The ducks were making a great noise on the pond up the hill. Old Gunning in the sunlight lumbered between the stable-wall and the raspberry canes, uphill. The garden was all uphill. Mark looked across the grass up at the hedge. When they turned his bed round he looked down on the house. Rough, grey stone.
Half round, he looked across the famous four counties; half round, the other way on, he could see up a steep grass-bank to the hedge on the main roadside. Now he was looking uphill across the tops of the hay-grass, over the raspberry canes at the hedge that Gunning was going to trim…. Full of consideration for him, they were, all the lot of them. For ever thinking of finding possible interests for him. He did not need it. He had interests enough.
Up the pathway that was above, beyond the hedge, on a grass slope, went the Elliot children — a lanky girl of ten with very long, corn-coloured hair; a fat boy of five in a sailor’s suit — unspeakably dirty. The girl too long in the legs and ankles, her hair limp… War-starvation in early years! Well, that was not his, Mark Tietjens’, fault. He had given the nation the Transport it needed: the nation should have found the food. They had not, so the children had long thin legs and wristbones that protruded on pipe-stems. All that generation!… No fault of his! He had managed the Transport as it should be managed. His department had. His own department, built up by himself from junior temporary clerk to senior permanent official; he had built it up, from the day of his entrance thirty years ago, to the day of his resolution never more to speak word.
Nor yet stir a finger! He had to be in this world, in this nation. Let them care for him, for he was done with them…. He knew the sire and dam of every horse from Eclipse to Perlmutter. That was enough for him. They helped him to read all that could be read about racing. He had interests enough!
The ducks on the pond continued to make a great noise, churning the water, up the hill, boisterously with their wings, and squawking. If they had been hens there would have been something the matter – a dog chasing them. Ducks did not signify. They went mad, contagiously. Like nations or all the cattle of a county.
Gunning, lumbering past the raspberry canes, took a bud or so and squeezed the pale things between finger and thumb. Looking for traces of maggots. Pale green leaves the raspberry had: a fragile plant among the robuster rosace?. That was not starvation, but race. Their commissariat was efficient enough, but presumably they were not gross feeders. Gunning began to trim the hedge with sharp, brushing blows of his bagging hook. There was still far too much bramble among the quickset: in a week the hedge would be unsightly again.
They kept the hedge low so that he should be amused by passengers on the path, though they would really have preferred to let it grow high so that passers-by should not see into the orchard…. Well, he had seen passers- by. More than they thought for!… What in hell was Sylvia’s game? And that old ass Edward Campion’s?… Well, he, Mark, was not going to interfere. There was undoubtedly something up…. Marie Leonie – formerly Charlotte — knew neither of that precious couple by sight: she had certainly seen them peer down over the hedge….
They — it was more of their considerateness — had contrived a broad shelf on the left corner post of his shelter. So that birds should amuse him. He had always sought after larger quarry!… A hedge-sparrow, noiseless and quaker-grey, was ghost-like on his shelf. It flitted hiding itself deep in hedgerows. He thought of it as an American bird — or perhaps that was because there were so many Americans about there, though he never saw them…. A voiceless nightingale, slim, long, thin-billed, almost without markings as becomes a bird that seldom sees the sun, but lives in the deep twilight of deep hedges…. American because it ought to wear a scarlet letter. Nearly all he knew of Americans came from a book he had once read — about a woman like a hedge-sparrow, creeping furtive in hedgerows and getting into trouble with a priest…. But no doubt there were other types.
This desultory, slim, obviously Puritan bird, inserted its thin bill into the dripping that Gunning had put on the shelf for the tomtits. The riotous tomtit, the great tit, the bottle-tit… all that family love dripping. The hedge- sparrow obviously did not; the dripping on that warmish June day had become oleaginous. The hedge-sparrow, its bill all greased, mumbled its upper mandible with its lower but took no more dripping. It looked at Mark’s eyes. Because these regarded it motionlessly it uttered a long warning note and flitted, noiseless, into invisibility. All hedge things ignore you whilst you move on and do not regard them. The moment you stay still and fix your eyes on them they warn the rest of the hedge and flit off. This hedge-sparrow no doubt had its young within ear-shot. Or the warning might have been just co-operative.
Marie Leonie nee Riotor, was coming up the steps and then the path. He knew, that by the sound of her breathing. She stood beside him, shapeless in her long pinafore of printed cotton, holding a plate of soup and saying:
“Mon pauvre homme! Mon pauvre homme! Ce qu’ils ont fait de toil”
She began a breathless discourse in French. She was of the large, blond, Norman type; in the middle forties, her extremely fair hair very voluminous and noticeable. She had lived with Mark Tietjens for twenty years now, but she had always refused to speak a word of English, having an invincible scorn for both language and people of her adopted country.
Her discourse poured on. She had set the little tray with the plate of reddish-yellowish soup on a flat shelf of wood that turned out on a screw from underneath the bed; in the soup was a shining clinical thermometer that she moved and regarded from time to time, beside the plate a glass syringe, graduated. She said that
She had always in the Grey’s Inn Road had Paris turnips from Jacopo’s in Old Compton Street. There was no reason why you should not grow
Between sentences she ejaculated from time to time:
“My poor man! What they have made of you?”
Her volubility flowed over Mark like a rush of water over a grating, only a phrase or so now and then coming to his attention. It was not unpleasant; he liked his woman. She had a cat that she made abstain from meat on a Friday. In the Gray’s Inn Road that had been easier, in a large room decorated with innumerable miniatures and silhouettes representing members of the Riotor family and its branches. Mme Riotor
The noise of her voice, which was deep-chested and not unpleasing, went on. Mark regarded her with the ironic indulgence that you accord to a child, but indeed, when he had been still in harness it had rested him always to come home as he had done every Thursday and Monday and not infrequently on a Wednesday when there had been no racing. It had rested him to come home from a world of incompetent imbecile’s and to hear this brain comment on that world. She had views on virtue, pride, downfalls, human careers, the habits of cats, fish, the clergy, diplomats, soldiers, women of easy virtue, Saint Eustachius, President Grevy, the purveyors of comestibles, custom-house officers, pharmacists, Lyons silk weavers, the keepers of boarding-houses, garotters, chocolate- manufacturers, sculptors other than M. Casimir-Bar, the lovers of married women, housemaids…. Her mind in fact was like a cupboard, stuffed, packed with the most incongruous materials, tools, vessels, and debris. Once the door was opened you never knew what would tumble out or be followed by what. That was restful to Mark as foreign travel might have been — only he had never been abroad except when his father, before his accession to Groby, had lived in Dijon for his chidren’s education. That was how he knew French.
Her conversation had another quality that continually amused him: she always ended it with the topic with
