Parade's End (124 page)

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

The General groaned:

‘Rich enough! My God!’

She said:

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

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

‘Sylvia… . Consider the expenses of my constituency… . One would almost say you hated me!’

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

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

The General exclaimed:

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

Sylvia said:

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

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

Lord Fittleworth rode up to the General and said:

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

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

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

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

The General said to Fittleworth:

‘Here, I say, she says I am a regular miser… . You don’t have any complaints, say, from your keepers that I don’t tip enough? That’s the real sign of a miser!’

Fittleworth said to Sylvia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that appeared to get through.

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

And it had come rather naturally to bring in Edith Ethel, for not so long ago Lady Macmaster had actually paid Sylvia a visit. It was about the late Macmaster’s debt to Christopher. That was a point about which Lady Macmaster was and always had seemed to be a little cracky. She had actually visited Sylvia in order to see if Sylvia would not use her influence with Christopher. To get him to remit the debt!

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

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

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

But the letters of this particular Scot had outpassed the language of ordinary Egerianishness. They spoke of Lady Macmaster’s eyes, arms, shoulders, feminine aura… . These letters Lady Macmaster had proposed to entrust to Christopher for sale to Trans-Atlantic collectors. She said they ought to fetch $30,000 at least and with the 10% commission that Christopher might take he might consider himself as amply repaid for the four thousand odd that Macmaster’s estate owed him.

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

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