Some Do Not … · Part I · Chapter 1 6 (1/3)

VI

Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won’t corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket, Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten-foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: “Pink! pink!”: the young woman had an agreeable back.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church⁠—two clergy⁠—the State: two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids.⁠ ⁠… Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer; ammer from the Middle High German for “finch”), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as “dishwasher.” (These charming local dialect names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our lady’s bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor’s button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear): So interesting! cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French pasque, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s beard; purple loosestrife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!)⁠ ⁠… Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotations, imbecile epithets! Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (No! Not genuine willow-pattern, of course, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port⁠ ⁠… for the gentleman!⁠ ⁠… and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10:15. Midday now!

“God’s England!” Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. “ ‘Land of Hope and Glory!’⁠—F natural descending to tonic, C major: chord of 6⁠–⁠4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major.⁠ ⁠… All absolutely correct! Double basses, cellos, all violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special vox humana and key-bugle effect.⁠ ⁠… Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew.⁠ ⁠… Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman’s back. English midday midsummer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad!” Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!

“Now I’m a bloody murderer!” Tietjens said. “Not gory! Green stained with vital fluid of innocent plant⁠ ⁠… And by God! Not a woman in the country who won’t let you rape her after an hour’s acquaintance!” He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!

“By God,” he said, “Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition: H.M. City Man.⁠ ⁠… All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we’ve got a navy!⁠ ⁠… But perhaps that’s rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks⁠ ⁠… Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here on earth⁠ ⁠… as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen’s helmets.⁠ ⁠… No! It’s I do that: my part, I think, miss!⁠ ⁠… Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of Sodom. All splendid! I bet she’s virtuous. But you don’t have to bet. It isn’t done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! Attractive back. Virginal cockiness.⁠ ⁠… Yes, better occupation for mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you’re as hysterical as a female cat on heat.⁠ ⁠… You could see it in her: that woman: you can see it in most of ’em! Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the suffragette kid⁠ ⁠… Backbone of England!⁠ ⁠…”

He killed another flower.

“But by God! we’re both under a cloud! Both!⁠ ⁠… That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M.P. (suspended), to spread the tale.⁠ ⁠… And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy!⁠ ⁠… My dear boy: I so regret: your father’s oldest friend.⁠ ⁠… By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich.⁠ ⁠… But no! Gloomy reflections: I’m hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills⁠ ⁠… Das Pillen-Land, the Germans call us. Very properly⁠ ⁠… And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life⁠ ⁠… and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long!⁠ ⁠… Why, hang it, I’m as badly off as she. Sylvia’s as bad as Duchemin!⁠ ⁠… I’d never have thought that⁠ ⁠… No wonder meat’s turned to uric acid⁠ ⁠… prime cause of neurasthenia.⁠ ⁠… What a beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He’s finished. Poor devil: he’d better have ogled this kid. He could have sung: ‘Highland Mary’ a better tune than ‘This is the end of every man’s desire’⁠ ⁠… You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute.⁠ ⁠…”

He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!

“But damn it all,” he said to himself, “she makes a good screen for Sylvia⁠ ⁠… who cares! She must chance it. She’s probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already⁠ ⁠… as a suffragette!”

Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him.⁠ ⁠… Her nimble footwork, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside thistle-tops. No; damn it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch.⁠ ⁠… Infinitely pathetic!

Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: “Pink! pink!”

The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:

“Damn your eyes! Have them put out, then!” The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tomtit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: “Damn your eyes! Have your chastity impugned then? What do you speak to strange men in public for! You know you can’t do it in this country. If it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other’s throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot⁠ ⁠… well, you could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met.⁠ ⁠… ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore⁠ ⁠…’ To every man you met as long as he wasn’t an Englishman of good birth: that would deflower you!” He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. “Well! be deflowered then: lose your infantile reputation. You’ve spoken to strange pitch: you’re defiled⁠ ⁠… with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England.⁠ ⁠… They’d all tell you you can’t talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other.⁠ ⁠… Then be a screen for Sylvia: get struck off the visiting books! The deeper you’re implicated, the more bloody villain I am! I’d like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it.⁠ ⁠…”

Nevertheless, when at the roadside he stood level with Miss Wannop who did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:

“Where’s the next stile? I hate walking on roads!” She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow. “Fifty yards!” she said.

