Some Do Not … · Part II · Chapter 2 1 (2/5)

They had two floors of a great building, and that gave them a great deal of space, the breakfast-room, in which during the war they also lunched, was an immense room, completely lined with books that were nearly all calf-backed, with an immense mirror over an immense, carved, yellow and white marble mantelpiece, and three windows that, in their great height, with the spideriness of their divisions and their old, bulging glass⁠—some of the panes were faintly violet in age⁠—gave to the room an eighteenth century distinction. It suited, she admitted, Tietjens, who was an eighteenth century figure of the Dr. Johnson type⁠—the only eighteenth century type of which she knew, except for that of the beau something who wore white satin and ruffles, went to Bath and must have been indescribably tiresome.

Above, she had a great white drawing-room, with fixings that she knew were eighteenth century and to be respected. For Tietjens⁠—again she admitted⁠—had a marvellous gift for old furniture: he despised it as such, but he knew it down to the ground. Once when her friend Lady Moira had been deploring the expense of having her new, little house furnished from top to toe under the advice of Sir John Robertson, the specialist (the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some American), Tietjens, who had come in to tea and had been listening without speaking, had said, with the soft good nature, rather sentimental in tone, that once in a blue moon he would bestow on her prettiest friends:

“You had better let me do it for you.”

Taking a look round Sylvia’s great drawing-room, with the white panels, the Chinese lacquer screens, the red laquer and ormolu cabinets and the immense blue and pink carpet (and Sylvia knew that if only for the three panels by a fellow called Fragonard, bought just before Fragonards had been boomed by the late King, her drawing-room was something remarkable), Lady Moira had said to Tietjens, rather flutteringly and almost with the voice with which she began one of her affairs:

“Oh, if you only would.”

He had done it, and he had done if for a quarter of the estimate of Sir John Robertson. He had done it without effort, as if with a roll or two of his elephantine shoulders, for he seemed to know what was in every dealer’s and auctioneer’s catalogue by looking at the green halfpenny stamp on the wrapper. And, still more astonishingly, he had made love to Lady Moira⁠—they had stopped twice with the Moiras in Gloucestershire and the Moiras had three times weekended with Mrs. Satterthwaite as the Tietjens’ invités.⁠ ⁠… Tietjens had made love to Lady Moira quite prettily and sufficiently to tide Moira over until she was ready to begin her affair with Sir William Heathly.

For the matter of that, Sir John Robertson, the specialist in old furniture, challenged by Lady Moira to pick holes in her beautiful house, had gone there, poked his large spectacles against cabinets, smelt the varnish of table tops and bitten the backs of chairs in his ancient and shortsighted way, and had then told Lady Moira that Tietjens had bought her nothing that wasn’t worth a bit more than he had given for it. This increased their respect for the old fellow: it explained his several millions. For, if the old fellow proposed to make out of a friend like Moira a profit of 300 percent⁠—limiting it to that out of sheer affection for a pretty woman⁠—what wouldn’t he make out of a natural⁠—and national⁠—enemy like a United States senator!

And the old man took a great fancy to Tietjens himself⁠—which Tietjens, to Sylvia’s bewilderment, did not resent. The old man would come in to tea and, if Tietjens were present, would stay for hours talking about old furniture. Tietjens would listen without talking. Sir John would expatiate over and over again about this to Mrs. Tietjens. It was extraordinary. Tietjens went purely by instinct: by taking a glance at a thing and chancing its price. According to Sir John one of the most remarkable feats of the furniture trade had been Tietjens’ purchase of the Hemingway bureau for Lady Moira. Tietjens, in his dislikeful way, had bought this at a cottage sale for £3 10s., and had told Lady Moira it was the best piece she would ever possess: Lady Moira had gone to the sale with him. Other dealers present had hardly looked at it: Tietjens certainly hadn’t opened it. But at Lady Moira’s, poking his spectacles into the upper part of the glazed piece, Sir John had put his nose straight on the little bit of inserted yellow wood by a hinge, bearing signature, name and date: “Jno. Hemingway, Bath, 1784.” Sylvia remembered them because Sir John told her so often. It was a lost “piece” that the furnishing world had been after for many years.

