believing what a beautiful woman will tell him. Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin; and it is true that no man knows what another man is doing when he is out of sight. + 

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

So that appeared to get through. + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II + 

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

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

It had been obvious to her for a long time that God would one day step in and intervene for the protection of Christopher. After all, Christopher was a good man⁠—a rather sickeningly good man. It is, in the end, she reluctantly admitted, the function of God and the invisible Powers to see that a good man shall eventually be permitted to settle down to a stuffy domestic life⁠ ⁠… even to chaffering over old furniture. It was a comic affair⁠—but it was the sort of affair that you had to admit. God is probably⁠—and very rightly⁠—on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise the world could not continue⁠—the children would not be healthy. And certainly God desired the production of large crops of healthy children. Mind doctors of today said that all cases of nervous breakdown occurred in persons whose parents had not led harmonious lives. + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah, if it’s only that⁠ ⁠…” and nothing more. And she chanced it again: + 

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

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

“Surely you wouldn’t meet that fellow!”⁠ ⁠… And that rather spoilt it. + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

At that point Fittleworth exclaimed: + 

“Damn it all, I’ve got to settle the hash of that fellow Gunning!” + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re Captain Tietjens’ servant, aren’t you? I’m his wife. Staying with Lord Fittleworth!” + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gunning, however, had said something like: + 

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t see why I need go to the farm. I can perfectly well ride Boldero down this path. I must certainly speak to your master.” + 

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

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

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

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

Gunning continued dryly: + 

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

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

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

Anyhow, the case had been a fiasco from Sylvia’s point of view, and for the first time in her life she had felt mortification; in addition she had felt a great deal of religious trepidation. It had come into her mind in court⁠—and it came with additional vividness there above that house, that, years ago in her mother’s sitting-room in a place called Lobscheid, Father Consett had predicted that if Christopher fell in love with another woman, she, Sylvia, would perpetrate acts of vulgarity. And there she had been, not only toying with the temporal courts in a matter of marriage, which is a sacrament, but led undoubtedly into a position that she had to acknowledge was vulgar. She had precipitately left the court when Mr. Hatt had for the second time appealed for pity for her⁠—but she had not been able to stop it.⁠ ⁠… Pity! She appeal for pity! She had regarded herself⁠—she had certainly desired to be regarded⁠—as the sword of the Lord smiting the craven and the traitor⁠—to Beauty! And was it to be supported that she was to be regarded as such a fool as to be decoyed into an empty house! Or as to let herself be thrown downstairs!⁠ ⁠… But qui facit per alium is herself responsible, and there she had been in a position as mortifying as would have been that of any city clerk’s wife. The florid periods of Mr. Hatt had made her shiver all over, and she had never spoken to him again. + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She exclaimed to Gunning: + 

“By God, if you do not let me pass, I will cut your face in half.⁠ ⁠… !” + 

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

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

She said to Gunning: + 

“You damn fool.⁠ ⁠… You damn fool.⁠ ⁠… I want to save⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

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

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

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

“Where are all these fools? I want to get them out of here!” + 

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

She said: + 

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

He said: + 

“You poor bitch! You poor bitch! The riding has done it!” + 

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

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

III + 

Valentine was awakened by the shrill overtones of the voice of the little maid coming through the open window. She had fallen asleep over the words: “Saepe te in somnis vidi!” to a vision of white limbs in the purple Adriatic. Eventually the child’s voice said: + 

“We only sez ‘mem’ to friends of the family!” shrilly and self-assertively. + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look here, you.⁠ ⁠… Examine my⁠ ⁠… my cache-corsets.⁠ ⁠… Wouldn’t some new ones be better than a new pedigree sow?”⁠ ⁠… The fellow never had looked at her⁠ ⁠… cache-corsets. Marie Léonie had! + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet⁠ ⁠… How you wanted them to charge! + 

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

If the country would stand it!⁠ ⁠… + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lady below exclaimed in a high voice: + 

“That Lady Mark Tietjens! That! Mercy me, I thought it was the cook!” + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lady Tietjens, mwaw, Madam de Bray Pape, desire coo-pay la arbre.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Valentine could hear Marie Léonie’s steely tones saying: + 

“On dit ’l’arbre, Madame!” + 

And then the high voice of the little maid: + 

“Called us ‘the pore,’ she did, your ladyship.⁠ ⁠… Ast us why we could not take example!” + 

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

“Sir Mark seems to be perspiring a great deal. I was so free as to wipe⁠ ⁠…” + 

As, above, Valentine said: “Oh, Heaven!” Marie Léonie cried out: “Mon Dieu!” and there was a rush of skirts and pinafore. + 

Marie Léonie was rushing past a white, breeched figure, saying: + 

“Vous, une étrangère, avez osé.⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

She must not think about these things! + 

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

She must not think about these things. + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentine’s heart started. The light from the doorway was again obscured. Marie Léonie ran panting in. Sister Anne, in effect! She said: “Le téléphone! Vite!” + 