“Come along!” he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one alone: perhaps the General driving the dogcart he affected. He said to himself:

“By God! If they cut this girl I’d break their backs over my knee!” and he hastened. “Just the beastly thing that would happen.” The road probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!

Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they’re going to hurry⁠—but why hurry!⁠—do it in the shade of field hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead. In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn’t intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster’s; but she cool and denunciatory in her pretty blouse.

There was a dogcart coming behind them!

Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the breakfast-table.⁠ ⁠… The dogcart contained the police: after them! She didn’t waste time looking round: she wasn’t a fool like Atalanta in the egg race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a yard and half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked; breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn’t the sense to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshireman didn’t know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol.⁠ ⁠… Oh hang.⁠ ⁠…

The voice of Mrs. Wannop⁠—of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good, round face like a peony⁠—said:

“Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her⁠ ⁠… but she gave you seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father’s ambition!” She thought of them as children running races. She beamed down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St. Peter.

“My dear boy!” she said, “my dear boy; it’s such a satisfaction to have you under my roof!”

The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs. Wannop said unconcernedly: “Stephen Joel! I haven’t done talking.”

Tietjens was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse’s sweat-smeared stomach.

“You soon will have,” he said, “with the girth in that state. Your neck will be broken.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Wannop said. “Joel only bought the turnout yesterday.”

Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity:

“Here; get down, you,” he said. He held, himself, the head of the horse whose nostrils were wide with emotion: it rubbed its forehead almost immediately against his chest. He said: “Yes! yes! There! there!” Its limbs lost their tautness. The aged driver scrambled down from the high seat, trying to come down at first forward and then backwards. Tietjens fired indignant orders at him:

“Lead the horse into the shade of that tree. Don’t touch his bit: his mouth’s sore. Where did you get this job lot? Ashford market: thirty pounds: it’s worth more.⁠ ⁠… But, blast you, don’t you see you’ve got a thirteen hands pony’s harness for a sixteen and a half hands horse. Let the bit out: three holes: it’s cutting the animal’s tongue in half.⁠ ⁠… This animal’s a rig. Do you know what a rig is? If you give it corn for a fortnight it will kick you and the cart and the stable to pieces in five minutes one day.” He led the conveyance, Mrs. Wannop triumphantly complacent and all, into a patch of shade beneath elms.

“Loosen that bit, confound you,” he said to the driver. “Ah! you’re afraid.”

He loosened the bit himself, covering his fingers with greasy harness polish which he hated. Then he said:

“Can you hold his head or are you afraid of that too? You deserve to have him bite your hands off.” He addressed Miss Wannop: “Can you?”

She said:

“No! I’m afraid of horses. I can drive any sort of car; but I’m afraid of horses.”

He said:

“Very proper!” He stood back and looked at the horse: it had dropped its head and lifted its near hind foot, resting the toe on the ground: an attitude of relaxation.

“He’ll stand now!” he said. He undid the girth, bending down uncomfortably, perspiring and greasy: the girth-strap parted in his hand.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Wannop said. “I’d have been dead in three minutes if you hadn’t seen that. The cart would have gone over backwards⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens took out a large, complicated, horn-handled knife like a schoolboy’s. He selected a punch and pulled it open. He said to the driver:

“Have you got any cobbler’s thread? Any string? Any copper wire? A rabbit wire, now? Come, you’ve got a rabbit wire or you’re not a handy man.”

The driver moved his slouch hat circularly in negation. This seemed to be Quality who summons you for poaching if you own to possessing rabbit wires. Tietjens laid the girth along the shaft and punched into it with his punch.

“Woman’s work!” he said to Mrs. Wannop, “but it’ll take you home and last you six months as well⁠ ⁠… But I’ll sell this whole lot for you tomorrow.”

Mrs. Wannop sighed: