Mr. Duchemin had walked swiftly to his chair which Parry, as swiftly

walking behind him, drew out. His master slipped into it with a

graceful, sideways motion. He shook his head at grey Miss Fox who had

moved a hand towards an ivory urn-tap. There was a glass of water beside

his plate, and round it his long, very white fingers closed. He stole a

quick glance at Macmaster, and then looked at him steadily with

glittering eyes. He said: "Good-morning, doctor," and then, drowning

Macmaster's quiet protest: "Yes! Yes! The stethoscope meticulously

packed into the top-hat and the shining hat left in the hall."

The prize-fighter, in tight box-cloth leggings, tight whipcord breeches,

and a short tight jacket that buttoned up at the collar to his chin--the

exact stud-groom of a man of property, gave a quick glance of

recognition to Macmaster and then to Mr. Duchemin's back another quick

look, raising his eyebrows. Macmaster, who knew him very well because he

had given Tietjens boxing lessons at Cambridge, could almost hear him

say: "A queer change this, sir! Keep your eyes on him a second!" and,

with the quick, light, tip-toe of the pugilist he slipped away to the

sideboard. Macmaster stole a quick glance on his own account at Mrs.

Duchemin. She had her back to him, being deep in conversation with

Tietjens. His heart jumped a little when, looking back again, he saw Mr.

Duchemin half raised to his feet, peering round the fortifications of

silver. But he sank down again in his chair, and surveying Macmaster

with an expression of cunning singular on his ascetic features,

exclaimed:

"And your friend? Another medical man! All with stethoscope complete. It

takes, of course, two medical men to certify . . ."

He stopped and with an expression of sudden, distorted rage, pushed

aside the arm of Parry, who was sliding a plate of sole-fillets on to

the table beneath his nose.

"Take away," he was beginning to exclaim thunderously, "these

conducements to the filthy lusts of . . ." But with another cunning and

apprehensive look at Macmaster, he said: "Yes! yes! Parry! That's right.

Yes! Sole! A touch of kidney to follow. Another! Yes! Grape-fruit! With

sherry!" He had adopted an old Oxford voice, spread his napkin over his

knees and hastily placed in his mouth a morsel of fish.

Macmaster with a patient and distinct intonation said that he must be

permitted to introduce himself. He was Macmaster, Mr. Duchemin's

correspondent on the subject of his little monograph. Mr. Duchemin

looked at him, hard, with an awakened attention that gradually lost

suspicion and became gloatingly joyful:

"Ah, yes, Macmaster!" he said. "Macmaster. A budding critic. A little of

a hedonist perhaps? And yes . . . you wired that you were coming. Two

friends! Not medical men! Friends!" He moved his face closer to

Macmaster and said:

"How tired you look! Worn! Worn!"

Macmaster was about to say that he was rather hard-worked when, in a

harsh, high cackle close to his face there came the Latin words. Mrs.

Duchemin--and Tietjens!--had heard. Macmaster knew then what he was up

against. He took another look at the prize-fighter; moved his head to

one side to catch a momentary view of the gigantic Mr. Horsley, whose

size took on a new meaning. Then he settled down in his chair and ate a

kidney. The physical force present was no doubt enough to suppress Mr.

Duchemin should he become violent. And trained! It was one of the

curious, minor coincidences of life that, at Cambridge, he had once

thought of hiring this very Parry to follow round his dear friend Sim.

Sim, the most brilliant of sardonic ironists, sane, decent and

ordinarily a little prudish on the surface, had been subject to just

such temporary lapses as Mr. Duchemin. On society occasions he would

stand up and shout or sit down and whisper the most unthinkable

indecencies. Macmaster, who had loved him very much, had run round with

Sim as often as he could, and had thus gained skill in dealing with

these manifestations. . . . He felt suddenly a certain pleasure! He

thought he might gain prestige in the eyes of Mrs. Duchemin if he dealt

quietly and efficiently with this situation. It might even lead to an

intimacy. He asked nothing better!

He knew that Mrs. Duchemin had turned towards him: he could feel her

listening and observing him; it was as if her glance was warm on his

cheek. But he did not look round; he had to keep his eyes on the

gloating face of her husband. Mr. Duchemin was quoting Petronius,

leaning towards his guest. Macmaster consumed kidneys stiffly.

He said:

"That isn't the amended version of the iambics. Willamovitz Möllendorf

that we used . . ."

To interrupt him Mr. Duchemin put his thin hand courteously on

Macmaster's arm. It had a great cornelian seal set in red gold on the

third finger. He went on, reciting in ecstasy; his head a little on one

side as if he were listening to invisible choristers. Macmaster really

disliked the Oxford intonation of Latin. He looked for a short moment at

Mrs. Duchemin; her eyes were upon him; large, shadowy, full of

gratitude. He saw, too, that they were welling over with wetness.

He looked quickly back at Duchemin. And suddenly it came to him; she was

suffering! She was probably suffering intensely. It had not occurred to

him that she would suffer--partly because he was without nerves himself,

partly because he had conceived of Mrs. Duchemin as firstly feeling

admiration for himself. Now it seemed to him abominable that she should

suffer.

Mrs. Duchemin was in an agony. Macmaster had looked at her intently and

looked away! She read into his glance contempt for her situation, and

anger that he should have been placed in such a position. In her pain

she stretched out her hand and touched his arm.

Macmaster was aware of her touch; his mind seemed filled with sweetness.

But he kept his head obstinately averted. For her sake he did not dare

to look away from the maniacal face. A crisis was coming. Mr. Duchemin

had arrived at the English translation. He placed his hands on the

tablecloth in preparation for rising; he was going to stand on his feet

and shout obscenities wildly to the other guests. It was the exact

moment.

Macmaster made his voice dry and penetrating to say:

"'Youth of tepid loves' is a lamentable rendering of _puer calide_! It's

lamentably antiquated . . ."

Duchemin choked and said:

"What? What? What's that?"

"It's just like Oxford to use an eighteenth century crib. I suppose

that's Whiston and Ditton? Something like that . . ." He observed

Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering--as if he were

coming awake in a strange place! He added:

"Anyhow it's wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have

some galantine. I'm going to. Your sole's cold."

Mr. Duchemin looked down at his plate.

"Yes! Yes!" he muttered. "Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce!" The

prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable quiet fellow;

as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said:

"You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What

became of Maggie . . . Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was Rossetti's

model for _Alla Finestra del Cielo_?"

Mr. Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted

eyes:

"_Alla Finestra_!" he exclaimed: "Oh yes! I've got the water-colour. I

saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot. . . ." He looked again

at his plate, started at sight of the galantine and began to eat

ravenously: "A beautiful girl!" he said: "Very long necked . . . She

wasn't of course . . . eh . . . respectable! She's living yet, I think.

Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of

course! . . . In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of

that class. . . ." He went muttering on, his head above his plate.

Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled

to turn to Mrs. Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly:

"If he'll eat a little: get his stomach filled . . . It calls the blood

down from the head. . . ."

She said:

"Oh, forgive! It's dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive!"

He said:

"No! No! . . . Why; it's what I'm _for_!"

A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life:

"Oh, you _good_ man!" she said in her profound tones, and they remained

gazing at each other.

Suddenly, from behind Macmaster's back Mr. Duchemin shouted:

"I say he made a settlement on her, _dum casta et sola_, of course.

Whilst she remained chaste and alone!"

Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had

seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on

his feet, panting and delighted:

"Chaste!" He shouted. "Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion

in the word . . .'" He surveyed the opulent broadness of his tablecloth;

it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of

meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long

captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford

Movement voice: "But chastity . . ."

Mrs. Wannop suddenly said:

"Oh!" and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she

continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her

and said:

"You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned

than my poor readers would care for . . ." Mr. Horsley had been

preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a

description of an article he had been writing about the _Mosella_ of

Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She

talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned

across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig,

said to her as loudly as he could:

"I've got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if

you'll . . ."

The completely deaf Miss Fox--who had had her training by

writing--remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin:

"I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of

minute insects. . . ."

"When my revered preceptor," Mr. Duchemin thundered on "drove away in

the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: 'We will live like

the blessed angels!' How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin suddenly screamed:

"Oh . . . _no_!"

As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others paused--for a

breath. Then they continued talking with polite animation and listening

with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the highest achievement

and justification of English manners!

Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and

shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that

he and the Rev. Horsley could get Mr. Duchemin away, but there'd be a

hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: "Wait!" and, turning to Mrs.

Duchemin he said: "I can stop him. Shall I?" She said:

"Yes! Yes! Anything!" He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a

thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered

into the prize-fighter's hairy ear that was held down to him:

"Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As _hard_ as you can without

breaking your thumb . . ."

Mr. Duchemin had just declaimed:

"I, too, after my nuptials . . ." He began to wave his arms, pausing and

looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs. Duchemin had

just screamed.

Mr. Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined

himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of

he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes.

"He won't get up again." Macmaster whispered to the appreciative

pugilist. "He'll want to. But he'll be afraid."

He said to Mrs. Duchemin:

"Dearest lady! It's all over. I assure you of that. It's a scientific

nerve counter-irritant."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"Forgive!" with one deep sob: "You can never respect . . ." She felt her

eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his

executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath

suspended itself. . . .

Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers

beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the

fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed

themselves.

In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first

with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained

that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if

not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not

to ensue, sharp physical pain--which of course is a nervous matter,

too! . . .

Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master's ear:

"It's time you prepared your sermon for to-morrow, sir," and Mr.

Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick

carpet to the small door.

Then Macmaster said to her:

"You come from Edinburgh? You'll know the Fifeshire coast then."

"Do I not?" she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the

whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a

Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again,

and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool

hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if

much of her life went. She said: "You'll be knowing Kingussie House,

just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child."