Valentine said: + 

“J’ai déjà téléphoné.⁠ ⁠… Le docteur sera ici dans quelques minutes.⁠ ⁠… Je te prie de rester à côté de moi!”⁠ ⁠… “I beg you to remain beside me!” Selfish! Selfish! But there was a child to be born.⁠ ⁠… Anyhow Marie Léonie could not have got out of that door. It was blocked.⁠ ⁠… Ah! + 

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

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

“For God’s sake hold your damned tongue. Get out of here!” + 

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

“Mother!⁠ ⁠… Mo⁠ ⁠… ther!” + 

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

It occurred to Valentine that this was only the second time that she had ever seen that face. + 

Its stillness now was terrible! + 

What was she waiting for before she began the Billingsgate that they were both going to indulge in before all these people?⁠ ⁠… For she, Valentine, had her back against the wall! She heard herself begin to say: + 

“You have spoilt⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

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

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

You must not say Damn it all. The war is over⁠ ⁠… Ah, but its backwashes, when would they be over? + 

It said⁠—that woman’s voice was so perfectly expressionless that you could continue appropriately to call it “it”⁠—it said, coldly to Mrs. de Bray Pape: + 

“You hear! The lady of the house does not require your presence. Please go away.” + 

Mrs. de Bray Pape was explaining that she intended re-furnishing Groby in the Louis Quatorze style. + 

It occurred to Valentine that this position had its comicalities. Mrs. de Bray Pape did not know her, Valentine. Marie Léonie did not know who that figure was. + 

They would miss a good deal of the jam⁠ ⁠… Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday.⁠ ⁠… Where was the jam? That figure had said, “The lady of the house.” Delicately. Quelle delicatesse! + 

But she did not appear denunciatory. She dropped sideways: pensive. Puzzled. As if at the ways of God. As if stricken by God and puzzled at his ways⁠ ⁠… Well, she might be. + 

She caught at the telephone shelf. The child had moved within her.⁠ ⁠… It wanted her to be called “Mrs. Tietjens” in its own house. This woman stood in the way. She could not give a father’s name to the little thing. So he protested within her. Dark it was growing. Hold up there. + 

Someone was calling “Valentine!” + 

A boy’s voice called: + 

“Mother! Mother!” + 

A soft voice said: + 

“Mrs. Tietjens!” + 

What things to say in her child’s hearing!⁠ ⁠… Mother! Mother!⁠ ⁠… Her mother was in Pontresina, complete with secretary in black alpaca⁠ ⁠… The Italian Alps! + 

Dark!⁠ ⁠… Marie Léonie said in her ear: “Tiens toi debout, ma chérie!” + 

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

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

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

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

“Madame⁠ ⁠… eh⁠ ⁠… Tietjens! Pardon!” Attempting a French accent! + 

Edith Ethel remarked: + 

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

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

“I am sorry Mr. Ruggles called me Mrs. Tietjens before you!” + 

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

It said drily: + 

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

But the voice went on: + 

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

“Dr. Span is bringing some bromide.⁠ ⁠… I can’t find those⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

“Qui est elle? C’est bien la femme?” + 

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

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

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

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

She looked loweringly then at Valentine: + 

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

She bit into a small handkerchief that she had in her hand, concealed. She said: “Damn it, I’m playing pimp to Tietjens of Groby⁠—leaving my husband to you!⁠ ⁠…” + 

Someone again sobbed. + 

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

Marie Léonie said: + 

“C’est lamentable qu’un seul homme puisse inspirer deux telles passions dans deux telles femmes.⁠ ⁠… C’est le martyre de notre vie!” + 

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

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

IV + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And how shall I thy true love know from another one? + 

Oh, by his cockled hat and staff and by his sandalled shoon!” + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name was written in⁠ ⁠… Lettest thou thy servant⁠ ⁠… divorce in peace! + 

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

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

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

“Half Groby wall is down. Your bedroom’s wrecked. I found your case of seabirds thrown on a rubble heap.” + 

It was as well that one’s services were unforgettable! + 

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

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

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

“Let him off: the poor devil’s worn out!” + 

Heavily, like a dejected bulldog, Christopher made for the gate. As he went up the green path beyond the hedge, Valentine began to sob. + 

“How are we to live? How are we ever to live?” + 

“Now I must speak,” Mark said. + 

He said: + 

“Did ye ever hear tell o’ t’ Yorkshireman⁠ ⁠… On Mount Ara⁠ ⁠… Ara⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

“Put your ear close to my mouth.⁠ ⁠…” She cried out. + 

He whispered: + 

“ ‘ ’Twas the mid o’ the night and the barnies grat + 

And the mither beneath the mauld heard that.⁠ ⁠…’ + 

An old song. My nurse sang it.⁠ ⁠… Never thou let thy child weep for thy sharp tongue to thy good man.⁠ ⁠… A good man! Groby Great Tree is down.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He said: “Hold my hand!” + 

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

She nearly cried out for Marie Léonie. + 

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

She said: + 

“He spoke just now.⁠ ⁠… It has been a torturing afternoon.⁠ ⁠… Now I’m afraid⁠ ⁠… I’m afraid he’s⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

“Go get you to bed.⁠ ⁠… I will come and examine you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She said: + 

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