‘Look here,’ the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens’ ear, ‘what am I to tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl.’
‘Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter hounds,’ Tietjens said; ‘that’s a matutinal job . . .
The General’s voice had a really pathetic intonation:
‘On a Sunday!’ he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: ‘I shall tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin’s church at Pett.’
‘If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession, do,’ Tietjens said. ‘But you’ll have to pay for the horse.’
‘I’m damned if I will,’ the General shouted. ‘I tell you you were driving into my drive.’
‘Then I shall,’ Tietjens said, ‘and you know the construction you’ll put on that.’
He straightened his back to look at the horse.
‘Go away,’ he said, ‘say what you like. Do what you like! But as you go through Rye send up the horse ambulance from the vet.’s . Don’t forget that. I’m going to save this horse . . . ’
‘You know, Chris,’ the General said, ‘you’re the most wonderful hand with a horse . . . There isn’t another man in England . . .
‘I know it,’ Tietjens said. ‘Go away. And send up that ambulance . . . There’s your sister getting out of your car . . . ’
The General began:
‘I’ve an awful lot to get explained . . . ’ But, at a thin scream of: ‘General! General!’ he pressed on his sword hilt to keep it from between his long, black, scarlet-striped legs, and running to the car pushed back into its door a befeathered, black bolster. He waved his hand to Tietjens:
‘I’ll send the ambulance,’ he called.
The horse, its upper leg swathed with criss-crosses of white through which a purple stain was slowly penetrating, stood motionless, its head hanging down, mule-like, under the blinding sun. To ease it Tietjens began to undo the trace. The girl hopped over the hedge and, scrambling down, began to help him.
‘Well. My reputation’s gone,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I know what Lady Claudine is . . . Why did you try to quarrel with the General? . . .
‘Oh, you’d better,’ Tietjens said wretchedly, ‘have a lawsuit with him. It’ll account for . . . for your not going to Mountby . . . ’
‘You think of everything,’ she said.
They wheeled the cart backwards off the motionless horse. Tietjens moved it two yards forward—to get it out of sight of its own blood. Then they sat down side by side on the slope of the bank.
‘Tell me about Groby,’ the girl said at last.
Tietjens began to tell her about his home . . . There was, in front of it, an avenue that turned into the road at right angles. Just like the one at Mountby.
‘My great-great-grandfather made it,’ Tietjens said. ‘He liked privacy and didn’t want the house visible to vulgar people on the road . . . just like the fellow who planned Mountby, no doubt . . . But it’s beastly dangerous with motors. We shall have to alter it . . . just at the bottom of a dip. We can’t have horses hurt . . . You’ll see . . . ’ It came suddenly into his head that he wasn’t perhaps the father of the child who was actually the heir to that beloved place over which generation after generation had brooded. Ever since Dutch William! A damn Nonconformist swine!
On the bank his knees were almost level with his chin. He felt himself slipping down.
‘If I ever take you there . . . ’ he began.
‘Oh, but you never will,’ she said.
The child wasn’t his. The heir to Groby! All his brothers were childless . . . There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count sixty-three. And there came up a whispering roar . . . But not his child! Perhaps he hadn’t even the power to beget children. His married brothers hadn’t . . . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss Wannop had her arm over his shoulder.
‘My dear!’ she said, ‘you won’t ever take me to Groby . . . It’s perhaps . . . oh . . . short acquaintance; but I feel you’re the splendidest . . .
He thought: ‘It is rather short acquaintance.’
He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall, eel-skin, blonde figure of his wife . . .
The girl said:
‘There’s a fly coming!’ and removed her arm.
A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted a pound to take them to Mrs Wannop’s, waked out of his beauty sleep and all. The knacker’s cart was following.
‘You’ll take Miss Wannop home at once,’ Tietjens said, ‘she’s got her mother’s breakfast to see to . . . I shan’t leave the horse till the knacker’s van comes.’
The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip.
‘Aye,’ he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Always the gentleman . . . a merciful man is merciful also to his beast . . . But I wouldn’t leave my little wooden ‘ut, nor miss my breakfast, for no beast . . . Some do and some . . . do not.’
He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique conveyance.
Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight, beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at last, a lot of blood.
Tietjens said:
‘I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want the money . . . ’
He said:
‘But it wouldn’t be playing the game!’
A long time afterwards he said:
‘Damn all principles!’ And then:
‘But one has to keep on going . . . Principles are like a skeleton map of a country—you know whether you’re going east or north.’
The knacker’s cart lumbered round the corner.
Part Two
1
Sylvia Tietjens rose from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along it, carrying her plate. She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her skirts as long as she possibly could: she didn’t, she said, with her height, intend to be taken for a girl guide. She hadn’t, in complexion, in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute. You couldn’t discover in the skin of her face any deadness: in her eyes the shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had purposely increased her air of scornful insolence. That was because she felt that her hold over men increased to the measure of her coldness. Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was Sylvia’s pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all the women in it realized with mortification—that they needn’t! For if coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: ‘Nothing doing!’ as barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn’t more plainly have conveyed