Nevertheless, he knew all about women. Of that he was confident. That is to say, that when in the course of conversation or gossip he had heard the actions of women narrated or commented on, he had always been able to supply a motive for those actions sufficient to account for them to his satisfaction, or to let him predict with accuracy what course the future would take. No doubt, twenty years of listening to the almost ceaseless but never disagreeable conversation of Marie Léonie had been a liberal education.
He regarded his association with her with complete satisfaction—as the only subject for complete satisfaction to be found in the contemplation of the Tietjens family. Christopher’s Valentine was a pretty piece enough and had her head screwed confoundedly well on. But Christopher’s association with her had brought such a peck of troubles down on his head that, except for the girl as an individual, it was a pretty poor choice. It was a man’s job to pick a woman who would neither worry him nor be the cause of worries. Well, Christopher had picked two—and look at the results!
He himself had been completely unmistaken—from the first minute. He had first seen Marie Léonie on the stage at Covent Garden. He had gone to Covent Garden in attendance on his stepmother, his father’s second wife—the soft woman. A florid, gentle, really saintly person. She had passed around Groby for a saint. An Anglican saint, of course. That was what was the matter with Christopher. It was the soft streak. A Tietjens had no business with saintliness in his composition! It was bound to get him looked on as a blackguard!
But he had attended Covent Garden as a politeness to his stepmother, who very seldom found herself in Town. And there, in the second row of the ballet, he had seen Marie Léonie—slimmer, of course, in those days. He had at once made up his mind to take up with her, and, an obliging commissionaire having obtained her address for him from the stage-door, he had, towards twelve-thirty next day, walked along the Edgware Road towards her lodgings. He had intended to call on her; he met her, however, in the street. Seeing her there, he had liked her walk, her figure, her neat dress.
He had planted himself, his umbrella, his billycock hat and all, squarely in front of her—she had neither flinched nor attempted to bolt round him—and had said that, if at the end of her engagement in London, she cared to be placed “dans ses draps,” with two hundred and fifty pounds a year and pin money to be deliberated on, she might hang up her cream-jug at an apartment that he would take for her in St. John’s Wood Park, which was the place in which, in those days, most of his friends had establishments. She had preferred the neighbourhood of the Gray’s Inn Road, as reminding her more of France.
But Sylvia was quite another pair of shoes. …
That young man was flushing all over his face. The young of the tomtit in the old shoe were getting impatient; they were chirruping in spite of the alarm-cries of the mother on the boughs above the thatch. It was certainly insanitary to have boughs above your thatch, but what did it matter in days so degenerate that even the young of tomtits could not restrain their chirpings in face of their appetites.
That young man—Sylvia’s by-blow—was addressing embarrassed remarks to Mrs. de Bray Pape. He suggested that perhaps his uncle resented the lady’s lectures on history and sociology. He said they had come to talk about the tree. Perhaps that was why his uncle would not speak to them.
The lady said that it was precisely giving lessons in history to the dissolute aristocracy of the Old World that was her mission in life. It was for their good, resent it how they might. As for talking about the tree, the young man had better do it for himself. She now intended to walk around the garden to see how the poor lived.
The boy said that in that case he did not see why Mrs. de Bray Pape had come at all. The lady answered that she had come at the sacred behest of his injured mother. That ought to be answer enough for him. She flitted, disturbedly from Mark’s view.
The boy, swallowing visibly in his throat, fixed his slightly protruding eyes on his uncle’s face. He was about to speak, but he remained for a long time silent and goggling. That was a Christopher Tietjens trick—not a Tietjens family trick. To gaze at you a long time before speaking. Christopher had it, no doubt, from his mother—exaggeratedly. She would gaze at you for a long time. Not unpleasantly, of course. But Christopher had always irritated him, even as a small boy. … It is possible that he himself might not be as he was if he hadn’t gazed at him for a long time, like a stuck pig. On the morning of that beastly day. Armistice Day. … Beastly.
Cramp’s eldest son, a bugler in the second Hampshires, went down the path, his bugle shining behind his khaki figure. Now they would make a beastly row with that instrument. On Armistice Day they had played the Last Post on the steps of the church under Marie Léonie’s windows. … The Last Post! … The Last of England! He remembered thinking that. He had not by then had the full terms of that surrender, but he had had a dose enough of Christopher’s stuck-piggedness! … A full dose! He didn’t say he didn’t deserve it. If you make mistakes you must take what you get for it. You shouldn’t make mistakes.
The boy at the foot of the bed was making agonized motions with his throat: swallowing his Adam’s apple.
He said:
“I can understand, uncle, that you hate to see us. All the same, it seems a little severe to refuse to speak to