He answered:

"Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur

within."

She said:

"Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And . . .

And indeed there are other things I will tell you."

She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm

buckled on again:

"Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our

youths."

He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:

"Then you're an older friend than I," he asked, "though I've known him

since I was fourteen, and I don't believe you could be a better. He's a

good fellow. . ."

She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his

warning--she _knew_ it was a warning--to her to spare his friend.

Mrs. Wannop gave a distinct, but not an alarming scream. Mr. Horsley had

been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the

Moselle in Roman times. The _Mosella_ of Ausonius; the subject of the

essay he was writing is mostly about fish. . . .

"No," he shouted, "it's been said to be the roach. But there are no

roach in the river now." "_Vannulis viridis, oculisque_. No. It's the

other way round: _Red_ fins . . ."

Mrs. Wannop's scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly

over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate!--were enough to

interrupt him.

"_Tietjens_!" she again screamed. "Is it possible? . . ."

She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the

young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had

turned to speak to Mrs. Duchemin she had recognised his aquiline

half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding-breakfast.

To the table that knew it by heart--though Tietjens himself didn't!--she

recited the story of how his father had saved her life, and was her

mascot. And she offered the son--for to the father she had never been

allowed to make any return--her house, her purse, her heart, her time,

her all. She was so completely sincere that, as the party broke up, she

just nodded to Macmaster and, catching Tietjens forcibly by the arm,

said perfunctorily to the critic:

"Sorry I can't help you any more with the article. But my dear Chrissie

must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute!"

She moved off, Tietjens grappled to her, her daughter following as a

young swan follows its parents. In her gracious manner Mrs. Duchemin had

received the thanks of her guests for her wonderful breakfast and had

hoped that now that they had found their ways there. . . .

The echoes of the dispersed festival seemed to whisper in the room.

Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin faced each other, their eyes wary--and

longing.

He said:

"It's dreadful to have to go now. But I have an engagement."

She said:

"Yes! I know! With your great friends."

He answered:

"Oh, only with Mr. Waterhouse and General Campion . . . and Mr.

Sandbach, of course . . ."

She had a moment of fierce pleasure at the thought that Tietjens was not

to be of the company: _her_ man would be out-soaring the vulgarian of

his youth, of his past that she didn't know. . . . Almost harshly she

exclaimed:

"I don't want you to be mistaken about Kingussie House. It was just a

holiday school. Not a grand place."

"It was very costly," he said, and she seemed to waver on her feet.

"Yes! yes!" she said, nearly in a whisper "But you're so grand now! I

was only the child of very poor bodies. Johnstons of Midlothian. But

very poor bodies. . . . I . . . He bought me, you might say. You know.

. . . Put me to very rich schools: when I was fourteen . . . my people

were glad. . . . But I think if my mother had known when I married . . ."

She writhed her whole body. "Oh, dreadful! dreadful!" she exclaimed.

"I want you to know . . ."

His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart. . . .

Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to

say: "I must see you this evening. . . . I shall be mad with anxiety

about you." She whispered: "Yes! yes! . . . In the yew walk." Her eyes

were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. "You are the . . .

first . . . man . . ." she breathed.

"I will be the only one for ever," he said.

He began to see himself: in the tall room, with the long curtains: a

round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture

with great depths: the entwined figures.

They drew apart to gaze at each other: holding hands. . . . The voice of

Tietjens said:

"Macmaster! You're to dine at Mrs. Wannop's to-night. Don't dress; I

shan't." He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had

interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white

patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair.

Macmaster said:

"All right. It's near here, isn't it? . . . I've got an engagement just

after . . ." Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be

working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse . . .

Mrs. Duchemin said with swift jealousy:

"You let him order you about . . ." Tietjens was gone.

Macmaster said absently:

"Who? Chrissie? . . . Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me. . . . We

make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of

the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby. . . ." Feeling that she didn't

appreciate his friend he was abstractly piling on commendations: "He's

making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England

could make. But he's going . . ."

An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet

triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly

that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself

quote:

"'Since when we stand side by side!'" His voice trembled.

"Ah yes!" came in her deep tones: "The beautiful lines . . . They're

true. We must part. In this world . . ." They seemed to her lovely and

mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly,

arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:

"We must wait." He added fiercely: "But to-night, at dusk!" He imagined

the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight

under the window.

"Yes! yes!" she said. "There's a little white gate from the lane." She

imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects

half seen. So much of glamour she could allow herself.

Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they

would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light,

talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but

with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh. . . .

And then: long, circumspect years. . . .

Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer

sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the

stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!

VI

Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned

out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the

best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible,

won't corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a

great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the

young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon

as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it

lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket. Miss Wannop moved

off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the

left hand a ten foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms

just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On

the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed.

The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: "Pink! pink!": the

young woman had an agreeable back.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through

Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable,

clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth;

she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that

each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably

appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their

promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church--two clergy--the State:

two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids. . . . Each

knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch,

greenfinch, yellow-ammer (_not_, my dear, hammer! _ammer_ from the

Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler,

pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher." (These _charming_ local dialect

names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white

blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot,

wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that

the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture

on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our Lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle:

bachelor's button (but in _Sussex_ they call it ragged robin, my dear):

So interesting! cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French _pasque_,

meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not

burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over;

black briony; wild clematis: later it's old man's beard; purple

loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal

shepherds give a grosser name. _So_ racy of the soil!) . . . Walk, then,

through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with

all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets!

Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably

extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned,

to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid

potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (_No_! _Not_

genuine willow-pattern, of _course_, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce

with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also

preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on

opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port . . . for the

_gentleman_! . . . and the jaws hardly able to open after the too

enormous breakfast at 10.15. Mid-day now!

"God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour.

"'Land of Hope and Glory!'--F natural descending to tonic, C major:

chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C

major. . . . All absolutely correct! Double basses, 'cellos, all

violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special

_vox humana_ and key-bugle effect. . . . Across the counties came the

sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Pipe exactly right. It must

be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young

woman's back. English mid-day midsummer. Best climate in the world! No

day on which man may not go abroad!" Tietjens paused and aimed with his

hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its

undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe

lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman

killed among crinolines!

"Now I'm a bloody murderer!" Tietjens said. "Not gory! Green-stained

with vital fluid of innocent plant . . . And by God! Not a woman in the

country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!" He

slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the

sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and

marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!

"By God," he said, "Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition;

H.M. City Man. . . . All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God

we've got a navy! . . . But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows!

Britannia needs no bulwarks . . . Then thank God for the upright young

man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories

as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here in

earth . . . as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of

the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome!

Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's

helmets. . . . No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss! . . .

Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of

Sodom. All splendid! I bet she's virtuous. But you don't have to bet. It

isn't done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes!

Attractive back. Virginal cockiness. . . . Yes, better occupation for

mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till

you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat. . . . You could see it in

her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em! Thank God then for the

Tory, upright young married man and the Suffragette kid . . . Backbone

of England! . . ."

He killed another flower.

"But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both! . . . That kid and I! And

General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul,

M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale. . . . And forty toothless fogies in

the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your

names cut out of them, my boy! . . . My dear boy: I so regret: your

father's oldest friend. . . . By Jove, the pistachio nut of that

galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought

I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich. . . . But no! Gloomy

reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same

reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters

over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of

pills . . . _Das Pillen-Land_, the Germans call us. Very properly . . .

And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life . . .

and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day

long! . . . Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as

Duchemin! . . . I'd never have thought that . . . No wonder meat's

turned to uric acid . . . prime cause of neurasthenia. . . . What a

beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He's finished. Poor devil: he'd better

have ogled this kid. He could have sung: 'Highland Mary' a better tune

than 'This is the end of every man's desire' . . . You can cut it on his

tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a

paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute. . . ."

He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought

not to be walking with this girl!

"But damn it all," he said to himself, "she makes a good screen for

Sylvia . . . who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off

all their beastly visiting lists already . . . as a suffragette!"

Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile:

left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the

other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt

had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him. . . . Her nimble

foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic.

To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch:

the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the

sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside this thistle-tops. No; damn

it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier

does, the eyes of a chaffinch. . . . Infinitely pathetic!

Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: "Pink! pink!"

The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:

"Damn your eyes! _Have_ them put out, then!" The beastly bird that made

the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like

any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists,

botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: "Damn

your eyes! _Have_ your chastity impugned them? What do you speak to

strange men in public for! You know you can't do it in this country. If

it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each

other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot. . . . well, you

could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to

every man you met. . . . 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore . . .' To

every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth:

_that_ would deflower you!" He was scrambling clumsily over the stile.

"Well! _be_ deflowered then: _lose_ your infantile reputation. You've

spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled . . . with the benefit of

Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids

of England. . . . They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man,

in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia

or other. . . . Then _be_ a screen for Sylvia: _get_ struck off the

visiting books! The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I

am! I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it. . . ."

Nevertheless, when at the road-side he stood level with Miss Wannop who

did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left

with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:

"Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads!" She pointed with her

chin along the opposite hedgerow. "Fifty yards!" she said.

"Come along!" he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come

into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would

happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach

all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one

alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected. He said to

himself:

"By God! If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee!" and

he hastened. "Just the beastly thing that _would_ happen." The road

probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!

Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most

extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they're

going to hurry--but _why_ hurry!--do it in the shade of field hedgerows,

not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead.

In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn't

intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly

noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she cool and

denunciatory in her pretty blouse. . . .

There was a dog-cart coming behind them!

Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had

said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the

breakfast-table. . . . The dog-cart contained the police: after them!

