For, obviously, the best thing Christopher could have done for his brother’s health would have been to have accepted the stewardship of Groby—but his brother could die and he himself could die before he would do that. It was nevertheless a pretty cruel affair. … Over Boswell the two brothers had got as thick as thieves with an astonishing intimacy—and with an astonishing similarity. If one of them made a comment on Bennett Langton it would be precisely the comment that the other had on his lips. It was what asses call telepathy nowadays … a warm, comfortable feeling, late at night with the light shaded from your eyes, the voice going on through the deep silence of London that awaited the crashes of falling bombs. … Well, Mark accepted Christopher’s dictum that he himself was an eighteenth-century bloke and was only forestalled when he had wanted to tell Christopher that he was more old-fashioned still—a sort of seventeenth-century Anglican who ought to be strolling in a grove with the Greek Testament beneath the arm and all. … And, hang it all, there was room for him! The land had not changed. … There were still the deep beech-woods making groves beside the ploughlands and the rooks rising lazily as the plough came towards them. The land had not changed. … Well, the breed had not changed. … There was Christopher. … Only, the times … they had changed. … The rooks and the ploughlands and the beeches and Christopher were there still. … But not the frame of mind in the day. … The sun might rise and go above the plough till it set behind the hedge, and the ploughman went off to the inn settle; and the moon could do the same. But they would—neither sun nor moon—look on the spit of Christopher in all their journeys. Never. They might as well expect to see a mastodon. … And he, Mark, himself was an old-fashioned buffer. That was all right. Judas Iscariot himself was an old-fashioned ass, once upon a time!
But it was almost on the edge of not playing the game for Christopher to let that intimacy establish itself and all the time to cherish that unforgivingness. … Not quite not playing the game: but almost. For hadn’t Mark held out feelers? Hadn’t he made concessions? Hadn’t his very marrying of Marie Léonie been by way of a concession to Christopher? Didn’t Christopher, if the truth was to be known, want Mark to marry Marie Léonie because he, Christopher, wanted to marry Valentine Wannop and hadn’t a hope? If the truth were known. … Well, he had made that concession to Christopher, who was a sort of a parson anyhow. But ought Christopher to have exacted—to have telepathically willed—that concession if he wasn’t himself going to concede something? Ought he to have forced him, Mark, to accept his mooning womanly services when the poor devil was already worn out with his military duties of seeing old tins cleaned out day after day, if he meant to become a beastly old-furniture dealer and refuse Groby? For, upon his soul, till the morning of Armistice Day, Mark had accepted Christopher’s story of Mr. Schatzweiler as merely a good-humoured, grim threat. … A sort of a feint at a threat. …
Well, probably it was playing the game all right: if Christopher thought it was jonnock, jonnock it was!
But … a damn beastly shock. … Why, he had been practically convalescent, he had been out of bed in a dressing-gown and had told Lord Wolstonmark that he could pile in as many papers as he liked from the Office. … And then Christopher, without a hat and in a beastly civilian suit of light mulberry-coloured Harris tweed, had burst into the room with a beastly piece of old furniture under his arm. … A sort of inlaid toy writing-desk. A model. For cabinetmakers! A fine thing to bring into a convalescent bedroom, to a man quietly reading Form T.O. LOUWR 1962 E 17 of the 10/11/18, in front of a clean fire. … And chalk-white about the gills the fellow was—with an awful lot of silver in his hair. … What age was he? Forty? Forty-three? God knew!
Forty. … He wanted to borrow forty quid on that beastly piece of furniture. To have an Armistice Day Beanfeast and set up house with his gal! Forty quid! My God! Mark felt his bowels turning over within him with disgust. … The gal—that fellow’s half-sister as like as not—was waiting in an empty house for him to go and seduce her. In order to celebrate the salvation of the world by seven million deaths!
If you seduce a girl you don’t do it on forty pounds: you accept Groby and three, seven, ten thousand a year. So he had told Christopher.
And then he had got it. Full in the face. Christopher was not going to accept a penny from him. Never. Not ever! … No doubt about that, either. That fact had gone into Mark as a knife goes into the stag’s throat. It had hurt as much, but it hadn’t killed! Damn it, it might as well have!
