It had struck him then—whilst Valentine had been holding the letter up for him to read. … Pretty piece, Valentine, nowadays. The country air suited her—that this woman must be an intimate friend of his brother’s wife Sylvia. Otherwise she would have said “Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens,” at least.
Now he was not so certain. This was not the sort of person to be an intimate friend of that bitch’s. Then she was a cat’s-paw. Sylvia’s intimates—amongst women—were all Bibbies and Jimmies and Marjies. If she spoke to any other woman it was to make use of her—as a lady’s maid or a tool.
The lady said:
“It must be agony to you to be reduced to letting your ancestral home. But that does not seem to be a reason for not speaking to me. I meant to ask the Earl’s housekeeper for some eggs for you, but I forgot. I am always forgetting. I am so active. Mr. de Bray Pape says I am the most active woman from here to Santa Fe.”
Mark wondered: why Santa Fe? That was probably because Mr. Pape had olive-tree plantations in that part of California. Valentine had told him over Mrs. Pape’s letter that Mr. Pape was the largest olive-oil merchant in the world. He cornered all the olive-oil and all the straw-coloured flasks in Provence, Lombardy, California, and informed his country that you were not really refined if you used in your salads oil that did not come out of a Pape Quality flask. He showed ladies and gentlemen in evening dress starting back from expensively laid dinner-tables, holding their noses and exclaiming: “Have you no Papes!” Mark wondered where Christopher got his knowledges, for naturally Valentine had the information from him. Probably Christopher had looked at American papers. But why should one look at American papers? Mark himself never had. Wasn’t there the Field? … He was a queer chap, Christopher.
The lady said:
“It isn’t a reason for not speaking to me! It isn’t!”
Her greyish face flushed slowly. Her eyes glittered behind her rimless pince-nez. She exclaimed:
“You are probably too haughtily aristocratic to speak to me, Sir Mark Tietjens. But I have in me the soul of the Maintenon; you are only the fleshly descendant of a line of chartered libertines. That is what Time and the New World have done to redress the balance of the Old. It is we who are keeping up the status of the grands seigneurs of old in your so-called ancestral homes.”
He thought she was probably right. Not a bad sort of woman: she would naturally be irritated at his not answering her. It was proper enough.
He never remembered to have spoken to an American or to have thought about America. Except, of course, during the war. Then he had spoken to Americans in uniform about Transport. He hadn’t liked their collars, but they had known their jobs as far as their jobs went—which had been asking to be provided with a disproportionate amount of transport for too few troops. He had had to wring that transport out of the country.
If he had had his way he wouldn’t have. But he hadn’t had his way. Because the Governing Classes were no good. Transport is the soul of a war: the spirit of an army had used to be in its feet, Napoleon had said. Something like that. But those fellows had starved the army of transport; then flooded it with so much it couldn’t move; then starved it again. Then they had insisted on his finding enormously too much transport for those fellows with queer collars who used it for disposing of typewriters and sewing machines that came over on transports. … It had broken his back. That and solitude. There had not been a fellow he could talk to in the Government towards the end. Not one who knew the difference between the ancestry of Persimmon and the stud form of Sceptre or Isinglass. Now they were paying for it.
The lady was saying to him that her spiritual affinity was probably a surprise to Sir Mark. There was none the less no mistake about it. In every one of the Maintenon’s houses she felt instantly at home; the sight in any Museum of any knickknack or jewel that had belonged to the respectable companion of Louis Quatorze startled her as if with an electric shock. Mr. Quarternine, the celebrated upholder of the metempsychosistic school, had told her that those phenomena proved beyond doubt that the soul of the Maintenon had returned to earth in her body. What, as against that, were the mere fleshly claims of Old Family?
Mark considered that she was probably right. The old families of his country were a pretty inefficient lot that he was thankful to have done with. Racing was mostly carried on by English nobles from Frankfort-on-the-Main. If this lady could be regarded as speaking allegorically she was probably right. And she had had to get a soul from somewhere.
But she talked too much about it. People ought not to be so tremendously fluent. It was tiring; it failed to hold the attention. She was going on.
He lost himself in speculations as to her reason for being there, trampling on his brother’s grass. It would give Gunning and the extra hands no end of an unnecessary job to cut. The lady was talking about Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette had gone sledging on salt in summer. Trampling down hay-grass was really worse. Or no better. If everyone in the country trampled on grass like that it would put up the price of fodder for transport animals to something prohibitive.
Why had she come there? She wanted to take Groby furnished. She might for him. He had never cared about Groby. His father had never had a stud worth talking about. A selling plater or two. He had never cared for hunting or shooting. He remembered standing on Groby lawn watching the shooting parties take to the hills on the Twelfth and
