The lady below exclaimed in a high voice:
“That Lady Mark Tietjens! That! Mercy me, I thought it was the cook!”
She, Valentine, ought to go down and help Marie Léonie. But she was not going to. She had the sense that hostile presences were creeping up the path and Marie Léonie had given her the afternoon off. … For the sake of the future, Marie Léonie had said. And she had said that she had once expected her own future to offer the reading of Aeschylus beside the Aegean sea. Then Marie Léonie had kissed her and said she knew that Valentine would never rob her of her belongings after Mark died!
An unsolicited testimonial, that. But of course Marie Léonie would desire her not to lose the affections of Christopher. Marie Léonie would say to herself that in that case Christopher might take up with a woman who would want to rob Marie Léonie of her possessions after Mark died. …
The woman down below announced herself as Mrs. de Bray Pape, descendant of the Maintenon, and wanted to know if Marie Léonie did not think it reasonable to cut down a tree that overhung your house. Valentine desired to spring to the window: she sprang to the old panelled door and furiously turned the key in the lock. She ought not to have turned the key so carelessly: it had a knack of needing five or ten minutes manipulation before you could unlock the door again. … But she ought to have sprung to the window and cried out to Mrs. de Bray Pape: “If you so much as touch a leaf of Groby Great Tree we will serve you with injunctions that it will take half your life and money to deal with!”
She ought to have done that to save Christopher’s reason. But she could not: she could not! It was one thing living with all the tranquillity of conscience in the world in open sin. It was another, confronting elderly Americans who knew the fact. She was determined to remain shut in there. An Englishman’s house may no longer be his castle—but an Englishwoman’s castle is certainly her own bedroom. When once, four months or so ago, the existence of little Chrissie being manifest, she had expressed to Christopher the idea that they ought no longer to go stodging along in penury, the case being so grave: they ought to take some of the Groby money—for the sake of future generations. …
Well, she had been run down. … At that stage of parturition, call it, a woman is run down and hysterical. … It had seemed to her overwhelmingly the fact that a breeding woman ought to have pink fluffy things next her quivering skin and sprayings of say, Houbigant, all over her shoulders and hair. For the sake of the child’s health.
So she had let out violently at poor wretched old Chris, faced with the necessity for denying his gods, and had slammed to and furiously locked that door. Her castle had been her bedroom with a vengeance then—for Christopher had been unable to get in or she to get out. He had had to whisper through the keyhole that he gave in: he was dreadfully concerned for her. He had said that he hoped she would try to stick it a little longer, but, if she would not, he would take Mark’s money.
Naturally she had not let him—but she had arranged with Marie Léonie for Mark to pay a couple of pounds more a week for their board and lodging, and as Marie Léonie had perforce taken over the housekeeping, they had found things easing off a little. Marie Léonie had run the house for thirty shillings a week less than she, Valentine, had ever been able to do—and run it streets better. Streets and streets! So they had had money at least nearly to complete their equipments of table linen and the layette. … The long and complicated annals!
It was queer that her heart was nearly as much in Christopher’s game as was his own. As housemother, she ought to have grabbed after the last penny—and goodness knew the life was strain enough. Why do women back their men in unreasonable romanticisms? You might say that it was because, if their men had their masculinities abated—like defeated roosters!—the women would suffer in intimacies. … Ah, but it wasn’t that! Nor was it merely that they wanted the buffaloes to which they were attached to charge.
It was really that she had followed the convolutions of her man’s mind. And ardently approved. She disapproved with him of riches, of the rich, of the frame of mind that riches confer. If the war had done nothing else for them—for those two of them—it had induced them, at least, to install Frugality as a deity. They desired to live hard, even if it deprived them of the leisure in which to think high! She agreed with him that if a ruling class loses the capacity to rule—or the desire!—it should abdicate from its privileges and get underground.
And having accepted that as a principle, she could follow the rest of his cloudy obsessions and obstinacies.
Perhaps she would not have backed him up in his long struggle with dear Mark if she had not considered that their main necessity was to live high. … And she was aware that why, really, she had sprung to the door rather than to the window had been that she had not desired to make an unfair move in that long chess game. On behalf of Christopher. If she had had to see Mrs. de Bray Pape or to speak to her it would have been disagreeable to have that descendant of a king’s
