He mumbled that mother was splendid, but he did not think she ought to have sent him there. Naturally she had her wrongs. For himself he was a Marxist-Communist. All Cambridge was. He therefore of course approved of his father’s living with whom he wished. But there were ways of doing things. Because you were advanced you did not have to treat women with discourtesy. The reverse, rather. He was painfully agitated by the time he overtook the tired lady at the corner of the next zigzag.
She wanted him not to misunderstand her. No discredit attached in her eyes to the pursuit of selling old furniture. Far from it. Mr. Lemuel of Madison Avenue might be called a dealer in old furniture. It was, of course, Oriental, which made a difference. But Mr. Lemuel was a most cultivated man. His country house at Croogers in the State of New York was kept up in a style that would have done credit to the grands seigneurs of pre-Revolutionary France. But from that to this … what a downfall!
The house—the cottage—was by now nearly below her feet, the roof extremely high, the windows sunk very deep in grey stone and very small. There was a paved semicircular court before the door, the space having been cut out of the orchard bank and walled with stones. It was extravagantly green, sunk in greenery, and the grass that came nearly to Mrs. Pape’s middle was filled with hiding profusions of flowers turning to seed. The four counties swept away from under her, hedges like string going away, enclosing fields, to the hills on the very distant horizon. The country near at hand wooded. The boy beside her took a deep breath as he always did when he saw a great view. On the moors above Groby, for instance. Purple they were.
“It isn’t fit for human habitation!” the lady exclaimed with the triumphant intonation of one who sees a great truth confirmed. “The homes of the poor in these old countries beggar even pity. Do you suppose they so much as have a bath?”
“I should think my father and uncle were personally clean!” the boy said. He mumbled that this was supposed to be rather a show place. He could trust his father indeed to find rather a show place to live in. Look at the rock plants in the sunk garden! He exclaimed: “Look here! Let’s go back!”
Mrs. Pape’s perturbation gave way to obstinacy. She exclaimed:
“Never!” She had a mission from the poor boy’s injured mother. She would never look Sylvia Tietjens in the face if she flinched. Sanitation went before anything. She hoped to leave the world a better place before she passed over. She had Authority conferred on her. Metem-psychosistically. She believed that the soul of Madame de Maintenon, the companion of Lewis the Fourteenth, had passed into her. How many convents had not the Maintenon set up and how rigidly had she not looked after the virtue and the sanitation of the inhabitants? That was what she, Mrs. Millicent de Bray Pape, looked to. She had in the South of France—the Riviera—a palace, erected by Mr. Behrens, the celebrated architect—after the palace of the Maintenon at Sans Souci. But sanitated! She asked the young man to believe her. The boudoir appeared to be only a panelled boudoir; very large because of the useless vanity of le Raw Solale. Madame de Maintenon would have been content without such vanity. … But only touch a spring in the panels and every sort of bathing arrangement presented itself to you hidden in the wall. Sunken baths; baths above ground; douches with seawater extra-iodized; lateral douches with and without bath-salts dissolved in the water. That was what she called making the world a little better. Impossible not to be healthy with all that …
The boy mumbled that he was not in principle against the old tree’s coming down. He was, indeed, in principle against his uncle’s and his father’s adoption of the peasant life. This was an industrial age. The peasant had always spoilt every advance in the ideas of the world. All the men at Cambridge were agreed as to that. He exclaimed:
“Hi! You can’t do that. … Not go through standing hay!”
Every fibre of his country boy landowner’s soul was outraged as he saw the long trail of satiny grey that followed Mrs. de Bray Pape’s long skirts. How were his father’s men to cut hay that had been trampled like that? But, unable to bear any longer the suspense of the spectacular advance towards Mark Tietjens along those orange zigzags, Mrs. de Bray Pape was running straight down the bank towards the unwalled, thatched hut. She could see it through the tops of the apple-tree.
The boy, desperately nervous, continued to descend the zigzag paths that would take him into the very purlieus of his father’s house—onto the paved court where there were rock plants between the interstices. His mother ought not to have forced him to accompany Mrs. de Bray Pape. His mother was splendid. Divinely beautiful: athletic as Atalanta or Betty Nuthall, in spite of her sufferings. But she ought not to have sent Mrs. de Bray Pape. It was meant as a sort of revenge. General Campion had not approved. He could see that, though he had said: “My boy, you ought always to obey your dear mother! She has suffered so much. It is your duty to make it up to her by fulfilling her slightest whim. An Englishman always does his duty to his mother!”
Of course