She didn't waste time looking round: she wasn't a fool like Atalanta in

the egg race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a

yard and a half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked:

breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn't the sense

to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face,

panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being

made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops

cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshireman didn't

know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught.

Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol. . . . Oh hang. . . .

The voice of Mrs. Wannop--of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on

high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good, round face like a

peony--said:

"Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her . . . but she gave you

seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father's

ambition!" She thought of them as children running races. She beamed

down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who

had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St. Peter.

"My dear boy!" she said, "my dear boy; it's such a satisfaction to have

you under my roof!"

The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs.

Wannop said unconcernedly: "Stephen Joel! I haven't done talking."

Tietjens was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse's

sweat-smeared stomach.

"You soon will have," he said, "with the girth in that state. Your neck

will be broken."

"Oh, I don't think so," Mrs. Wannop said. "Joel only bought the turn-out

yesterday."

Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity:

"Here; get down, you," he said. He held, himself, the head of the horse

whose nostrils were wide with emotion: it rubbed its forehead almost

immediately against his chest. He said: "Yes! yes! There! there!" Its

limbs lost their tautness. The aged driver scrambled down from the high

seat, trying to come down at first forward and then backwards. Tietjens

fired indignant orders at him:

"Lead the horse into the shade of that tree. Don't touch his bit: his

mouth's sore. Where did you get this job lot? Ashford market: thirty

pounds: it's worth more. . . . But, blast you, don't you see you've got

a thirteen hands pony's harness for a sixteen and a half hands horse.

Let the bit out: three holes: it's cutting the animal's tongue in half.

. . . This animal's a rig. Do you know what a rig is? If you give it

corn for a fortnight it will kick you and the cart and the stable to

pieces in five minutes one day." He led the conveyance, Mrs. Wannop

triumphantly complacent and all, into a patch of shade beneath elms.

"Loosen that bit, confound you," he said to the driver. "Ah! you're

afraid."

He loosened the bit himself, covering his fingers with greasy harness

polish which he hated. Then he said:

"Can you hold his head or are you afraid of that too? You _deserve_ to

have him bite your hands off." He addressed Miss Wannop: "Can _you_?"

She said: "No! I'm afraid of horses. I can drive any sort of car: but

I'm afraid of horses." He said: "Very proper!" He stood back and looked

at the horse: it had dropped its head and lifted its near hind foot,

resting the toe on the ground: an attitude of relaxation.

"He'll stand now!" he said. He undid the girth, bending down

uncomfortably, perspiring and greasy: the girth-strap parted in his

hand.

"It's true," Mrs. Wannop said. "I'd have been dead in three minutes if

you hadn't seen that. The cart would have gone over backwards . . ."

Tietjens took out a large, complicated, horn-handled knife like a

schoolboy's. He selected a punch and pulled it open. He said to the

driver:

"Have you got any cobbler's thread? Any string? Any copper wire? A

rabbit wire, now? Come, you've got a rabbit wire or you're not a handy

man."

The driver moved his slouch hat circularly in negation. This seemed to

be Quality who summons you for poaching if you own to possessing rabbit

wires.

Tietjens laid the girth along the shaft and punched into it with his

punch.

"Woman's work!" he said to Mrs. Wannop, "but it'll take you home and

last you six months as well . . . But I'll sell this whole lot for you

to-morrow."

Mrs. Wannop sighed:

"I suppose it'll fetch a ten pound note . . ." She said: "I ought to

have gone to market myself."

"No!" Tietjens answered: "I'll get you fifty for it or I'm no

Yorkshireman. This fellow hasn't been swindling you. He's got you deuced

good value for money, but he doesn't know what's suited for ladies; a

white pony and a basket-work chaise is what you want."

"Oh, I like a bit of spirit," Mrs. Wannop said.

"Of course you do," Tietjens answered: "but this turn-out's too much."

He sighed a little and took out his surgical needle.

"I'm going to hold this band together with this," he said. "It's so

pliant it will make two stitches and hold for ever. . . ."

But the handy man was beside him, holding out the contents of his

pockets: a greasy leather pouch, a ball of beeswax, a knife, a pipe, a

bit of cheese and a pale rabbit wire. He had made up his mind that

_this_ Quality was benevolent and he made offering of all his

possessions.

Tietjens said: "Ah," and then, while he unknotted the wire:

"Well! Listen . . . you bought this turn-out of a higgler at the back

door of the Leg of Mutton Inn."

"Saracen's 'Ed!" the driver muttered.

"You got it for thirty pounds because the higgler wanted money bad. _I_

know. And dirt cheap. . . . But a rig isn't everybody's driving. All

right for a vet or a horse-coper. Like the cart that's too tall! . . .

But you did damn well. Only you're not what you were, are you, at

thirty? And the horse looked to be a devil and the cart so high you

couldn't get out once you were in. And you kept it in the sun for two

hours waiting for your mistress."

"There wer' a bit o' lewth 'longside stable wall," the driver muttered.

"Well! He didn't like waiting," Tietjens said placably. "You can be

thankful your old neck's not broken. Do this band up, one hole less for

the bit I've taken in."

He prepared to climb into the driver's seat, but Mrs. Wannop was there

before him, at an improbable altitude on the sloping watch-box with

strapped cushions.

"Oh, no, you don't," she said, "no one drives me and my horse but me or

my coachman when I'm about. Not even you, dear boy."

"I'll come with you then," Tietjens said.

"Oh, no, you don't," she answered. "No one's neck's to be broken in this

conveyance but mine and Joel's," she added: "perhaps to-night if I'm

satisfied the horse is fit to drive."

Miss Wannop suddenly exclaimed:

"Oh, _no_, mother." But the handy man having climbed in, Mrs. Wannop

flirted her whip and started the horse. She pulled up at once and leaned

over to Tietjens:

"_What_ a life for that poor woman," she said. "We must _all_ do all we

can for her. She could have her husband put in a lunatic asylum

to-morrow. It's sheer self-sacrifice that she doesn't."

The horse went off at a gentle, regular trot.

Tietjens addressed Miss Wannop:

"What hands your mother's got," he said, "it isn't often one sees a

woman with hands like that on a horse's mouth. . . . Did you see how she

pulled up? . . ."

He was aware that, all this while, from the road-side, the girl had been

watching him with shining eyes: intently even: with fascination.

"I suppose you think that a mighty fine performance," she said.

"I didn't make a very good job of the girth," he said. "Let's get off

this road."

"Setting poor, weak women in their places," Miss Wannop continued.

"Soothing the horse like a man with a charm. I suppose you soothe women

like that too. I pity your wife. . . . The English country male! And

making a devoted vassal at sight of the handy man. The feudal system all

complete. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Well, you know, it'll make him all the better servant to you if he

thinks you've friends in the know. The lower classes are like that.

Let's get off this road."

She said:

"You're in a mighty hurry to get behind the hedge. Are the police after

us or aren't they? Perhaps you were lying at breakfast: to calm the

hysterical nerves of a weak woman."

"I wasn't lying," he said, "but I hate roads when there are

field-paths . . ."

"That's a phobia, like any woman's," she exclaimed.

She almost ran through the kissing-gate and stood awaiting him:

"I suppose," she said, "if you've stopped off the police with your high

and mighty male ways you think you've destroyed my romantic young dream.

You haven't. I don't _want_ the police after me. I believe I'd _die_ if

they put me in Wandsworth . . . I'm a coward."

"Oh, no, you aren't," he said, but he was following his own train of

thought, just as she wasn't in the least listening to him. "I daresay

you're a heroine all right. _Not_ because you persevere in actions the

consequences of which you fear. But I daresay you can touch pitch and

not be defiled."

Being too well brought up to interrupt she waited till he had said all

he wanted to say, then she exclaimed:

"Let's settle the preliminaries. It's obvious mother means us to see a

great deal of you. _You're_ going to be a mascot too, like your father.

I suppose you think you are: you saved me from the police yesterday, you

appear to have saved mother's neck to-day. You appear, too, to be going

to make twenty pounds profit on a horse deal. You say you will and you

seem to be that sort of a person . . . Twenty pounds is no end in a

family like ours . . . Well, then, you appear to be going to be the

regular _bel ami_ of the Wannop family . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I hope not."

"Oh, I don't mean," she said, "that you're going to rise to fame by

making love to all the women of the Wannop family. Besides, there's only

me. But mother will press you into all sorts of odd jobs: and there will

always be a plate for you at the table. Don't shudder! I'm a regular

good cook--_cuisine bourgeoise_ of course. I learned under a real

professed cook, though a drunkard. That meant I used to do half the

cooking and the family was particular. Eating people are: county

councillors, half of them, and the like. So I know what men are . . ."

She stopped and said good-naturedly: "But do, for goodness' sake, get it

over. I'm sorry I was rude to you. But it _is_ irritating to have to

stand like a stuffed rabbit while a man is acting like a regular

Admirable Crichton, and cool and collected, with the English country

gentleman air and all."

Tietjens winced. The young woman had come a little too near the knuckle

of his wife's frequent denunciations of himself. And she exclaimed:

"No! That's not fair! I'm an ungrateful pig! You didn't show a bit more

side really than a capable workman must who's doing his job in the midst

of a crowd of incapable duffers. But just get it out, will you? Say once

and for all that--you know the proper, pompous manner: you are not

without sympathy with our aims: but you disapprove--oh, immensely,

strongly--of our methods."

It struck Tietjens that the young woman was a good deal more interested

in the cause--of votes for women--than he had given her credit for. He

wasn't much in the mood for talking to young women, but it was with

considerably more than the surface of his mind that he answered:

"I don't. I approve entirely of your methods: but your aims are

idiotic."

She said:

"You don't know, I suppose, that Gertie Wilson, who's in bed at our

house, is wanted by the police: not only for yesterday, but for putting

explosives in a whole series of letter-boxes?"

