Foxhunting, the sport of kings with only twenty percent of the danger of war! He, Mark Tietjens, had never cared for hunting; now he would never do any more; he had never cared for pheasant-shooting. He would never do any more. Not couldn’t; wouldn’t from henceforth. … It annoyed him that he had not taken the trouble to ascertain what it was Iago said, before he had taken Iago’s resolution. … From henceforth he never would speak word. … Something to that effect: but you could not get that into a blank verse line.
Perhaps Iago had not been speaking blank verse when he had taken his, Mark Tietjens’, resolution. … Took by the throat the circumciséd dog and smote him. … Good man, Shakespeare! All-round man in a way, too. Probably very like Gunning. Knew Queen Elizabeth’s habits when hunting; also very likely how to hedge, thatch, break up a deer or a hare or a hog, and how to serve a writ and write bad French. Lodged with a French family in Crutched Friars or the Minories. Somewhere.
The ducks were making a great noise on the pond up the hill. Old Gunning in the sunlight lumbered between the stable-wall and the raspberry canes, uphill. The garden was all uphill. He looked across the grass up at the hedge. When they turned him round he looked downhill at the house. Rough, grey stone!
Half-round, he looked across the famous four counties; half round, the other way on, he could see up the grass-slope to the hedge on the roadside. Now he was looking uphill across the tops of the hay-grass, over the raspberry canes at the hedge that Gunning was going to trim. Full of consideration for him, they were, all the lot of them. Forever thinking of developing his possible interests. He didn’t need it. He had interests enough.
Up the pathway that was above and beyond the hedge on a grass-slope went the Elliott children, a lanky girl of ten, with very long, corn-coloured hair, a fat boy of five, unspeakably dirty. The girl too long and thin in the legs and ankles, her hair limp. War-starvation in early years. … Well, that was not his fault. He had given the nation the transport it needed; they should have found the stuff. They hadn’t, so the children had long, thin legs and protruding wrists on pipe-stem arms. All that generation! … No fault of his. He had managed the nation’s transport as it should be managed. His department had. His own Department, made by himself from junior temporary clerk to senior permanent official, from the day of his entrance thirty-five years before to the day of his resolution never more to speak word.
Nor yet stir a finger. He had to be in this world, in this nation. Let them care for him; he was done with them. … He knew the sire and dam of every horse from Eclipse to Perlmutter. That was enough for him. They let him read all that could be read about racing. He had interests enough!
The ducks on the pond up the hill continued to make a great noise, churning boisterously the water with their wings and squawking. If they had been hens there would have been something the matter—a dog chasing them. Ducks did not signify; they went mad, contagiously. Like nations and all the cattle of a county.
Gunning, lumbering past the raspberry canes, took a bud or so and squeezed the pale things between finger and thumb, then examined his thumb. Looking for maggots, no doubt. Pale green leaves the raspberry had; a fragile plant amongst the robuster rosaceae. That was not war-starvation but race. Their commissariat was efficient enough, but they were presumably not gross feeders. Gunning began to brush the hedge, sharp, brushing blows with his baggin’ hook. There was still far too much bramble amongst the quickset; in a week the hedge would be unsightly again.
That was part of their consideration again! They kept the hedge low so that he should be amused by passersby on the path, though they would have preferred to let it grow high so that the passersby should not see into the orchard. … Well, he had seen passersby. More than they knew. … What the hell was Sylvia’s game? And that old ass Edward Campion’s? … Well, he was not going to interfere. There was, however, undoubtedly something up! … Marie Léonie—formerly Charlotte!—knew neither of them by sight, though she had undoubtedly seen them peering over the hedge!
They—it was more of their considerateness—had contrived a shelf on the left corner-post of his shelter. So that birds should amuse him! A hedge-sparrow, noiseless and quaker-grey, ghostlike, was on this shelf. A thin, under-vitalized being that you never saw. It flitted, hiding itself deep in hedgerows. He had always thought of it as an American bird: a voiceless nightingale, thin, long, thin-billed, almost without markings as becomes a bird that seldom sees the sun but lives in the twilight of deep hedges. American because it ought to wear a scarlet letter. He only knew of Americans because of a book he had once read—a woman like a hedge-sparrow, creeping furtive in shadows and getting into trouble with a priest.
This desultory, slim bird, obviously Puritan, inserted its thin bill into the dripping that Gunning had put on the shelf for the tomtits. The riotous tomtit, the bottle-tit, the great-tit, all that family love dripping. The hedge-sparrow obviously did not; the dripping on that warmish June day had become oleaginous; the hedge-sparrow, its bill all greased, mumbled its upper and lower mandible but took no more dripping. It looked at Mark’s eyes. Because these regarded it motionlessly, it uttered a long warning note and flitted, noiseless, into invisibility. All hedge things ignore you whilst you move on and do not regard them. The moment you stay still and fix your eyes on them
