Eh, but Christopher was bitter! … Apparently he had gone round first to Sir John Robertson’s with the jigamaree. Years before, Sir John had promised to buy it for a hundred pounds. It was a special sort of model signed by some duke of a Bath cabinetmaker in 1762. … Wasn’t that the year of the American Rebellion? Well, Christopher had bought it in a junk-shop of sorts for a fiver and Sir John had promised him a hundred quid. He collected cabinetmakers’ models: extraordinarily valuable they were. Christopher had spat out that this was worth a thousand dollars. … Thinking of his old-furniture customers!
When Christopher had used that word—with the blue pebbles sticking out of his white-lard head—Mark had felt the sweat break out all over him. He had known it was all up. … Christopher had gone on: you expected him to spit electric sparks but his voice was wooden. Sir John had said to him:
“Eh, no, mon. You’re a fine soldier now, raping half the girls in Flanders and Ealing and asking us to regard you as heroes. Fine heroes. And now you’re safe. … A hundred pounds is a price to a Christian that is faithful to his lovely wife. Five pounds is as much as I’ll give you for the model, and be thankful it is five, not one, for old sake’s sake!”
That was what Sir John Robertson had said to Christopher: that was what the world was like to serving soldiers in that day. You don’t have to wonder that Christopher was bitter—even to his own brother with the sweat making his under-linen icy. Mark had said:
“My good chap. I won’t lend you a penny on that idiotic jigamaree. But I’ll write you a cheque for a thousand pounds this minute. Give me my chequebook from the table. …”
Marie Léonie had come into the room on hearing Christopher’s voice. She liked to hear the news from Christopher. And she liked Christopher and Mark to have heated discussions. She had observed that they did Mark good: on the day when Christopher had first come there, three weeks before, when they certainly had heatedly discussed she had observed that Mark’s temperature had fallen from ninety-nine point six to ninety-eight point two. In two hours. … After all, if a Yorkshire man can quarrel he can live. They were like that, those others, she said.
Christopher had turned on her and said:
“Ma belle amie m’attend à ma maison; nous voulons célébrer avec mes camarades de regiment. Je n’ai pas le sous. Prêtez moi quarante livres, je vous en prie, madame!” He had added that he would leave his cabinet as a pledge. He was as stiff as a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. She had looked at Mark with some astonishment. After all, she might well be astonished. He himself had made no sign and suddenly Christopher had exclaimed:
“Prêtez les moi, prêtez les moi, pour l’amour de Dieu!”
Marie Léonie had gone a little white, but she had turned up her skirt and turned down her stocking and took out the notes.
“Pour le dieu d’Amour, monsieur, je veux bien,” she had said. … You never knew what a Frenchwoman would not say. That was out of an old song.
But the sweat burst out all over his face at the recollection: great drops of sweat.
VII
Marie Léonie, a strong taste of apples in her mouth, strong savours of apples on the air, wasps around her and as if a snowdrift of down descending about her feet, was frowning seriously over Burgundy bottles into which ran cider from a glass tube that she held to their necks. She frowned because the task was serious and engrossing, because the wasps annoyed her and because she was resisting an impulse inside herself. It told her that something ailed Mark and urged her to go and look at him.
It annoyed her because, as a rule—a rule so strong that it had assumed the aspect of a regulation—she felt presages of something ailing Mark only at night. Only at night. During the day usually she felt in her for intérieur that Mark was like what he was only because he wanted so to be. His glance was too virile and dominant to let you think otherwise—the dark, liquid, direct glance! But at nightfall—or at any rate shortly after supper when she had retired to her room terrible premonitions of disaster to Mark visited her. He was dying where he lay; he was beset by the spectral beings of the countryside; robbers, even, had crept upon him, though that was unreasonable. For all the countryside knew that Mark was paralysed and unable to store wealth in his mattress. … Still, nefarious strangers might see him and imagine that he kept his gold repeater watch beneath his pillow. … So she would rise a hundred times in a night and, going to the low, diamond-casement window, would lean out and listen. But there would be no sound: the wind in the leaves; the cry of waterbirds over head. The dim light would be in the hut, seen unmoving through the apple-boughs.
Now, however, in broad daylight, towards the hour of tea, with the little maid on a stool beside her plucking the boiling-hens that were to go to market next day, with the boxes of eggs on their shelves, each egg wired to the bottom of its box, waiting till she had time to date-stamp it—in the open potting-shed in the quiet, broad light of a summer day she was visited by a presage of something ailing Mark. She resented it, but she was not the woman to resist it.
There was, however, nothing to warrant it. From the