He said:

"I didn't . . . but it was a perfectly proper thing to do. She hasn't

burned any of my letters or I might be annoyed: but it wouldn't

interfere with my approval."

"You don't think," she asked earnestly, "that we . . . mother and

I . . . are likely to get heavy sentences for shielding her. It would be

beastly bad luck on mother. Because she's an anti. . ."

"I don't know about the sentence," Tietjens said, "but we'd better get

the girl off your premises as soon as we can. . . ."

She said:

"Oh, you'll _help_?"

He answered:

"Of course, your mother can't be incommoded. She's written the only

novel that's been fit to read since the eighteenth century."

She stopped and said earnestly:

"Look here. _Don't_ be one of those ignoble triflers who say the vote

won't do women any good. Women have a rotten time. They do, really. If

you'd seen what I've seen, I'm not talking through my hat." Her voice

became quite deep: she had tears in her eyes: "_Poor_ women _do_!" she

said, "little insignificant creatures. We've _got_ to change the divorce

laws. We've _got_ to get better conditions. _You_ couldn't stand it if

you knew what I know."

Her emotion vexed him, for it seemed to establish a sort of fraternal

intimacy that he didn't at the moment want. Women do not show emotion

except before their familiars.

He said drily:

"I daresay I shouldn't. But I don't know, so I can!"

She said with deep disappointment:

"Oh, you _are_ a beast! And I shall never beg your pardon for saying

that. I don't believe you mean what you say, but merely to say it is

heartless."

This was another of the counts of Sylvia's indictment and Tietjens

winced again. She explained:

"You don't know the case of the Pimlico army clothing factory workers or

you wouldn't say the vote would be no use to women."

"I know the case perfectly well," Tietjens said: "It came under my

official notice, and I remember thinking that there never was a more

signal instance of the uselessness of the vote to anyone."

"We can't be thinking of the same case," she said.

"We are," he answered. "The Pimlico army clothing factory is in the

constituency of Westminster; the Under-Secretary for War is member for

Westminster; his majority at the last election was six hundred. The

clothing factory employed seven hundred men at 1s. 6d. an hour, all

these men having votes in Westminster. The seven hundred men wrote to

the Under-Secretary to say that if their screw wasn't raised to two bob

they'd vote solid against him at the next election. . . ."

Miss Wannop said: "Well then!"

"So," Tietjens said: "The Under-Secretary had the seven hundred men at

eighteenpence fired and took on seven hundred women at tenpence. What

good did the vote do the seven hundred men? What good did a vote ever do

anyone?"

Miss Wannop checked at that and Tietjens prevented her exposure of his

fallacy by saying quickly:

"Now, if the seven hundred women, backed by all the other ill-used,

sweated women of the country, had threatened the Under-Secretary, burned

the pillar-boxes, and cut up all the golf greens round his

country-house, they'd have had their wages raised to half-a-crown next

week. That's the only straight method. It's the feudal system at work."

"Oh, but we couldn't cut up _golf_ greens," Miss Wannop said. "At least

the W.S.P.U. debated it the other day, and decided that anything so

unsporting would make us _too_ unpopular. I was for it personally."

Tietjens groaned:

"It's maddening," he said, "to find women, as soon as they get in

Council, as muddle-headed and as afraid to face straight issues as

men! . . ."

"You won't, by-the-by," the girl interrupted, "be able to sell our horse

to-morrow. You've forgotten that it will be Sunday."

"I shall have to on Monday, then," Tietjens said. "The point about the

feudal system . . ."

Just after lunch--and it was an admirable lunch of the cold lamb, new

potatoes and mint-sauce variety, the mint-sauce made with white wine

vinegar and as soft as kisses, the claret perfectly drinkable and the

port much more than that, Mrs. Wannop having gone back to the late

professor's wine merchants--Miss Wannop herself went to answer the

telephone. . . .

The cottage had no doubt been a cheap one, for it was old, roomy and

comfortable; but effort had no doubt, too, been lavished on its low

rooms. The dining-room had windows on each side and a beam across; the

dining silver had been picked up at sales, the tumblers were old

cut-glass; on each side of the ingle was a grandfather's chair. The

garden had red brick paths, sunflowers, hollyhocks and scarlet gladioli.

There was nothing to it all, but the garden-gate was well hung.

To Tietjens all this meant effort. Here was a woman who, a few years

ago, was penniless, in the most miserable of circumstances, supporting

life with the most exiguous of all implements. What effort hadn't it

meant! and what effort didn't it mean? There was a boy at Eton . . . a

senseless, but a gallant effort.

Mrs. Wannop sat opposite him in the other grandfather's chair; an

admirable hostess, an admirable lady. Full of spirit in dashes; but

tired. As an old horse is tired that, taking three men to harness it in

the stable yard, starts out like a stallion, but soon drops to a

jog-trot. The face tired, really; scarlet-cheeked with the good air, but

seamed downward. She could sit there at ease, the plump hands covered

with a black lace shawl, and descending on each side of her lap, as much

at ease as any other Victorian great lady. But at lunch she had let drop

that she had written for eight hours every day for the last four

years--till that day--without missing a day. To-day being Saturday, she

had no leader to write:

"And, my darling boy," she had said to him. "I'm giving it to you. I'd

give it to no other soul but your father's son. Not even to . . ." And

she had named the name that she most respected. "And that's the truth,"

she had added. Nevertheless, even over lunch, she had fallen into

abstractions, heavily and deeply, and made fantastic mis-statements,

mostly about public affairs. . . . It all meant a tremendous

record. . . .

And there he sat, his coffee and port on a little table beside him; the

house belonging to him. . . .

She said:

"My dearest boy . . . you've so much to do. Do you think you ought

really to drive the girls to Plimsoll to-night? They're young and

inconsiderate; work comes first."

Tietjens said:

"It isn't the distance . . ."

"You'll find that it is," she answered humorously. "It's twenty miles

beyond Tenterden. If you don't start till ten when the moon sets, you

won't be back till five, even if you've no accidents. . . . The horse is

all right, though . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Mrs. Wannop, I ought to tell you that your daughter and I are being

talked about. Uglily!"

She turned her head to him; rather stiffly. But she was only coming out

of an abstraction.

"Eh?" she said, and then: "Oh! About the golf-links episode. . . . It

must have looked suspicious. I daresay you made a fuss, too, with the

police, to head them off her." She remained pondering for a moment,

heavily, like an old pope:

"Oh, you'll live it down," she said.

"I ought to tell you," he persisted, "that it's more serious than you

think. I fancy I ought not to be here."

"Not here!" she exclaimed. "Why, where else in the world should you be?

You don't get on with your wife; I know. She's a regular wrong 'un. Who

else could look after you as well as Valentine and I?"

In the acuteness of that pang, for, after all, Tietjens cared more for

his wife's reputation than for any other factor in a complicated world,

Tietjens asked rather sharply why Mrs. Wannop had called Sylvia a wrong

'un. She said in rather a protesting, sleepy way:

"My dear boy, nothing! I've guessed that there are differences between

you; give me credit for some perception. Then, as you're perfectly

obviously a right 'un, she must be a wrong 'un. That's all, I assure

you."

In his relief Tietjens' obstinacy revived. He liked this house; he liked

this atmosphere; he liked the frugality, the choice of furniture, the

way the light fell from window to window; the weariness after hard work;

the affection of mother and daughter; the affection, indeed, that they

both had for himself, and he was determined, if he could help it, not to

damage the reputation of the daughter of the house.

Decent men, he held, don't do such things, and he recounted with some

care the heads of the conversation he had had with General Campion in

the dressing-room. He seemed to see the cracked wash-bowls in their

scrubbed oak settings. Mrs. Wannop's face seemed to grow greyer, more

aquiline; a little resentful! She nodded from time to time; either to

denote attention or else in sheer drowsiness:

"My dear boy," she said at last, "it's pretty damnable to have such

things said about you. I can see that. But I seem to have lived in a

bath of scandal all my life. Every woman who has reached my age has that

feeling. . . Now it doesn't seem to matter . . ." She really nodded

nearly off: then she started. "I don't see . . . I really don't see how

I can help you as to your reputation. I'd do it if I could: believe me.

. . . But I've other things to think of. . . . I've this house to keep

going and the children to keep fed and at school. I can't give all the

thought I ought to to other people's troubles. . . ."

She started into wakefulness and right out of her chair.

"But what a beast I am!" she said, with a sudden intonation that was

exactly that of her daughter; and, drifting with a Victorian majesty of

shawl and long skirt behind Tietjens' high-backed chair, she leaned over

it and stroked the hair on his right temple:

"My dear boy," she said. "Life's a bitter thing. I'm an old novelist and

know it. There you are working yourself to death to save the nation with

a wilderness of cats and monkeys howling and squalling your personal

reputation away. . . . It was Dizzy himself said these words to me at

one of our receptions. 'Here I am, Mrs. Wannop,' he said. . . And . . ."

She drifted for a moment. But she made another effort: "My dear boy,"

she whispered, bending down her head to get it near his ear: "My dear

boy; it doesn't matter; it doesn't really matter. You'll live it down.

The only thing that matters is to do good work. Believe an old woman

that has lived very hard; 'Hard lying money' as they call it in the

navy. It sounds like cant, but it's the only real truth. . . . You'll

find consolation in that. And you'll live it all down. Or perhaps you

won't; that's for God in His mercy to settle. But it won't matter;

believe me, as thy day so shall thy strength be." She drifted into other

thoughts; she was much perturbed over the plot of a new novel and much

wanted to get back to the consideration of it. She stood gazing at the

photograph, very faded, of her husband in side-whiskers and an immense

shirt-front, but she continued to stroke Tietjens' temple with a

subliminal tenderness.