For that exploit the old man seemed to love Tietjens. That he loved Sylvia herself, she was quite aware. He fluttered round her tremulously, gave fantastic entertainments in her honour and was the only man she had never turned down. He had a harem, so it was said, in an enormous house at Brighton or somewhere. But it was another sort of love he bestowed on Tietjens: the rather pathetic love that the aged bestow on their possible successors in office.

Once Sir John came into tea and quite formally and with a sort of portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should come into partnership with him with the reversion of the business⁠—not, of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking a detail or two of Sir John’s proposed arrangement. Then he had said, with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a pretty woman, that he didn’t think it would do. There would be too much beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him than his office⁠ ⁠… but there was too much beastly money about it.

Once more, a little to Sylvia’s surprise⁠—but men are queer creatures!⁠—Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable, though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn’t have Tietjens he couldn’t; and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old-furniture trade: that was why he hadn’t persisted. But he sent by Sylvia a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens did come to be in want of money⁠ ⁠…

Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people⁠—as they sometimes did⁠—told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of caprice⁠—like her own; and, since she knew that most of her own manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of thinking much about him.

But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had discussed the change at Lobscheid⁠—or rather when Sylvia had unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!⁠—he had predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the affair of her mother’s cousin’s opera box that had most impressed her. He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering with her social level, and she was convinced that he was not going to. He had thought about it a good deal.

She hadn’t much listened to him. She had thought, firstly, that he was a fool and, secondly, that he did mean to hurt her. And she acknowledged that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with another man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his name and the shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms. Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure.

But at Lobscheid he had talked a lot of nonsense, as it had seemed to her: a mixture of prophecy and politics. The Chancellor of the Exchequer of that date had been putting pressure on the great landlords: the great landlords had been replying by cutting down their establishments and closing their town houses⁠—not to any great extent, but enough to make a very effective gesture of it, and so as to raise a considerable clamour from footmen and milliners. The Tietjens⁠—both of them⁠—were of the great land-owning class: they could adopt that gesture of shutting up their Mayfair house and going to live in a wilderness. All the more if they made their wilderness a thoroughly comfortable affair!

He had counselled her to present this aspect of the matter to her mother’s cousin, the morosely portentous Rugeley. Rugeley was a great landowner⁠—almost the greatest of all; and he was a landowner obsessed with a sense of his duties both to his dependants and his even remote relatives. Sylvia had only, Tietjens said, to go to the Duke and tell him that the Chancellor’s exactions had forced them to this move, but that they had done it partly as a protest, and the Duke would accept it almost as a personal tribute to himself. He couldn’t, even as a protest, be expected to shut up Mexborough or reduce his expenses. But, if his humbler relatives spiritedly did, he would almost certainly make it up to them. And Rugeley’s favours were on the portentous scale of everything about him. “I shouldn’t wonder,” Tietjens had said, “if he didn’t lend you the Rugeley box to entertain in.”

And that is exactly what had happened.

The Duke⁠—who must have kept a register of his remotest cousins⁠—had, shortly before their return to London, heard that this young couple had parted with every prospect of a large and disagreeable scandal. He had approached Mrs. Satterthwaite⁠—for whom he had a gloomy affection⁠—and he had been pleased to hear that the rumour was a gross libel. So that, when the young couple actually turned up again⁠—from Russia!⁠—Rugeley, who perceived that they were not only together, but to all appearances quite united, was determined not only to make it up to them, but to show, in order to abash their libellers as signal a mark of his favour as he could without inconvenience to himself. He, therefore, twice⁠—being a widower⁠—invited Mrs. Satterthwaite to entertain for him, Sylvia to invite the guests, and then had Mrs. Tietjens’ name placed on the roll of those who could have the Rugeley box at the opera, on application at the Rugeley estate office, when it wasn’t wanted. This was a very great privilege and Sylvia had known how to make the most of it.

