“And you call yourself a Tory!” Macmaster said.
“The lower classes,” Tietjens continued equably, “such of them as get through the secondary schools, want irregular and very transitory unions. During holidays they go together on personally-conducted tours to Switzerland and such places. Wet afternoons they pass in their tiled bathrooms, slapping each other hilariously on the backs and splashing white enamel paint about.”
“You say you don’t read novels,” Macmaster said, “but I recognise the quotation.”
“I don’t read novels,” Tietjens answered. “I know what’s in ’em. There has been nothing worth reading written in England since the eighteenth century except by a woman. … But it’s natural for your enamel splashers to want to see themselves in a bright and variegated literature. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a healthy, human desire, and now that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied. It’s healthy, I tell you. Infinitely healthier than. …” He paused.
“Than what?” Macmaster asked.
“I’m thinking,” Tietjens said, “thinking how not to be too rude.”
“You want to be rude,” Macmaster said bitterly, “to people who lead the contemplative … the circumspect life.”
“It’s precisely that,” Tietjens said. He quoted:
“ ‘She walks the lady of my delight,
A shepherdess of sheep;
She is so circumspect and right:
She has her thoughts to keep.’ ”
Macmaster said:
“Confound you, Chrissie. You know everything.”
“Well, yes,” Tietjens said musingly. “I think I should want to be rude to her. I don’t say I should be. Certainly I shouldn’t if she were good looking. Or if she were your soul’s affinity. You can rely on that.”
Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens’ large and clumsy form walking beside the lady of his, Macmaster’s, delight, when ultimately she was found—walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn’t like Tietjens. Women didn’t as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated him. … Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said conciliatorily:
“Yes, I think I could rely on that!” He added: “All the same I don’t wonder that …”
He had been about to say:
“I don’t wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral.” For Tietjens’ wife alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his views. … But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on:
“All the same when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will save England, because they’ve the courage to know what they want and to say so.”
Macmaster said loftily:
“You’re extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to know as well as I do that a war is impossible—at any rate with this country in it. Simply because …” He hesitated and then emboldened himself: “We—the circumspect—yes, the circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places.”
“War, my good fellow,” Tietjens said—the train was slowing down preparatorily to running into Ashford—“is inevitable, and with this country plumb center in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows are such damn hypocrites. There’s not a country in the world that trusts us. We’re always, as it were, committing adultery—like your fellow!—with the name of Heaven on our lips.” He was jibing again at the subject of Macmaster’s monograph.
“He never!” Macmaster said in almost a stutter. “He never whined about Heaven.”
“He did,” Tietjens said: “The beastly poem you quoted ends:
“ ‘Better far though hearts may break,
Since we dare not love,
Part till we once more may meet
In a Heaven above.’ ”
And Macmaster, who had been dreading that shot—for he never knew how much or how little of any given poem his friend would have by heart—Macmaster collapsed, as it were, into fussily getting down his dressing-cases and clubs from the rack, a task he usually left to a porter. Tietjens who, however much a train might be running into a station he was bound for, sat like a rock until it was dead-still, said:
“Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there’s you fellows who can’t be trusted. And then there’s the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And there aren’t enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round. It’s like you polygamists with women. There aren’t enough women in the world to go round to satisfy your insatiable appetites. And there aren’t enough men in the world to give each woman one. And most women want several. So you have divorce cases. I suppose you won’t say that because you’re so circumspect and right there shall be no more divorce? Well, war is as inevitable as divorce. …”
Macmaster had his head out of the carriage window and was calling for a porter.
On the platform a number of women in lovely sable cloaks, with purple or red jewel cases, with diaphanous silky scarves flying from motor hoods, were drifting towards the branch train for Rye, under the shepherding of erect, burdened footmen. Two of them nodded to Tietjens.
Macmaster considered that he was perfectly right to be tidy in his dress; you never knew whom you mightn’t meet on a railway journey. This confirmed him as against Tietjens, who preferred to look like a navvy.
A tall, white-haired, white-moustached, red-cheeked fellow limped after Tietjens, who was getting his immense bag out of the guard’s van. He clapped the young man on the shoulder and said:
“Hullo! How’s your mother-in-law? Lady Claude wants to know. She says come up and pick a bone tonight if you’re going to Rye.” He had extraordinarily blue, innocent eyes.
Tietjens said:
“Hullo, General,” and added: “I believe she’s much better. Quite restored. This is Macmaster. I think I shall be going over to bring my wife back in a day or two. They’re both at Lobscheid … a German spa.”
The General said:
“Quite right. It isn’t good for a young