This kept Tietjens sitting there. He was quite aware that he had tears

in his eyes; this was almost too much tenderness to bear, and, at bottom

his was a perfectly direct, simple and sentimental soul. He always had

bedewed eyes at the theatre, after tender love scenes and so avoided the

theatre. He asked himself twice whether he should or shouldn't make

another effort, though it was almost beyond him. He wanted to sit still.

The stroking stopped; he scrambled on to his feet:

"Mrs. Wannop," he said, facing her, "it's perfectly true. I oughtn't to

care what these swine say about me, but I do. I'll reflect about what

you say till I get it into my system . . ."

She said:

"Yes, yes! My dear," and continued to gaze at the photograph:

"But," Tietjens said; he took her mittened hand and led her back to her

chair: "What I'm concerned for at the moment is not my reputation, but

your daughter Valentine's."

She sank down into the high chair, balloon-like and came to rest.

"Val's reputation!" she said, "Oh! you mean they'll be striking _her_

off their visiting lists. It hadn't struck me. So they will!" She

remained lost in reflection for a long time.

Valentine was in the room, laughing a little. She had been giving the

handy man his dinner, and was still amused at his commendations of

Tietjens.

"You've got one admirer," she said to Tietjens. "'Punched that rotten

strap,' he goes on saying, 'like a gret ol' yaffle punchin' a 'ollow

log!'" He's had a pint of beer and said it between each gasp. She

continued to narrate the quaintnesses of Joel which appealed to her;

informed Tietjens that "yaffle" was Kentish for great green woodpecker;

and then said:

"You haven't got any friends in Germany, have you?" She was beginning to

clear the table.

Tietjens said:

"Yes; my wife's in Germany; at a place called Lobscheid."

She placed a pile of plates on a black japanned tray.

"I'm so sorry," she said, without an expression of any deep regret.

"It's the ingenious clever stupidities of the telephone. I've got a

telegraph message for you then. I thought it was the subject for

mother's leader. It always comes through with the initials of the paper

which are not unlike Tietjens, and the girl who always sends it is

called Hopside. It seemed rather inscrutable, but I took it to have to

do with German politics and I thought mother would understand it. . . .

You're not both asleep, are you?"

Tietjens opened his eyes; the girl was standing over him, having

approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which

she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the

letters of the message ran together. The message was:

"Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia

Hopside Germany."

Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed

meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the

table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities

on the telephone.

"Of course if I'd had any sense," the girl said, "I should have known it

couldn't have been mother's leader note; she never gets one on a

Saturday."

Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each

word a pause:

"It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me."

"Lucky you!" the girl said, "I wish I was you. I've never been in the

Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg." She went off with her great

tray load, the table cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she

had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was

extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That

was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would

have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her

words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realised

that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it

was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil . . . though the devil of

course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is

probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of

mental oppressions . . . if God then desired (and one couldn't object

but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a

cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness. . . . But He had done it; no

doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are

heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just? . . . Perhaps

God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences.

There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their

breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers,

toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile

inefficiency; with gross piles of hot-house flowers--that he detested

for their exotic waxennesses!--with white enamelled panels that he

disliked and framed, weak prints--quite genuine of course, my dear,

guaranteed so by Sotheby--pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats,

selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs.

Satterthwaite, in négligé, but with an immense hat; reading the

_Times_ with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could settle

down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she could

not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands behind

her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as cruel as

the usual degenerate Derby winner. In-bred for generations for one

purpose: to madden men of one type. . . . Pacing backwards and forwards,

exclaiming: "I'm bored! Bored!"; sometimes even breaking the breakfast

plates . . . And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with

imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and

clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife's

questions. . . . And in his forehead the continual pressure; the

determination to sit put; the _décor_ of the room seeming to burn into

his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon

his forehead. . . .

Mrs. Wannop was talking to him now; he did not know what she said; he

never knew afterwards what he had answered.

"God!" he said within himself, "if it's sexual sins God punishes, He

indeed is just and inscrutable!" . . . Because he had had physical

contact with this woman before he married her; in a railway carriage;

coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl!

Where was the physical attraction of her gone to now? Irresistible;

reclining back as the shires rushed past. . . . His mind said that she

had lured him on. His intellect put the idea from him. No gentleman

thinks such things of his wife.

No gentleman thinks. . . . By God; she must have been with child by

another man. . . . He had been fighting the conviction down all the last

four months. . . . He knew now that he had been fighting the conviction

all the last four months whilst, anæsthetised, he had bathed in figures

and wave-theories. . . . Her last words had been: her very last words:

late: all in white she had gone up to her dressing-room, and he had

never seen her again; her last words had been about the child . . .

"Supposing," she had begun . . . He didn't remember the rest. But he

remembered her eyes. And her gesture as she peeled off her long white

gloves. . . .

He was looking at Mrs. Wannop's ingle; he thought it a mistake in taste,

really, to leave logs in an ingle during the summer. But then what are

you to do with an ingle in summer? In Yorkshire cottages they shut the

ingles up with painted doors. But that is stuffy, too!

He said to himself:

"By God! I've had a stroke!" and he got out of his chair to test his

legs. . . . But he hadn't had a stroke. It must then, he thought, be

that the pain of his last consideration must be too great for his mind

to register, as certain great physical pains go unperceived. Nerves,

like weighing machines, can't register more than a certain amount, then

they go out of action. A tramp who had had his leg cut off by a train

had told him that he had tried to get up, feeling nothing at all. . . .

The pain comes back though . . .

He said to Mrs. Wannop, who was still talking:

"I beg your pardon. I really missed what you said."

Mrs. Wannop said:

"I was saying that that's the best thing I can do for you."

He said:

"I'm really very sorry: it was that that I missed. I'm a little in

trouble you know."

She said:

"I know: I know. The mind wanders; but I wish you'd listen. I've got to

go to work, so have you. I said: after tea you and Valentine will walk

into Rye to fetch your luggage."

Straining his intelligence, for, in his mind, he felt a sudden strong

pleasure: sunlight on pyramidal red roof in the distance: themselves

descending in a long diagonal, a green hill: God, yes, he wanted open

air. Tietjens said:

"I see. You take us both under your protection. You'll bluff it out."

Mrs. Wannop said rather coolly:

"I don't know about you both. It's you I'm taking under my protection

(it's _your_ phrase!) As for Valentine: she's made her bed; she must lie

on it. I've told you all that already. I can't go over it again."

She paused, then made another effort:

"It's disagreeable," she said, "to be cut off the Mountby visiting list.

They give amusing parties. But I'm too old to care and they'll miss my

conversation more than I do theirs. Of course, I back my daughter

against the cats and monkeys. Of course, I back Valentine through thick

and thin. I'd back her if she lived with a married man or had

illegitimate children. But I don't approve, I don't approve of the

suffragettes: I despise their aims: I detest their methods. I don't

think young girls ought to talk to strange men. Valentine spoke to you

and look at the worry it has caused you. I disapprove. I'm a woman: but

I've made my own way: other women could do it if they liked or had the

energy. I disapprove! But don't believe that I will ever go back on any

suffragette, individual, in gangs; my Valentine or any other. Don't

believe that I will ever say a word against them that's to be

repeated--_you_ won't repeat them. Or that I will ever write a word

against them. No, I'm a woman and I stand by my sex!" She got up

energetically:

"I must go and write my novel," she said. "I've Monday's instalment to

send off by train to-night. You'll go into my study: Valentine will give

you paper; ink; twelve different kinds of nibs. You'll find Professor

Wannop's books all round the room. You'll have to put up with Valentine

typing in the alcove. I've got two serials running, one typed, the other

in manuscript."

Tietjens said:

"But _you_!"

"I," she exclaimed, "I shall write in my bedroom on my knee. I'm a woman

and can. You're a man and have to have a padded chair and sanctuary. . . .

You feel fit to work? Then: you've got till five, Valentine will get

tea then. At half-past five you'll set off to Rye. You'll be back with

your luggage and your friend and your friend's luggage at seven."

She silenced him imperiously with:

"Don't be foolish. Your friend will certainly prefer this house and

Valentine's cooking to the pub and the pub's cooking. And he'll save on

it. . . . It's _no_ extra trouble. I suppose your friend won't inform

against that wretched little suffragette girl upstairs." She paused and

said: "You're _sure_ you can do your work in the time and drive

Valentine and her to that place . . . Why it's necessary is that the

girl daren't travel by train and we've relations there who've never been

connected with the suffragettes. The girl can live hid there for a bit.

. . . But sooner than you shouldn't finish your work I'd drive them

myself . . ."

She silenced Tietjens again: this time sharply:

"I tell you it's _no_ extra trouble. Valentine and I _always_ make our

own beds. We don't like servants among our intimate things. We can get

three times as much help in the neighbourhood as we want. We're liked

here. The extra work you give will be met by extra help. We could have

servants if we wanted. But Valentine and I like to be alone in the house

together at night. We're very fond of each other."

She walked to the door and then drifted back to say:

"You know I can't get out of my head that unfortunate woman and her

husband. We must _all_ do what we can for them." Then she started and

exclaimed: "But, good heavens, I'm keeping you from your work . . . The

study's in there, through that door."

She hurried through the other doorway and no doubt along a passage,

calling out:

"Valentine! Valentine! Go to Christopher in the study. At once . . . at

. . ." Her voice died away.

VII

Jumping down from the high step of the dog-cart the girl completely

disappeared into the silver: she had on an otter-skin toque, dark, that

should have been visible. But she was gone more completely than if she

had dropped into deep water, into snow--or through tissue paper. More

suddenly, at least! In darkness or in deep water a moving paleness would

have been visible for a second: snow or a paper hoop would have left an

opening. Here there had been nothing.

