“Mrs. de Bray Pape,” the boy was stammering, “is extremely keen on the tree’s being… I agree in principle…. My mother wished you to see that — oh, in modern days — a house is practically unlet-table if… So she got Mrs. de Bray Pape…. She hasn’t had the courage though she swore she had….”
He continued to stammer. Then he started and stopped, crimson. A woman’s voice had called:
“Mr. Tictjens…. Mr. Mark… Hi… hup!”
A small woman, all in white, white breeches, white coat, white wide-awake, was slipping down from a tall bay with a white star on the forehead — a bay with large nostrils and an intelligent head. She waved her hand obviously at the boy and then caressed the horse’s nostrils. Obviously at the boy… for it was impossible that Mark, Senior, would know a woman who could make a sound like “Hi, hup!” to attract his attention.
Lord Fittleworth, in a square, hard hat, sat on an immense, coffin-headed dapple-grey. He had bristling, close-cropped moustaches and sat like a limpet. He waved his crop in the direction of Mark — they were such old friends — and went on talking to Gunning, who was at his stirrup. The coffin-headed beast started forward and reared a foot or so; a wild, brazen, yelping sound had disturbed it. The boy was more and more scarlet and as emotion grew on him, more and more like Christopher on that beastly day…. Christopher with a piece of furniture under his arm, in Marie Léonie’s room, his eyes goggling out at the foot of the bed.
Mark swore painfully to himself. He hated to be reminded of that day. Now this lad and that infernal bugle that the younger children of Cramp had got hold of from their bugler-brother, had put it back damnably in his mind. It went on. At intervals. One child had another try, then another. Obviously then Cramp, the eldest, took it. It blared out…. Ta…. Ta…. Ta…. Ta, ti… ta-ta-ti…. Ta…. The Last Post. The B—y infernal Last Post…. Well, Christopher, as that day Mark had predicted, had got himself, with his raw sensibilities, into a pretty bloody infernal mess while some drunken ass had played the Last Post under the window…. Mark meant that whilst that farewell was being played he had had that foresight. And he hated the bugle for reminding him of it. He hated it more than he had imagined. He could not have imagined himself using profanity even to himself. He must have been profoundly moved. Deucedly and profoundly moved at that beastly noise. It had come over the day like a disaster. He saw every detail of Marie Léonie’s room as it was on that day. There was, on the marble mantel-shelf under an immense engraving of the Sistine Madonna a feeding-cup over a night-light in which Marie Léonie had been keeping some sort of pap warm for him. Probably the last food to which he had ever helped himself….
V
But no… that must have been about twelve or earlier or later on that infernal day. In any case he could not remember any subsequent meal he had had then; but he remembered an almost infinitely long period of intense vexation. Of mortification insofar as he could accuse himself of ever having felt mortified. He could still remember the fierce intaking of his breath through his nostrils that had come when Christopher had announced what had seemed to him then his ruinous intentions…. It had not been till probably four in the morning that Lord Wolstonemark had rung him up to ask him to countermand the transport that was to have gone out from Harwich…. At four in the morning, the idiotic brutes. His substitute had disappeared in the rejoicings in the sy and Lord Wolstonemark had wanted to know what code they used for Harwich because transport must at all costs be stopped. There was going to be no advance into Germany…. He had never spoken after that!
His brother was done for; the country finished; he was as good as down and out, as the phrase was, himself. Already in his deep mortification — yes — mortification! — he had said to Christopher that morning — the 11th November, 1918 — that he would never speak to him again. He hadn’t at that moment meant to say that he would never speak to Christopher at all again — merely that he was never going to speak to him about the affairs of Groby! Christopher might take that immense, far-spreading, grey, bothersome house and the tree and the well and the moors and all the John Peel outfit. Or he might leave them. He, Mark, was never going to speak about the matter any more.
He remembered thinking that Christopher might have taken him to mean that he intended to withdraw, for what it was worth, the light of his countenance from the Christopher Tietjens ménage. Nothing had been further from his thoughts. He had a soft corner in his heart for Valentine Wannop. He had had it ever since sitting, feeling like a fool, in the ante-room of the War Office, beside her — gnawing at the handle of his umbrella. But, then, he had recommended her to become Christopher’s mistress; he had at any rate begged her to look after his mutton chops and his buttons. So that it wasn’t likely that when, a year or so later, Christopher announced that he really was at last going to take up with the young woman and to chance what came of it — it wasn’t likely that he intended to dissociate himself from the two of them.
The idea had worried him so much that he had written a rough note — the last time that his hand had ever held a pen — to Christopher. He had said that a brother’s backing was not of great use to a woman, but in the special circumstances of the case, he being Tietjens of Groby for what it was worth, and Lady Tietjens — Marie Léonie — being perfectly willing to be seen on all occasions with Valentine and her man it might be worth something, at any rate with tenantry and such like.
Well, he hadn’t gone back on that!
But once the idea had come into his head it had grown and grown, on top of his mortification and his weariness. Because he could not conceal from himself that he was weary to death — of the office, of the nation, of the world and people…. People… he was tired of them! And of the streets, and the grass, and the sky and the moors! He had done his job. That was before Wolstonemark had telephoned and he still thought that he had done his job of getting things here and there about the world to some purpose.
A man is in the world to do his duty by his nation and his family…. By his own people first. Well, he had to acknowledge that he had let his own people down pretty badly — beginning with Christopher. Chiefly Christopher; but that reacted on the tenantry.
He had always been tired of the tenantry and Groby. He had been born tired of them. That happens. It happens particularly in old and prominent families. It was odd that Groby and the whole Groby business should so tire him; he supposed he had been born with some kink. All the Tietjenses were born with some sort of kink. It came from the solitude maybe, on the moors, the hard climate, the rough neighbours — possibly even from the fact that Groby Great Tree overshadowed the house. You could not look out of the schoolroom windows at all for its great, ragged trunk and all the children’s wing was darkened by its branches. Black… funeral plumes. The Hapsburgs were said to hate their palaces — that was no doubt why so many of them, beginning with Juan Ort, had come muckers. At any rate they had chucked the royalty business.
And at a very early age he had decided that he would chuck the country-gentleman business. He didn’t see that he was the one to bother with those confounded, hardheaded beggars or with those confounded wind-swept moors and valley bottoms. One owed the blighters a duty, but one did not have to live among them or see that they aired their bedrooms. It had been mostly swank that, always; and since the Corn Laws it had been almost entirely swank. Still, it is obvious that a landlord owes something to the estate from which he and his fathers have drawn their income for generations and generations.