V
But no … that must have been about twelve, or earlier or later, on that infernal day. In any case he could not remember any subsequent meal he had had then; but he remembered an almost infinitely long period of intense vexation. Of mortification in so far as he could accuse himself of ever having felt mortified. He could still remember the fierce intaking of his breath through his nostrils that had come when Christopher had announced what had seemed to him then his ruinous intentions. … It had not been till probably four in the morning that Lord Wolstonmark had rung him, Mark, up to ask him to countermand the transport that was to have gone out from Harwich. … At four in the morning, the idiotic brutes.—His substitute had disappeared in the rejoicings in the sy⸺, and Lord Wolstonmark had wanted to know what code they used for Harwich because the transport must at all costs be stopped. There was going to be no advance into Germany. … He had never spoken after that!
His brother was done for; the country finished; he was as good as down and out, as the phrase was, himself. In his deep mortification—yes, mortification!—he had said to Christopher that morning—the 11th November, 1918—that he would never speak to him again. He hadn’t at that moment meant to say that he would never speak to Christopher at all again—merely that he was never going to speak to him about affairs—the affairs of Groby! Christopher might take that immense, far-spreading, grey bothersome house and the tree and the well and the moors and all the John Peel outfit. Or he might leave them. He, Mark, was never going to speak about the matter any more.
He remembered thinking that Christopher might have taken him to mean that he intended to withdraw, for what it was worth, the light of his countenance from the Christopher Tietjens ménage. Nothing had been further from his thoughts. He had a soft corner in his heart for Valentine Wannop. He had had it ever since sitting, feeling like a fool, in the anteroom of the War Office, beside her—gnawing at the handle of his umbrella. But, then, he had recommended her to become Christopher’s mistress: he had, at any rate, begged her to look after his mutton chops and his buttons. So that it wasn’t likely that when, a year or so later, Christopher announced that he really was at last going to take up with the young woman and to chance what came of it—it wasn’t likely that he intended to dissociate himself from the two of them.
The idea had worried him so much that he had written a rough note—the last time that his hand had ever held a pen—to Christopher. He had said that a brother’s backing was not of great use to a woman, but in the special circumstances of the case, he being Tietjens of Groby for what it was worth, and Lady Tietjens—Marie Léonie—being perfectly willing to be seen on all occasions with Valentine and her man, it might be worth something, at any rate with tenantry and suchlike.
Well, he hadn’t gone back on that!
But once the idea of retiring, not only from the Office but the whole world, had come into his head it had grown and grown, on top of his mortification and his weariness. Because he could not conceal from himself that he was weary to death—of the Office, of the nation, of the world and people. … People … he was tired of them, and of the streets, and the grass, and the sky and the moors. He had done his job.—That was before Wolstonmark had telephoned, and he still thought that he had done his job of getting things here and there about the world to some purpose.
A man is in the world to do his duty by his nation and his family. … By his own people first. Well, he had to acknowledge that he had let his own people down pretty badly—beginning with Christopher. Chiefly Christopher. But that reacted on the tenantry.
He had always been tired of the tenantry and Groby. He had been born tired of them. That happens. It happens particularly in old and prominent families. It was odd that Groby and the whole Groby business should so bore him; he supposed he had been born with some kink. All the Tietjenses were born with some sort of kink. It came from the solitude maybe, on the moors, the hard climate, the rough neighbours—possibly even from the fact that Groby Great Tree overshadowed the house. You could not look out of the schoolroom windows at all for its great, ragged trunk, and all the children’s wing was darkened by its branches. Black! … funeral plumes! The Hapsburgs were said to hate their palaces—that was no doubt why so many of them, beginning with
