Parade's End (114 page)

Mrs. de Bray Pape was telling him that it was not undemocratic to have your tenants’ children kneel down when you passed.

A boy’s voice said:

‘Uncle Mark!’ Who the devil could that be? Probably the son of the people he had week-ended with. Bowlby’s maybe; or Teddy Hope’s. He had always liked children and they liked him.

Mrs. de Bray Pape was saying that, yes, it was good for the tenants’ children. The Rev. Dr. Slocombe, the distinguished educationalist, said that these touching old rites should be preserved in the interests of the young. He said that to see the Prince of Wales at the Coronation kneeling before his father and swearing fealty had been most touching. And she had seen pictures of the Maintenon having it done when she walked out.
She
was now the Maintenon, therefore it must be right. But for Marie Antoinette …

The boy’s voice said:

‘I hope you will excuse … I
know
it isn’t the thing …’

He couldn’t see the boy without turning his head on the pillow and he was not going to turn his head. He had a sense of someone a yard or so away at his off-shoulder. The boy at least had not come through the standing hay.

He did not imagine that the son of anyone he had ever week-ended with would ever walk through standing hay. The young generation were a pretty useless lot, but he could hardly believe they would have come to that yet. Their sons might… . He saw visions of tall dining-rooms lit up, with tall pictures, and dresses, and the sunset through high windows over tall grasses in the parks. He was done with that. If any tenants’ children ever knelt to him it would be when he took his ride in his wooden coat to the little church over the moors… . Where his father had shot himself.

That had been a queer go. He remembered getting the news. He had been dining, at Marie Léonie’s… .

The boy’s voice was, precisely, apologising for the fact that that lady had walked through the grass. At the same time Mrs. de Bray Pape was saying things to the discredit of Marie Antoinette whom apparently she disliked. He could not imagine why anyone should dislike Marie Antoinette. Yet very likely she was dislikable. The French who were sensible people had cut her head off, so
they
presumably disliked her… .

He had been dining at Marie Léonie’s, she standing, her hands folded before her, hanging down, watching him eat his mutton chops and boiled potatoes when the porter from his Club had phoned through that there was a wire for him. Marie Léonie had answered the telephone. He had told her to tell the porter to open the telegram and read it to her. That was a not unusual proceeding. Telegrams that came to him at the Club usually announced the results of races that he had not attended. He hated to get up from the dinner-table. She had come back slowly and said still more slowly that she had bad news for him; there had been an accident; his father had been found shot dead.

He had sat still for quite a time; Marie Léonie also had said nothing. He remembered that he had finished his chops, but had not eaten his apple-pie. He had finished his claret.

By that time he had come to the conclusion that his father had probably committed suicide and that he – he, Mark Tietjens – was probably responsible for his father’s having done that. He had got up, then, told Marie Léonie to get herself some mourning and had taken the night train to Groby. There had been no doubt about it when he got there. His father had committed suicide. His father was not the man, unadvisedly, to crawl through a quicken-hedge with his gun at full-cock behind him, after rabbits… . It had been proposed.

There was, then, something soft about the Tietjens stock – for there had been no real and sufficient cause for the suicide. Obviously his father had had griefs. He had never got over the death of his second wife: that was soft for a Yorkshireman. He had lost two sons and an only daughter in the war: other men had done that and got over it. He had heard through him, Mark, that his youngest son – Christopher – was a bad hat. But plenty of men
had
sons who were bad hats… . Something soft then about the stock! Christopher certainly was soft. But that came from the mother. Mark’s step-mother had been from the south of Yorkshire. Soft people down there; a soft woman. Christopher had been her ewe lamb and she had died of grief when Sylvia had run away from him! …

The boy with a voice had got himself into view towards the bottom of the bed, near Mrs. de Bray Pape… . A tallish slip of a boy, with slightly chawbacony cheeks, high-coloured, lightish hair, brown eyes. Upstanding, but softish. Mark seemed to know him, but could not place him. He asked to be forgiven for the intrusion, saying that he knew it was not the thing.

Mrs. de Bray Pape was talking improbably about Marie Antoinette, whom she very decidedly disliked. She said that Marie Antoinette had behaved with great ingratitude to Madame de Maintenon – which must have been difficult. Apparently, according to Mrs. de Bray Pape, when Marie Antoinette had been a neglected little girl about the Court of France Madame de Maintenon had befriended her, lending her frocks, jewels, and perfumes. Later Marie Antoinette had persecuted her benefactor. From that had arisen all the woes of France and the Old World in general.

