Gunning, his bloodshot eyes fixed on her, moved his lips vindictively. She had, in face of those ghostly manifestations across hills and sky, a moment of real panic. Such as she had felt when they had been shelling near the hotel in France when she had sat amidst palms with Christopher under a glass roof…. A mad desire to run — or as if your soul ran about inside you like a parcel of rats in a pit awaiting an unseen terrier.
What was she to do? What the devil was she to do?… She felt an itch…. She felt the very devil of a desire to confront at least Mark Tietjens… even if it should kill the fellow. Surely God could not be unfair! What was she given beauty — the dangerous remains of beauty! — for if not to impress it on the unimpressible! She ought to be given the chance at least once more to try her irresistible ram against that immovable post…. She was aware….
Gunning was saying something to the effect that if she caused Mrs. Valentine to have a miscarriage or an idiot child ‘Is Lordship would flay all the flesh off ’er bones with ‘is own ridin’ crop. ’Is Lordship ’ad fair done it to ’im. Gunning ’isself, when ’e lef ’is missis then eight and a ’arf munce gone to live with old Mother Cressy! The child was bore dead.
The words conveyed little to her…. She was aware…. She was aware…. What was she aware of? She was aware that God — or perhaps it was Father Consett that so arranged it, more diplomatically, the dear! — desired that she should apply to Rome for the dissolution of her marriage with Christopher and that she should then apply to the civil courts. She thought that probably God desired that Christopher should be freed as early as possible, Father Consett suggesting to Him the less stringent course.
A fantastic object was descending at a fly-crawl the hill road that went almost vertically up to the farm amongst the beeches. She did not care!
Gunning was saying that that wer why ‘Is Lordship giv’im th’ sack. Took away the cottage an ten bob a week that ’Is Lordship allowed to all as had been in his service thritty yeer.
She said: “What! What’s that?” Then it came back to her that Gunning had suggested that she might give Valentine a miscarriage….
Her breath made in her throat a little clittering sound like the trituration of barley ears; her gloved hands, reins and all were over her eyes, smelling of morocco leather; she felt as if within her a shelf dropped away — as the platform drops away from beneath the feet of a convict they are hanging. She said: “Could…” Then her mind stopped, the clittering sound in her throat continuing. Louder. Louder.
Descending the hill at the fly’s pace was the impossible. A black basket-work pony phaeton, the pony — you always look at the horse first — four hands too big; as round as a barrel, as shining as a mahogany dining-table, pacing for all the world like a haute école circus steed and in a panic bumping its behind into that black vehicle. It eased her to see… But,… fantastically horrible, behind that grotesque coward of a horse, holding the reins, was a black thing, like a funeral charger; beside it a top hat, a white face, a buff waistcoat, black coat, a thin, Jewish beard. In front of that a bare, blond head, the hair rather long — on the front seat, back to the view. Trust Edith Ethel to be accompanied by a boy-poet cicisbeo! Training Mr. Ruggles for his future condition as consort!
She exclaimed to Gunning:
“By God, if you do not let me pass I will cut your face in half…”
It was justified! This in effect was too much — on the part of Gunning and God and Father Consett. All of a heap they had given her perplexity, immobility and a dreadful thought that was gripping her vitals…. Dreadful! Dreadful!
She must get down to the cottage. She must get down to the cottage.
She said to Gunning:
“You damn fool…. You damn fool…. I want to save…”
He moved up — interminably — sweating and hairy from the gate on which he had been leaning, so that he no longer barred her way. She trotted smartly past him and cantered beautifully down the slope. It came to her from the bloodshot glance that his eyes gave her that he would like to outrage her with ferocity. She felt pleasure.
She came off her horse like a circus performer to the sound of “Mrs. Tietjens! Mrs. Tietjens,” in several voices from above. She let the chestnut go to hell.
It seemed queer that it did not seem queer. A shed of log-parings set upright, the gate banging behind her. Apple branches spreading down; grass up to the middle of her grey breeches. It was Tom Tiddler’s Grounds; it was near a place called Gemmenich on the Fourth of August 1914… But just quietude: quietude.
Mark regarded her boy’s outline with beady, inquisitive eyes. She bent her switch into a half loop before her. She heard herself say:
“Where are all these fools? I want to get them out of here!”
He continued to regard her, beadily, his head like mahogany against the pillows. An apple bough caught in her hair.
She said:
“Damn it all, I had Groby Great Tree torn down: not that tin Maintenon. But, as God is my Saviour I would not tear another woman’s child in the womb!”
He said:
“You poor bitch! You poor bitch! The riding has done it!”
She swore to herself afterwards that she had heard him say that, for at the time she had had too many emotions to regard his speaking as unusual. She took indeed a prolonged turn in the woods before she felt equal to facing the others. Tietjens’s had its woods onto which the garden gave directly.
Her main bitterness was that they had this peace. She was cutting the painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning. It was the fact that her friend Bobbie’s husband, Sir Gabriel Blantyre — formerly Bosenheir — was cutting down expenses like a lunatic. In her world there was the writing on the wall. Here they could afford to call her a poor bitch — and be in the right of it, as like as not!
III
VALENTINE was awakened by the shrill overtones of the voice of the little maid coming in through the open window. She had fallen asleep over the words “Saepe te in somnis vidi!” to a vision of white limbs in the purple Adriatic. Eventually the child’s voice said:
“We only sez ‘mem’ to friends of the family!” shrilly and self-assertively.
She was at the casement, dizzy and sickish with the change of position and the haste — and violently impatient of her condition. Of humanity she perceived only the top of a three-cornered grey hat and a grey panniered skirt in downward perspective. The sloping tiles of the potting-shed hid the little maid; aligned small lettuce plants like rosettes on the dark earth ran from under the window, closed by a wall of sticked peas, behind them the woods, slender grey ash trunks going to a great height. They were needed for shelter. They would have to change their bedroom; they could not have a night nursery that faced the north. The spring onions needed pricking out; she had meant to put the garden pellitory into the rocks in the half-circle, but the operation had daunted her. Pushing the little roots into crevices with her fingers; removing stones, trowelling in artificial manure, stooping, dirtying her fingers would make her retch….