But he had – if he put himself to the question – mooned along under the absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven, to the scent of hay, to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of course – in June he changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a heron twice, overhead. They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn stacks, of heavy, rounded oaks, of hop oasts that are half church-tower, half finger-post. And the road silver grey, and the night warm… . It was mid-summer night that had done that to him… .
Hat mir’s angethan.
Das war ein schweigsames Reiten… .
Not absolutely silent of course, but silentish! Coming back from the parson’s, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had talked very little… . Not unpleasant people the parson’s: an uncle of the girl’s; three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl, but without the individuality… . A remarkably good bite of beef, a truly meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a man. All in candelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat up some stairs … a great deal of laughter of girls … then a re-start an hour later than had been scheduled… . Well, it hadn’t mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them; the good horse – really it was a good horse! – putting its shoulders into the work… .
They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train… .
There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near their off-lamp.
‘What a large bat!’ she had said. ‘Noctilux major …’
He said:
‘Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn’t it phalœna …’ She had answered:
‘From White … The Natural History of Selborne is the only natural history I ever read… .’
‘He’s the last English writer that could write,’ said Tietjens.
‘He calls the downs “those majestic and amusing mountains”,’ she said. ‘Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? Phal … i … i … na! To rhyme with Dinah!’
‘It’s “sublime and amusing mountains”, not “majestic and amusing”,’ Tietjens said. ‘I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys of to-day, from the German.’
She answered:
‘You would! Father used to say it made him sick.’
‘Cæsar equals Kaiser,’ Tietjens said… .
‘Bother your Germans,’ she said, ‘they’re no ethnologists; they’re rotten at philology!’ She added: ‘Father used to say so,’ to take away from an appearance of pedantry.
A silence then! She had right over her head a rug that her aunt had lent her; a silhouette beside him, with a cocky nose turned up straight out of the descending black mass. But for the square toque she would have had the silhouette of a Manchester cotton-hand: the toque gave it a different line; like the fillet of Diana. It was piquant and agreeable to ride beside a quite silent lady in the darkness of the thick Weald that let next to no moonlight through. The horse’s hoofs went clock, clock: a good horse. The near lamp illuminated the russet figure of a man with a sack on his back, pressed into the hedge, a blinking lurcher beside him.
‘Keeper between the blankets!’ Tietjens said to himself: ‘All these south country keepers sleep all night… . And then you give them a five-quid tip for the week-end shoot… .’ He determined that, as to that too he would put his foot down. No more week-ends with Sylvia in the mansions of the Chosen People… .
The girl said suddenly; they had run into a clearing of the deep underwoods:
‘I’m not stuffy with you over that Latin, though you were unnecessarily rude. And I’m not sleepy. I’m loving it all.’
He hesitated for a minute. It was a silly-girl thing to say. She didn’t usually say silly-girl things. He ought to snub her for her own sake… .
He had said:
‘I’m rather loving it too!’ She was looking at him; her nose had disappeared from the silhouette. He hadn’t been able to help it; the moon had been just above her head; unknown stars all round her; the night was warm. Besides, a really manly man may condescend at times! He rather owes it to himself… .
She said:
‘That was nice of you! You might have hinted that the rotten drive was taking you away from your so important work… .’
‘Oh, I can think as I drive,’ he said. She said:
‘Oh!’ and then: ‘The reason why I’m unconcerned over your rudeness about my Latin is that I know I’m a much better Latinist than you. You can’t quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in… . It’s vastum, not longum … “Terra tribus scopulis vastum procurrit” … It’s alto, not coelo… . “Uvidus ex alto desilientis… .” How could Ovid have written ex coelo? The “c” after the “x” sets your teeth on edge.’
Tietjens said:
‘Excogitabo!’
‘That’s purely canine!’ she said with contempt.
‘Besides,’ Tietjen said, ‘longum is much better than vastum. I hate cant adjectives like “vast”… .’
‘It’s like your modesty to correct Ovid,’ she exclaimed. ‘Yet you say Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets to be poets. That’s because they were sentimental and used adjectives like vastum… . What’s “Sad tears mixed with kisses” but the sheerest sentimentality!’
‘It ought, you know,’ Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, ‘to be “Kisses mingled with sad tears” … “Tristibus et lacrimis oscula mixta dabis.” …’
‘I’m hanged if I ever could,’ she exclaimed explosively. ‘A man like you could die in a ditch and I’d never come near. You’re desiccated even for a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans.’
‘Oh, well, I’m a mathematician,’ Tietjens said. ‘Classics is not my line!’
‘It isn’t,’ she answered tartly.
A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words:
‘You used “mingled” instead of “mixed” to translate mixta. I shouldn’t think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they’re as rotten at that as at everything else, father used to say.’
‘Your father was Balliol, of course,’ Tietjens said with the snuffy contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment and an olive branch.
Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still between him and the moon, remarked:
‘I don’t know if you know that for some minutes we’ve been running nearly due west. We ought to be going south-east by a bit south. I suppose you do know this road… .’
‘Every inch of it,’ she said, ‘I’ve been on it over and over again on my motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross-road is called Grandfather’s Want-ways. We’ve got eleven miles and a quarter still to do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it goes in and out amongst them, hundreds of them. You know the exports of the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles and chimney backs. The railings round St. Paul’s are made of Sussex iron.’
‘I knew that, of course,’ Tietjens said: ‘I come of an iron county myself. Why didn’t you let me run the girl over in the side-car, it would have been quicker?’