That appeared to Mark to be to mix history. Surely the Maintenon was a hundred years before the other. But he was not very certain. Mrs. de Bray Pape said, however, that she had those little-known facts from Mr. Reginald Weiler, the celebrated professor of social economy at one of the Western universities.

Mark returned to the consideration of the softness of the Tietjens stock whilst the boy gazed at him with eyes that might have been imploring or that might have been merely moonstruck. Mark could not see what the boy could have to be imploring about, so it was probably just stupidity. His breeches, however, were very nicely cut. Very nicely indeed. Mark recognised the tailor – a man in Conduit Street. If that fellow had the sense to get his riding breeches from that man he could not be quite an ass… .

That Christopher was soft because his mother did not come from the north of Yorkshire or Durham might be true enough – but that was not enough to account for the
race
dying out. His, Mark’s, father had no descendants by his sons. The two brothers who had been killed had been childless. He himself had none. Christopher… . Well, that was debatable!

That he, Mark, had practically killed his own father he was ready to acknowledge. One made mistakes: that was one. If one made mistakes one should try to repair them, otherwise one must, as it were, cut one’s losses. He could not bring his father back to life; he hadn’t, equally, been able to do anything for Christopher… . Not much, certainly. The fellow had refused his brass… . He couldn’t really blame him.

The boy was asking him if he would not speak to them. He said he was Mark’s nephew, Mark Tietjens, junior.

Mark took credit to himself because he did not stir a hair. He had so made up his mind, he found, that Christopher’s son was not his son that he had almost forgotten the cub’s existence. But he ought not to have made up his mind so quickly: he was astonished to find from the automatic working of his brain that he so had. There were too many factors to be considered that he had never bothered really to consider. Christopher had determined that this boy should have Groby: that had been enough for him, Mark. He did not much care who had Groby.

But the actual sight of this lad whom he had never seen before, presented the problem to him as something that needed solution. It came as a challenge. When he came to think of it, it was a challenge to him to make up his mind finally as to the nature of Woman. He imagined that he had never bothered his head about that branch of the animal kingdom. But he found that, lying there, he must have spent quite a disproportionate amount of his time in thinking about the motives of Sylvia.

He had never spoken much with any but men – and then mostly with men of his own class and type. Naturally you addressed a few polite words to your week-end hostess. If you found yourself in the rose-garden of a Sunday before church with a young or old woman who knew anything about horses, you talked about horses or Goodwood or Ascot to her for long enough to show politeness to your hostess’s guests. If she knew nothing about horses you talked about the roses or the irises or the weather last week. But that pretty well exhausted it.

Nevertheless he knew all about women; of that he was confident. That is to say that, when in the course of conversation or gossip he had heard the actions of women narrated or commented on, he had always been able to supply a motive for those actions sufficient to account for them to his satisfaction or to let him predict with accuracy what course the future would take. No doubt twenty years of listening to the almost ceaseless but never disagreeable conversation of Marie Léonie had been a liberal education.

He regarded his association with her with complete satisfaction – as the only subject for complete satisfaction to be found in the contemplation of the Tietjens family. Christopher’s Valentine was a pretty piece enough and had her head screwed confoundedly well on. But Christopher’s association with her had brought such a peck of troubles down on his head that, except for the girl as an individual, it was a pretty poor choice. It was a man’s job to pick a woman who would neither worry him nor be the cause of worries. Well, Christopher had picked two – and look at the results!

He, himself, had been completely unmistaken – from the beginning. He had first seen Marie Léonie on the stage of Covent Garden. He had gone to Covent Garden in attendance on his step-mother, his father’s second wife – the soft woman. A florid, gentle, really saintly person. She had passed around Groby for a saint. An Anglican saint, of course. That was what was the matter with Christopher. It was the soft streak. A Tietjens had no business with saintliness in his composition! It was bound to get him looked on as a blackguard!

But he had attended Covent Garden as a politeness to his step-mother who very seldom found herself in Town. And there, in the second row of the ballet he had seen Marie Léonie – slimmer of course in those days. He had at once made up his mind to take up with her and, an obliging commissionaire having obtained her address for him from the stage-door he had, towards twelve-thirty, walked along the Edgware Road towards her lodgings. He had intended to call on her; he met her, however, in the street. Seeing her there he had liked her walk, her figure, her neat dress.