On the other hand, on the occasion of their conversation at Lobscheid, Tietjens had prophesied what at the time seemed to her a lot of tosh. It had been two or three years before, but Tietjens had said that about the time grouse-shooting began, in 1914, a European conflagration would take place which would shut up half the houses in Mayfair and beggar their inhabitants. He had patiently supported his prophecy with financial statistics as to the approaching bankruptcy of various European powers and the growingly acquisitive skill and rapacity of the inhabitants of Great Britain. She had listened to that with some attention: it had seemed to her rather like the usual nonsense talked in country houses⁠—where, irritatingly, he never talked. But she liked to be able to have a picturesque fact or two with which to support herself when she too, to hold attention, wanted to issue moving statements as to revolutions, anarchies and strife in the offing. And she had noticed that when she magpied Tietjens’ conversations more serious men in responsible positions were apt to argue with her and to pay her more attention than before.⁠ ⁠…

And now, walking along the table with her plate in her hand, she could not but acknowledge that, triumphantly⁠—and very comfortably for her!⁠—Tietjens had been right! In the third year of the war it was very convenient to have a dwelling, cheap, comfortable, almost august and so easy to work that you could have, at a pinch, run it with one maid, though the faithful Hullo Central had not let it come to that yet.⁠ ⁠…

Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad: she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace.

“I’m bored,” she said. “Bored! Bored!”

Tietjens had moved slightly as she had thrown: the cutlets and most of the salad leaves had gone over his shoulder. But one, couched, very green leaf was on his shoulder-strap, and the oil and vinegar from the plate⁠—Sylvia knew that she took too much of all condiments⁠—had splashed from the revers of his tunic to his green staff-badges. She was glad that she had hit him as much as that: it meant that her marksmanship had not been quite rotten. She was glad, too, that she had missed him. She was also supremely indifferent. It had occurred to her to do it and she had done it. Of that she was glad!

She looked at herself for some time in the mirror of bluish depths. She pressed her immense bandeaux with both hands on to her ears. She was all right: high-featured: alabaster complexion⁠—but that was mostly the mirror’s doing⁠—beautiful, long, cool hands⁠—what man’s forehead wouldn’t long for them?⁠ ⁠… And that hair! What man wouldn’t think of it, unloosed on white shoulders!⁠ ⁠… Well, Tietjens wouldn’t! Or, perhaps, he did⁠ ⁠… she hoped he did, curse him, for he never saw that sight. Obviously sometimes, at night, with a little whisky taken he must want to!

She rang the bell and bade Hullo Central sweep the plateful from the carpet; Hullo Central, tall and dark, looking with wide-open eyes, motionlessly at nothing.

Sylvia went along the bookshelves, pausing over a book back, “Vitare Hominum Notiss⁠ ⁠…” in gilt, irregular capitals pressed deep into the old leather. At the first long window she supported herself by the blind-cord. She looked out and back into the room.

“There’s that veiled woman!” she said, “going into eleven.⁠ ⁠… It’s two o’clock, of course.⁠ ⁠…”

She looked at her husband’s back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn’t going to miss a motion or a stiffening.

“I’ve found out who it is!” she said, “and who she goes to. I got it out of the porter.” She waited. Then she added:

“It’s the woman you travelled down from Bishop’s Auckland with. On the day war was declared.”

Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing.

His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust heaps. He said:

“So you saw me!” But that, too, was mere politeness.

She said:

“Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine’s saw you! It was old Campion who said she was a Mrs.⁠ ⁠… I’ve forgotten the name.”

Tietjens said:

“I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the corridor!”

She said:

“Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster’s, or the mistress of both of you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common.⁠ ⁠… She’s got a mad husband, hasn’t she? A clergyman.”

Tietjens said:

“She hasn’t!”

Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in these discussions never manoeuvred for position, said:

“She has been Mrs. Macmaster over six months.”

Sylvia said:

“She married him then the day after her husband’s death.”