The constation interested him. He had been watching her intently and

with concern for fear she should miss the hidden lower step, in which

case she would certainly bark her shins. But she had jumped clear of the

cart: with unreasonable pluckiness, in spite of his: "Look out how you

get down." He wouldn't have done it himself: he couldn't have faced

jumping down into that white solidity . . .

He would have asked: "Are you all right?" but to express more concern

than the "look out," which he had expended already, would have detracted

from his stolidity. He was Yorkshire and stolid: she south country and

soft: emotional: given to such ejaculations as "I hope you're not hurt,"

when the Yorkshireman only grunts. But soft because she was south

country. She was as good as a man--a south country man. She was ready to

acknowledge the superior woodenness of the north. . . . That was their

convention: so he did not call down: "I hope you're all right," though

he had desired to.

Her voice came, muffled, as if from the back of the top of his head: the

ventriloquial effect was startling:

"Make a noise from time to time. It's ghostly down here and the lamp's

no good at all. It's almost out."

He returned to his constations of the concealing effect of water vapour.

He enjoyed the thought of the grotesque appearance he must present in

that imbecile landscape. On his right an immense, improbably brilliant

horn of a moon, sending a trail as if down the sea, straight to his

neck: beside the moon a grotesquely huge star: in an extravagant

position above them the Plough, the only constellation that he knew;

for, though a mathematician, he despised astronomy. It was not

theoretical enough for the pure mathematician and not sufficiently

practical for daily life. He had of course calculated the movements of

abstruse heavenly bodies: but only from given figures: he had never

looked for the stars of his calculations. . . . Above his head and all

over the sky were other stars: large and weeping with light, or as the

dawn increased, so paling that at times, you saw them; then missed them.

Then the eye picked them up again.

Opposite the moon was a smirch or two of cloud; pink below, dark purple

above; on the more pallid, lower blue of the limpid sky.

But the absurd thing was this mist! . . . It appeared to spread from his

neck, absolutely level, absolutely silver, to infinity on each side of

him. At great distances on his right black tree-shapes, in groups--there

were four of them--were exactly like coral islands on a silver sea. He

couldn't escape the idiotic comparison: there wasn't any other.

Yet it didn't actually spread from his neck: when he now held his hands,

nipple-high, like pallid fish they held black reins which ran downwards

into nothingness. If he jerked the rein, the horse threw its head up.

Two pricked ears were visible in greyness: the horse being sixteen two

and a bit over, the mist might be ten foot high. Thereabouts. . . . He

wished the girl would come back and jump out of the cart again. Being

ready for it he would watch her disappearance more scientifically. He

couldn't of course ask her to do it again: that was irritating. The

phenomenon would have proved--or it might of course disprove--his idea

of smoke screens. The Chinese of the Ming dynasty were said to have

approached and overwhelmed their enemies under clouds of--of course, not

acrid--vapour. He had read that the Patagonians, hidden by smoke, were

accustomed to approach so near to birds or beasts as to be able to take

them by hand. The Greeks under Paleologus the . . .

Miss Wannop's voice said--from beneath the bottom board of the cart:

"I wish you'd make some noise. It's lonely down here, besides being

possibly dangerous. There might be dicks on each side of the road."

If they were on the marsh there certainly would be dykes--why did they

call ditches "dykes," and why did she pronounce it "dicks"?--on each

side of the road. He could think of nothing to say that wouldn't express

concern and he couldn't do that by the rules of the game. He tried to

whistle "John Peel"! But he was no hand at whistling. He sang:

"D'ye ken, John Peel at the break of day . . ." and felt like a fool.

But he kept on at it, the only tune that he knew. It was the Yorkshire

Light Infantry quick-step: the regiment of his brothers in India. He

wished he had been in the army: but his father hadn't approved of having

more than two younger sons in the army. He wondered if he would ever run

with John Peel's hounds again: he had once or twice. Or with any of the

trencher-fed foot packs of the Cleveland district, of which there had

been still several when he had been a boy. He had been used to think of

himself as being like John Peel with his coat so grey . . . Up through

the heather, over Wharton's place; the pack running wild; the heather

dripping; the mist rolling up . . . another kind of mist than this south

country silver sheet. Silly stuff! Magical! That was the word. A silly

word. . . . South country . . . In the north the old grey mists rolled

together, revealing black hillsides!

He didn't suppose he'd have the wind now: this rotten bureaucratic life!

. . . If he had been in the army like the two brothers, Ernest and

James, next above him . . . But no doubt he would not have liked the

army. Discipline! . . . He supposed he would have put up with the

discipline: a gentleman had to. Because _noblesse oblige_: not for fear

of consequences . . . But army officers seemed to him pathetic. They

spluttered and roared: to make men jump smartly: at the end of

apoplectic efforts the men jumped smartly. But there was the end

of it. . . .

Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver:

if you looked at it with the eye of the artist . . . With the exact eye!

It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; of orange: delicate

reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts

like snow. . . . The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work.

The only work for a man. Why then, were artists soft: effeminate: not

men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the

school-teacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an

old woman!

And the bureaucrat then? Growing fat and soft like himself, or dry and

stringy like Macmaster or old Ingleby? They did men's work: exact

observation: return no. 17642 with figures exact. Yet they grew

hysterical: they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells,

asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand

and two wasn't ready. Nevertheless men liked the bureaucratic life: his

own brother, Mark, head of the family: heir to Groby. . . . Fifteen

years older: a quiet stick: wooden: brown: always in a bowler hat, as

often as not with his racing-glasses hung around him. Attending his

first-class office when he liked: too good a man for any administration

to lose by putting on the screw. . . . But heir to Groby: what would

that stick make of the place? . . . Let it, no doubt, and go on

pottering from the Albany to race meetings--where he never betted--to

Whitehall, where he was said to be indispensable. . . . Why

indispensable? Why in heaven's name? That stick who had never hunted,

never shot: couldn't tell coulter from plough-handle and lived in his

bowler hat! . . . A "sound" man: the archetype of all sound men. Never

in his life had anyone shaken his head at Mark and said:

"You're _brilliant_!" Brilliant! That stick! No, he was indispensable!

"Upon my soul!" Tietjens said to himself, "that girl down there is the

only intelligent living soul I've met for years." . . . A little

pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite

intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was

wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both

sides! . . . But, positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human

beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer

efficiency in killing: the other for having the constructive desire and

knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If

you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure

faith that she would kill it: emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and

sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she'd

find something to do for it . . . The two types of mind: remorseless

enemy: sure screen: dagger . . . sheath!

Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hadn't in

years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to--as you talk down to a

child: as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse . . .

as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their

way. . . .

But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd?

Not artist: not soldier: not bureaucrat: not certainly indispensable

anywhere: apparently not even sound in the eyes of these dim-minded

specialists . . . An exact observer. . . .

Hardly even that for the last six and a half hours:

"Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethan

Das war ein schweigsams Reiten . . ."

he said aloud.

How could you translate that: you couldn't translate it: no one could

translate Heine:

"It was the summer night came over me:

That was silent riding . . ."

A voice cut into his warm, drowsy thought:

"Oh, you _do_ exist. But you've spoken too late. I've run into the

horse." He must have been speaking aloud. He had felt the horse

quivering at the end of the reins. The horse, too, was used to her by

now. It had hardly stirred . . . He wondered when he had left off

singing "John Peel." . . . He said:

"Come along, then: have you found anything?"

The answer came:

"Something . . . But you can't talk in this stuff . . . I'll just . . ."

The voice died away as if a door had shut. He waited: consciously

waiting: as an occupation! Contritely and to make a noise he rattled the

whip-stock in its bucket. The horse started and he had to check in

quickly: a damn fool he was. Of course a horse would start if you

rattled a whip-stock. He called out:

"Are you all right?" The cart might have knocked her down. He had,

however, broken the convention. Her voice came from a great distance:

"I'm all right. Trying the other side . . ."

His last thought came back to him. He had broken their convention: he

had exhibited concern: like any other man. . . . He said to himself:

"By God! Why not take a holiday: why not break all conventions?"

They erected themselves intangibly and irrefragably. He had not known

this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to: and already the

convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she

warm and clinging. . . . Yet she was obviously as cool a hand as

himself: cooler no doubt, for at bottom he was certainly a

sentimentalist.

A convention of the most imbecile type . . . Then break all conventions:

with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight

hours . . . almost exactly forty-eight hours till he started for

Dover. . . .

"And I must to the greenwood go,

Alone: a banished man!"

By the descending moon: it being then just after cockcrow of midsummer

night--what sentimentality!--it must be half-past four on Sunday. He had

worked out that to catch the morning Ostend boat at Dover he must leave

the Wannops' at 5.15 on Tuesday morning, in a motor for the

junction. . . . What incredible cross-country train connections! Five hours

for not forty miles, He had then forty-eight and three-quarter hours! Let

them be a holiday! A holiday from himself above all: a holiday from his

standards: from his convention with himself. From clear observation:

from exact thought: from knocking over all the skittles of the

exactitudes of others: from the suppression of emotions. . . . From all

the wearinesses that made him intolerable to himself. . . . He felt his

limbs lengthen, as if they too had relaxed.

Well, already he had had six and a half hours of it. They had started at

10 and, like any other man, he had enjoyed the drive, though it had been

difficult to keep the beastly cart balanced, the girl had had to sit

behind with her arm round the other girl who screamed at every oak

tree. . . .

But he had--if he put himself to the question--mooned along under the

absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven: to the scent of

hay: to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of course--in June he

changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a heron twice, overhead.

They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn stacks, of heavy, rounded

oaks, of hop oasts that are half church tower, half finger-post. And the

road silver grey, and the night warm. . . . It was midsummer night that

had done that to him. . . .

_Hat mir's angethan.