He had planted himself, his umbrella, his billycock hat and all, squarely in front of her – she had neither flinched
nor
attempted to bolt round him! – and had said that, if at the end of her engagement in London, she cared to be placed ‘
dans ses draps
’, with two hundred and fifty pounds a year and pin money to be deliberated on, she might hang up her cream-jug at an apartment that he would take for her in St. John’s Wood Park which was the place in which in those days most of his friends had establishments. She had preferred the neighbourhood of the Gray’s Inn Road as reminding her more of France.

But Sylvia was quite another pair of shoes… .

That young man was flushing all over his face. The young of the tomtit in the old shoe were getting impatient; they were chirruping in spite of the alarm-cries of the mother on the boughs above the thatch. It was certainly insanitary to have boughs above your thatch, but what did it matter in days so degenerate that even the young of tomtits could not restrain their chirpings in face of their appetites.

That young man – Sylvia’s by-blow – was addressing embarrassed remarks to Mrs. de Bray Pape. He suggested that perhaps his uncle resented the lady’s lectures on history and sociology. He said they had come to talk about the tree. Perhaps that was why his uncle would not speak to them.

The lady said that it was precisely giving lessons in history to the dissolute aristocracy of the Old World that was her mission in life. It was for their good, resent it how they might. As for talking about the tree, the young man had better do it for himself. She now intended to walk around the garden to see how the poor lived.

The boy said that in that case he did not see why Mrs. de Bray Pape had come at all. The lady answered that she had come at the sacred behest of his injured mother. That ought to be answer enough for him. She flitted, disturbedly, from Mark’s view.

The boy, swallowing visibly in his throat, fixed his slightly protruding eyes on his uncle’s face. He was about to speak, but he remained for a long time, silent and goggling. That was a Christopher Tietjens trick – not a Tietjens family trick. To gaze at you a long time before speaking. Christopher had it, no doubt, from his mother – exaggeratedly. She would gaze at you for a long time. Not unpleasantly of course. But Christopher had always
irritated
him, even as a small boy… . It is possible that he, Mark, himself, might not be as he was if Christopher hadn’t gazed at him for a long time, like a stuck pig. On the morning of that beastly day. Armistice Day… . Beastly.

Cramp’s eldest son, a bugler in the second Hampshires, went down the path, his bugle shining behind his khaki figure. Now they would make a beastly row with that instrument. On Armistice Day they had played the Last Post on the steps of the church under Marie Léonie’s windows… . The Last Post! … The Last of England! He remembered thinking that. He had not by then had the full terms of that surrender, but he had had a dose enough of Christopher’s stuck-piggedness! … A full dose! He didn’t say he didn’t deserve it. If you make mistakes you must take what you get for it. You shouldn’t make mistakes.

The boy at the foot of the bed was making agonised motions with his throat: swallowing at his Adam’s apple.

He said:

‘I can understand, uncle, that you hate to see us. All the same it seems a little severe to refuse to speak to us!’

Mark wondered a little at the breakdown in communications that there must have been. Sylvia had been spying round that property and round and round and round again. She had had renewed interviews with Mrs. Cramp. It had struck him as curious taste to like to reveal to dependants – to reveal and to dwell upon, the fact that you were distasteful to your husband. If his woman had left him he would have preferred to hold his tongue about it. He certainly would not have gone caterwauling about it to the carpenter of the man she had taken up with. Still, there was no accounting for tastes. Sylvia had, no doubt, been so full of her own griefs that she, very likely, had not listened to what Mrs. Cramp had said about his, Mark’s, condition. During the one or two interviews he had had years ago with that bitch she had been like that. She had sailed in with her grievances against Christopher with such vigour that she had gone away with no ideas at all as to the conditions on which she was to be allowed to inhabit Groby. Obviously it taxed her mind to invent what she invented. You could not invent that sort of sex-cruelty stuff without having your mind a little affected. She could not, for instance, have invented the tale that he, Mark,
was
suffering for the sins of his youth without its taking it out of her. That is the ultimate retribution of Providence on those who invent gossip frequently. They go a little dotty… . The fellow – he could not call his name to mind, half Scotch, half Jew – who had told him the worst tales against Christopher, had gone a little dotty. He had grown a beard and wore a top-hat at inappropriate functions. Well, in effect, Christopher was a saint and Provvy invents retributions of an ingenious kind against those who libel saints.