‘Because,’ she said, ‘three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the milestone at Hog’s Corner: doing forty.’
‘It must have been a pretty tidy smash!’ Tietjens said. ‘Your mother wasn’t aboard?’
‘No,’ the girl said, ‘suffragette literature. The side-car was full. It was a pretty tidy smash. Hadn’t you observed I still limp a little? …’
A few minutes later she said:
‘I haven’t the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to notice the road. And I don’t care… . Here’s a signpost though; pull into it.’
The lamps would not, ho
wever, shine on the arms of the post; they were burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and, going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering ghostlinesses… .
The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was astonishing – it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it: ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly. The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket.
‘Did you do that on purpose?’ he asked the girl. ‘Or can’t you hold a horse?’
‘I can’t drive a horse,’ the girl said; ‘I’m afraid of them. I can’t drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I knew you’d say you’d rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with me.’
‘Then do you mind,’ Tietjens said, ‘telling me if you know this road at all?’
‘Not a bit!’ she answered cheerfully. ‘I never drove it in my life. I looked it up on the map before we started because I’m sick to death of the road we went by. There’s a one-horse ’bus from Rye to Tenterden, and I’ve walked from Tenterden to my uncle’s over and over again… .’
‘We shall probably be out all night then,’ Tietjens said. ‘Do you mind? The horse may be tired… .’
She said:
‘Oh, the poor horse! … I meant us to be out all night… . But the poor horse. What a brute I was not to think of it.’
‘We’re thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn’t read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere… .’ Tietjens said. ‘This is the road to Uddlemere.’
‘Oh, that was Grandfather’s Wantways all right,’ she declared. ‘I know it well. It’s called “Grandfather’s” because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran’fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845 – the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that.’
Tietjens sat patiently. He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.
‘Would you mind,’ he said then, ‘telling me …’
‘If,’ she interrupted, ‘that was really Gran’fer’s Want-ways: midland English. “Vent” equals four cross-roads: high French carrefour… . Or, perhaps, that isn’t the right word. But it’s the way your mind works… .’
‘You have, of course, often walked from your uncle’s to Gran’fer’s Wantways,’ Tietjens said, ‘with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old toll-gate house. That’s how you know the story of Gran’fer. You said you had never driven it; but you have walked it. That’s the way your mind works, isn’t it?’
She said: ‘Oh!’
‘Then,’ Tietjens went on, ‘would you mind telling me – for the sake of the poor horse – whether Uddlemere is or isn’t on our road home. I take it you don’t know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is the right road.’
‘The touch of pathos,’ the girl said, ‘is a wrong note. It’s you who’re in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn’t… .’
Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:
‘It is the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You wouldn’t let the horse go another five steps if it wasn’t. You’re as soppy about horses as … as I am.’
‘There’s at least that bond of sympathy between us,’ she said drily. ‘Gran’fer’s Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from “O’er the mere”. Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: “O’er the mere.” Obviously absurd! … Putrid! “O’er the” by Grimm’s law impossible as “Udi”; “mere” not a middle Low German word at all… .’
‘Why,’ Tietjens said, ‘are you giving me all this information?’
‘Because,’ the girl said, ‘it’s the way your mind works… . It picks up useless facts as silver after you’ve polished it picks up sulphur vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them… . I’ve never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up again out of bones. That’s what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist… .’
‘I know of course,’ Tietjens said.
‘Of course you know,’ the girl said. ‘You know everything… . And you’ve worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. You want to be an English country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you’ll never stir a finger except to say I told you so.’
She touched him suddenly on the arm:
‘Don’t mind me!’ she said. ‘It’s reaction. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.’
He said:
‘That’s all right! That’s all right!’ But for a minute or two it wasn’t really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities – even merely with the velvet. He added: ‘Your mother works you very hard.’
She exclaimed:
‘How you understand. You’re amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!’ She said: ‘Yes, this is the first holiday I’ve had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day’s work for slips of the pen. And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety… . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother had gone to prison… . Oh, I’d have gone mad… . Week-days and Sundays… .’ She stopped: ‘I’m apologising, really,’ she went on. ‘Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all… . It did make you a rather awful figure, you know … and the relief to find you’re … oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. I’d dreaded this drive. I’d have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn’t been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn’t let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart… . I could still …’
‘You couldn’t,’ Tietjens said. ‘You couldn’t see the cart.’
They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn’t see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale… . They agreed that they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous… . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea… .
Tietjens had said:
‘You’d better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I’d get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse… .’ She had plunged in …
And he had sat, feeling he didn’t know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no mean
s disagreeable thoughts – intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler’s epigrams. You couldn’t have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or if not that, the claret… . The claret in south country inns was often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept… .
On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife’s maid at Dover… .
He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men; free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings… .
The girl said:
‘I’m coming up now! I’ve found out something… .’ He watched intently the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the impenetrability of mist to the eye.
Her otter-skin cap had beads of dew; beads of dew were on her hair beneath; she scrambled up, a little awkwardly, her eyes sparkled with fun; panting a little; her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.
Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:
‘Steady, the Buffs!’ in his surprise.
She said:
‘Well, you might as well have given me a hand. I found,’ she went on, ‘a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and then the lamp went out. We’re not on the marsh because we’re between quick hedges. That’s all I’ve found… . But I’ve worked out what makes me so tart with you… .’
He couldn’t believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to catch her to him and had been foiled by her. She ought to be indignant, amused, even pleased… . She ought to show some emotion… .