Das war ein schweigsames Reiten._ . . .

Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the

parson's, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had

talked very little. . . . Not unpleasant people the parson's: an uncle

of the girl's: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but

without the individuality . . . A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly

meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a

man. All in candlelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat

up some stairs . . . a great deal of laughter of girls . . . then a

re-start an hour later than had been scheduled. . . . Well, it hadn't

mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them: the good

horse--_really_ it was a good horse!--putting its shoulders into the

work. . . .

They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl

from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her

in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train. . . .

There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near

their off-lamp.

"What a large bat!" she had said. "_Noctilux major_. . ."

He said:

"Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn't it

_phalœna_ . . ." She had answered:

"From White . . . The _Natural History of Selborne_ is the only natural

history I ever read. . . ."

"He's the last English writer that could write," said Tietjens.

"He calls the downs 'those majestic and amusing mountains,'" she said.

"Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from?

Phal . . . i . . . i . . . na! To rhyme with Dinah!"

"It's '_sublime_ and amusing mountains,' not 'majestic and amusing,'"

Tietjens said. "I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys

of to-day, from the German."

She answered:

"You would! Father used to say it made him sick."

"Cæsar equals Kaiser," Tietjens said. . . .

"Bother your Germans," she said, "they're no ethnologists; they're

rotten at philology!" She added: "Father used to say so," to take away

from an appearance of pedantry.

A silence then! She had right over her head a rug that her aunt had lent

her; a silhouette beside him, with a cocky nose turned up straight out

of the descending black mass. But for the square toque she would have

had the silhouette of a Manchester cotton-hand: the toque gave it a

different line; like the fillet of Diana. It was piquant and agreeable

to ride beside a quite silent lady in the darkness of the thick Weald

that let next to no moonlight through. The horse's hoofs went clock,

clock: a good horse. The near lamp illuminated the russet figure of a

man with a sack on his back, pressed into the hedge, a blinking lurcher

beside him.

"Keeper between the blankets!" Tietjens said to himself: "All these

south country keepers sleep all night. . . . And then you give them a

five quid tip for the week-end shoot. . . ." He determined that, as to

that, too he would put his foot down. No more week-ends with Sylvia in

the mansions of the Chosen People. . . .

The girl said suddenly; they had run into a clearing of the deep

underwoods:

"I'm not stuffy with you over that Latin, though you were unnecessarily

rude. And I'm not sleepy. I'm loving it all."

He hesitated for a minute. It was a silly-girl thing to say. She didn't

usually say silly-girl things. He ought to snub her for her own

sake. . . .

He had said:

"I'm rather loving it too!" She was looking at him; her nose had

disappeared from the silhouette. He hadn't been able to help it; the

moon had been just above her head; unknown stars all round her; the

night was warm. Besides, a really manly man may condescend at times! He

rather owes it to himself. . . .

She said:

"That was nice of you! You might have hinted that the rotten drive was

taking you away from your so important work. . . ."

"Oh, I can think as I drive," he said. She said:

"Oh!" and then: "The reason why I'm unconcerned over your rudeness about

my Latin is that I know I'm a much better Latinist than you. You can't

quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in. . . . It's

_vastum_, not _longum_ . . . 'Terra tribus scopulis vastum

procurrit' . . . It's _alto_, not _caelo_ . . . 'Uvidus ex alto

desilientis. . . .' How could Ovid have written _ex caelo_? The 'c'

after the 'x' sets your teeth on edge."

Tietjens said:

"_Excogitabo_!"

"That's purely canine!" she said with contempt.

"Besides," Tietjens said, "_longum_ is much better than _vastum_. I hate

cant adjectives like 'vast.' . . ."

"It's like your modesty to correct Ovid," she exclaimed. "Yet you say

Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets to _be_ poets. That's

because they _were_ sentimental and used adjectives like _vastum_. . . .

What's 'Sad tears mixed with kisses' but the sheerest sentimentality!"

"It ought, you know," Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, "to be

'Kisses mingled with sad tears' . . . 'Tristibus et lacrimis oscula

mixta dabis. . . .'"

"I'm hanged if I ever could," she exclaimed explosively. "A man like you

could die in a ditch and I'd never come near. You're desiccated even for

a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans."

"Oh, well, I'm a mathematician," Tietjens said. "Classics is not my

line!"

"It _isn't_," she answered tartly.

A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words:

"You used 'mingled' instead of 'mixed' to translate _mixta_. I shouldn't

think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they're as rotten at

that as at everything else, father used to say."

"Your father was Balliol, of course," Tietjens said with the snuffy

contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived

most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment

and an olive branch.

Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still

between him and the moon, remarked:

"I don't know if you know that for some minutes we've been running

nearly due west. We ought to be going south-east by a bit south. I

suppose you _do_ know this road. . . ."

"Every inch of it," she said, "I've been on it over and over again on my

motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross road is called

Grandfather's Wantways. We've got eleven miles and a quarter still to

do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it

goes in and out amongst them; hundreds of them. You know the exports of

the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles and

chimney backs. The railings round St. Paul's are made of Sussex iron."

"I knew that, of course," Tietjens said: "I come of an iron county

myself. . . . Why didn't you let me run the girl over in the side-car,

it would have been quicker?"

"Because," she said, "three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the

milestone at Hog's Corner: doing forty."

"It must have been a pretty tidy smash!" Tietjens said. "Your mother

wasn't aboard?"

"No," the girl said, "suffragette literature. The side-car was full. It

_was_ a pretty tidy smash. Hadn't you observed I still limp a

little?" . . .

A few minutes later she said:

"I haven't the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to

notice the road. And I don't care. . . . Here's a signpost though; pull

into it. . . ."

The lamps would not, however, shine on the arms of the post; they were

burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens

gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and,

going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering

ghostlinesses. . . .

The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs

clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was

astonishing; it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it:

ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly.

The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket.

"Did you do that on purpose?" he asked the girl. "Or can't you hold a

horse?"

"I can't drive a horse," the girl said; "I'm afraid of them. I can't

drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I _knew_ you'd say

you'd rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with

me."

"Then do you mind," Tietjens said, "telling me if you know this road at

all?"

"Not a bit!" she answered cheerfully. "I never drove it in my life. I

looked it up on the map before we started because I'm sick to death of

the road we went by. There's a one-horse 'bus from Rye to Tenterden, and

I've walked from Tenterden to my uncle's over and over again. . . ."

"We shall probably be out all night then," Tietjens said. "Do you mind?

The horse may be tired. . . ."

She said:

"Oh, the poor horse! . . . I _meant_ us to be out all night. . . . But

the poor horse. . . . What a brute I was not to think of it."

"We're thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter

from a place whose name I couldn't read; six and three-quarters from

somewhere called something like Uddlemere. . . ." Tietjens said. "This

is the road to Uddlemere."

"Oh, that was Grandfather's Wantways all right," she declared. "I know

it well. It's called 'Grandfather's' because an old gentleman used to

sit there called Gran'fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to

sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden

market was abolished in 1845--the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws,

you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that."

Tietjens sat patiently: He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a

heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had

not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.

"Would you mind," he said then, "telling me . . ."

"If," she interrupted, "that was really Gran'fer Wantways: midland

English. 'Vent' equals four cross-roads: high French _carrefour_. . . .

Or, perhaps, that isn't the right word. But it's the way your mind

works. . . ."

"You have, of course, often walked from your uncle's to Gran'fer's

Wantways," Tietjens said, "with your cousins, taking brandy to the

invalid in the old toll-gate house. That's how you know the story of

Grand'fer. You said you had never driven it; but you _have_ walked it.

That's the way _your_ mind works, isn't it?"

She said: "_Oh_!"

"Then," Tietjens went on, "would you mind telling me--for the sake of

the poor horse--whether Uddlemere is or isn't on our road home. I take

it you don't know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is

the right road."

"The touch of pathos," the girl said, "is a wrong note. It's you who're

in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn't. . . ."

Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:

"It _is_ the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You

wouldn't let the horse go another five steps if it wasn't. You're as

soppy about horses as . . . as I am."

"There's at least that bond of sympathy between us," she said drily.

"Gran'fer's Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore;

Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters;

twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name

is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from

'O'er the mere.' Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to

put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: 'O'er

the mere.' Obviously absurd! . . . Putrid! '_O'er the_' by Grimm's law

impossible as '_Udi_'; '_mere_' not a middle Low German word

at all. . . ."

"Why," Tietjens said, "are you giving me all this information?"

"Because," the girl said, "it's the way your mind works. . . . It picks

up useless facts as silver after you've polished it picks up sulphur

vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent

patterns and makes Toryism out of them. . . . I've never met a Cambridge

Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up

again out of bones. That's what father used to say; he was an Oxford

Disraelian Conservative Imperialist. . . ."

"I know of course," Tietjens said.

"Of course you know," the girl said. "You know everything. . . . And

you've worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was

unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. _You_ want to be a

Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and

the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you'll never

stir a finger except to say I told you so."

She touched him suddenly on the arm:

"_Don't_ mind me!" she said. "It's reaction. I'm so happy. I'm so

happy."

He said:

"That's all right! That's all right!" But for a minute or two it wasn't

really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet;

but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of

the defects of your qualities--even merely with the velvet. He added:

"Your mother works you very hard."

She exclaimed:

"How you _understand_. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a

sea-anemone!" She said: "Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for

four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the

movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her

day's work for slips of the pen. . . . And on the top of it the raid and

the anxiety. . . . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother _had_ gone

to prison. . . . Oh, I'd have gone mad. . . . Week-days and Sundays. . . ."

She stopped: "I'm apologising, really," she went on. "Of course I

ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum;

saving the country with your statistics and all. . . . It _did_ make you

a rather awful figure, you know . . . and the relief to find you're . . .

oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. . . . I'd dreaded this

drive. . . . I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been in such a

dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn't let off steam I

should have had to jump out and run beside the cart. . . . I could

still . . ."

"You couldn't," Tietjens said. "You couldn't see the cart."

They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them

with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to

sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its

romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they

could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to

a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing

the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse

would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man

that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale. . . . They agreed that

they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured

hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more

luminous. . . . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the

stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged

into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical

sea. . . . Tietjens had said:

"You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a

milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the

horse. . . ." She had plunged in . . .

And he had sat, feeling he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the

light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts--intent, like Miss

Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday

morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures;

a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a

horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the

horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man

in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of

stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler's epigrams. You

couldn't have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or

if not that, the claret. . . . The claret in south country inns was

often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept. . . .

On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his

wife's maid at Dover. . . .

He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like

other men; free of his conventions, his strait waist-coatings. . . .

The girl said:

"I'm coming up now! I've found out something. . . ." He watched intently

the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the

impenetrability of mist to the eye.

Her otter skin cap had beads of dew: beads of dew were on her hair

beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with

fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the

wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.

Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but

irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:

"Steady, the Buffs!" in his surprise.

She said:

"Well, you might as well have given me a hand." "I found," she went on,

"a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and then the lamp went out. We're not

on the marsh because we're between quick hedges. That's all I've found.

. . . But I've worked out what makes me so tart with you. . . ."

He couldn't believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of

that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to

catch her to him and had been foiled by her. . . . She ought to be

indignant, amused, even pleased. . . . She ought to show some

emotion. . . .

She said:

"It was your silencing me with that absurd non-sequitur about the

Pimlico clothing factory. It was an insult to my intelligence."

"You recognised that it was a fallacy!" Tietjens said. He was looking

hard at her. He didn't know what had happened to him. She took a long

look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was as if for a moment

destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him.

"Can't," he argued with destiny, "a man want to kiss a schoolgirl in a

scuffle. . . ." His own voice, a caricature of his own voice, seemed to

come to him: "Gentlemen don't . . ." He exclaimed:

"Don't gentlemen? . . ." and then stopped because he realised that he

had spoken aloud.

She said:

"Oh, _gentlemen_ do!" she said, "use fallacies to glide over tight

places in arguments. And they browbeat schoolgirls with them. It's that,

that underneath, has been exasperating me with you. You regarded me at

that date--three-quarters of a day ago--as a schoolgirl."

Tietjens said:

"I don't now!" He added: "Heaven knows I don't now!"

She said: "No; you don't now!"

He said:

"It didn't need your putting up all that blue stocking erudition to

convince me. . . ."

"Blue stocking!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "There's nothing of the

blue stocking about me. I know Latin because father spoke it with us. It

was your pompous blue socks I was pulling."

Suddenly she began to laugh. Tietjens was feeling sick, physically sick.

She went on laughing. He stuttered:

"What is it?"

"The sun!" she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun; not

a red sun: shining, burnished.

"I don't see . . ." Tietjens said.

"What there is to laugh at?" she asked. "It's the day! . . . The longest

day's begun . . . and to-morrow's as long. . . . The summer solstice,

you know. . . . After to-morrow the days shorten towards winter. But

to-morrow's as long. . . . I'm so glad . . ."

"That we've got through the night? . . ." Tietjens asked.

She looked at him for a long time. "You're not so dreadfully ugly,

really," she said.

Tietjens said:

"What's that church?"

Rising out of the mist on a fantastically green knoll, a quarter of a

mile away, was an unnoticeable place of worship: an oak shingle tower

roof that shone grey like lead: an impossibly bright weathercock,

brighter than the sun. Dark elms all round it, holding wetnesses of

mist.

"Icklesham!" she cried softly. "Oh, we're nearly home. Just above

Mountby . . . That's the Mountby drive. . . ."

Trees existed, black and hoary with the dripping mist. Trees in the

hedgerow and the avenue that led to Mountby: it made a right-angle just

before coming into the road and the road went away at right-angles

across the gate.

"You'll have to pull to the left before you reach the avenue," the girl

said. "Or as like as not the horse will walk right up to the house. The

higgler who had him used to buy Lady Claudine's eggs. . . ."

Tietjens exclaimed barbarously:

"Damn Mountby. I wish we'd never come near it," and he whipped the horse

into a sudden trot. The hoofs sounded suddenly loud. She placed her hand

on his gloved driving hand. Had it been his flesh she wouldn't have done

it.

She said:

"My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever . . . But you're a good man.

And very clever. . . . You will get through. . . ."

Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a

black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them: mathematically straight,

just rising from the mist. He shouted: mad: the blood in his head. His

shout was drowned by the scream of the horse: he had swung it to the

left. The cart turned up: the horse emerged from the mist: head and

shoulders: pawing. A stone sea-horse from the fountain of Versailles!

Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity: the girl looking at it,

leaning slightly forward.

The horse didn't come over backwards: he had loosened the reins. It

wasn't there any more. The damndest thing that _could_ happen! He had

known it would happen. He said:

"We're all right now!" There was a crash and scraping: like twenty

tea-trays: a prolonged sound. They must be scraping along the mud-guard

of the invisible car. He had the pressure of the horse's mouth: the

horse was away: going hell for leather. He increased the pressure. The

girl said:

"I know I'm all right with you."

They were suddenly in bright sunlight: cart: horse: commonplace

hedgerows. They were going uphill: a steep brae. He wasn't certain she

hadn't said: "Dear!" or "My dear!" Was it possible after so short . . .?

But it had been a long night. He was, no doubt, saving her life too. He

increased his pressure on the horse's mouth gently: up to all his twelve

stone: all his strength. The hill told too. Steep, white road between

shaven grass banks!

Stop; damn you! Poor beast . . . The girl fell out of the cart. No!

jumped clear! Out to the animal's head. It threw its head up. Nearly off

her feet: she was holding the bit. . . . She couldn't! Tender

mouth . . . afraid of horses. . . . He said:

"Horse cut!" Her face like a little white blancmange!

"Come quick," she said.

"I must hold a minute," he said, "might go off if I let go to get down.

Badly cut?"

"Blood running down solid! Like an apron," she said.

He was at last at her side. It was true. But not so much like an apron.

More like a red, varnished stocking. He said:

"You've a white petticoat on. Get over the hedge; jump it, and take it

off . . ."

"Tear it into strips?" she asked. "Yes!"

He called to her; she was suspended halfway up the bank:

"Tear one half off first. The rest into strips."

She said: "All right!" She didn't go over the quickset as neatly as he

had expected. No take off. But she was over. . . .

The horse, trembling, was looking down, its nostrils distended, at the

blood pooling from its near foot. The cut was just on the shoulder. He

put his left arm right over the horse's eyes. The horse stood it, almost

with a sigh of relief. . . . A wonderful magnetism with horses. Perhaps

with women too? God knew. He was almost certain she had said "Dear."

She said: "Here." He caught a round ball of whitish, stuff. He undid it.

Thank God: what sense! A long, strong, white band. . . . What the devil

was the hissing. . . . A small, closed car with crumpled mud-guards:

noiseless nearly: gleaming black . . . God curse it: it passed them:

stopped ten yards down . . . the horse rearing back: mad! Clean

mad . . . something like a scarlet and white cockatoo, fluttering out of

the small car door . . . a general. In full tog. White feathers! Ninety

medals! Scarlet coat! Black trousers with red stripe. Spurs too, by God!

Tietjens said:

"God damn you, you bloody swine. Go away!"

The apparition, past the horse's blinkers, said:

"I can, at least, hold the horse for you. I went past to get you out of

Claudine's sight."

"Damn good-natured of you," Tietjens said as rudely as he could. "You'll

have to pay for the horse."

The General exclaimed:

"Damn it all! Why should I? You were driving your beastly camel right

into my drive."

"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said.

"I was on private ground," the General shouted. "Besides I did." An

enraged, scarlet scarecrow, very thin, he was holding the horse's

bridle. Tietjens was extending the half petticoat, with a measuring eye,

before the horse's chest. The General said:

"Look here! I've got to take the escort for the Royal party at St.

Peter-in-Manor, Dover. They're laying the Buff's colours on the altar or

something."

"You never sounded your horn," Tietjens said. "Why didn't you bring your

chauffeur? He's a capable man. . . . You talk very big about the widow

and child. But when it comes to robbing them of fifty quid by

slaughtering their horse . . ."

The General said:

"What the devil were you doing coming into our drive at five in the

morning?"

Tietjens, who had applied the half petticoat to the horse's chest,

exclaimed:

"Pick up that thing and give it me." A thin roll of linen was at his

feet: it had rolled down from the hedge.

"Can I leave the horse?" the General asked.

"Of course you can," Tietjens said. "If I can't quiet a horse better

than you can run a car . . ."

He bound the new linen strips over the petticoat: the horse dropped its

head, smelling his hand. The General, behind Tietjens, stood back on his

heels, grasping his gold-mounted sword. Tietjens went on twisting and

twisting the bandage.

"Look here," the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens'

ear, "what am I to tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl."

"Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter

hounds," Tietjens said; "that's a matutinal job. . . ."

The General's voice had a really pathetic intonation:

"On a Sunday!" he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: "I shall

tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin's church at

Pett."

"If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession,

do," Tietjens said. "But you'll have to pay for the horse."

"I'm damned if I will," the General shouted. "I tell you you were

driving into my drive."

"Then I _shall_," Tietjens said, "and you know the construction you'll

put on _that_."

He straightened his back to look at the horse.

"Go away," he said, "say what you like. Do what you like! But as you go

through Rye send up the horse-ambulance from the vet's. Don't forget

that. I'm going to save this horse. . . ."