And then the description of the cider…. ’Ard! Thet cider was ’arder than a miser’s ’art or ’n ole maid’s tongue. Body it ’ad. Strength it ’ad. Stans to reason. Ten-year cider. Not a drop was drunk in Lordship’s ’ouse under ten years in cask. Killed three sheep a week fer his indoor and outdoor servants. An’ three hundred pigeons. The pigeon-cotes is a hundred feet high an’ the pigeons nesteses in ’oles in the inside walls. Clap-nests a ’ole wall at a go an’ takes the squabs. Times is not what they was but ’is Lordship keeps on. An always will!
The man in the bed — Mark Tietjens — continued his own thoughts:
Old Gunning lumbered slowly up the path towards the stable, his hands swinging. The stable was a tile-healed, thatched affair, no real stable in the North Country sense — a place where the old mare sheltered among chickens and ducks. There was no tidiness amongst South Country folk. They hadn’t it in them, though Gunning could bind a tidy thatch and trim a hedge properly. All-round man. Really an all-round man; he could do a great many things. He knew all about fox-hunting, pheasant-rearing, wood-craft, hedging, dyking, pig-rearing and the habits of King Edward when shooting. Smoking endless great cigars! One finished, light another, throw away the stub…
Fox-hunting, the sport of kings with only twenty per cent of the danger of war! He, Mark Tietjens, had never cared for hunting; now he would never do any more; he had never cared for pheasant-shooting. He would never do any more. Not couldn’t; wouldn’t from henceforth…. It annoyed him that he had not taken the trouble to ascertain what it was Iago said, before he had taken Iago’s resolution…. From henceforth he never would speak word…. Something to that effect: but you could not get that into a blank verse line.
Perhaps Iago had not been speaking blank verse when he had taken his, Mark Tietjens’ resolution… Took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him…. Good man, Shakespeare! All-round man in a way, too. Probably very like Gunning. Knew Queen Elizabeth’s habits when hunting; also very likely how to hedge, thatch, break up a deer or a hare or a hog, and how to serve a writ and write bad French. Lodged with a French family somewhere in a Crutched Friars or the Minories. Somewhere.
The ducks were making a great noise on the pond up the hill. Old Gunning in the sunlight lumbered between the stable-wall and the raspberry canes, uphill. The garden was all uphill. Mark looked across the grass up at the hedge. When they turned his bed round he looked down on the house. Rough, grey stone.
Half round, he looked across the famous four counties; half round, the other way on, he could see up a steep grass-bank to the hedge on the main roadside. Now he was looking uphill across the tops of the hay-grass, over the raspberry canes at the hedge that Gunning was going to trim…. Full of consideration for him, they were, all the lot of them. For ever thinking of finding possible interests for him. He did not need it. He had interests enough.
Up the pathway that was above, beyond the hedge, on a grass slope, went the Elliot children — a lanky girl of ten with very long, corn-coloured hair; a fat boy of five in a sailor’s suit — unspeakably dirty. The girl too long in the legs and ankles, her hair limp… War-starvation in early years! Well, that was not his, Mark Tietjens’, fault. He had given the nation the Transport it needed: the nation should have found the food. They had not, so the children had long thin legs and wristbones that protruded on pipe-stems. All that generation!… No fault of his! He had managed the Transport as it should be managed. His department had. His own department, built up by himself from junior temporary clerk to senior permanent official; he had built it up, from the day of his entrance thirty years ago, to the day of his resolution never more to speak word.
Nor yet stir a finger! He had to be in this world, in this nation. Let them care for him, for he was done with them…. He knew the sire and dam of every horse from Eclipse to Perlmutter. That was enough for him. They helped him to read all that could be read about racing. He had interests enough!
The ducks on the pond continued to make a great noise, churning the water, up the hill, boisterously with their wings, and squawking. If they had been hens there would have been something the matter – a dog chasing them. Ducks did not signify. They went mad, contagiously. Like nations or all the cattle of a county.
Gunning, lumbering past the raspberry canes, took a bud or so and squeezed the pale things between finger and thumb. Looking for traces of maggots. Pale green leaves the raspberry had: a fragile plant among the robuster rosaceæ. That was not starvation, but race. Their commissariat was efficient enough, but presumably they were not gross feeders. Gunning began to trim the hedge with sharp, brushing blows of his bagging hook. There was still far too much bramble among the quickset: in a week the hedge would be unsightly again.
They kept the hedge low so that he should be amused by passengers on the path, though they would really have preferred to let it grow high so that passers-by should not see into the orchard…. Well, he had seen passers-by. More than they thought for!… What in hell was Sylvia’s game? And that old ass Edward Campion’s?… Well, he, Mark, was not going to interfere. There was undoubtedly something up…. Marie Léonie – formerly Charlotte — knew neither of that precious couple by sight: she had certainly seen them peer down over the hedge….
They — it was more of their considerateness — had contrived a broad shelf on the left corner post of his shelter. So that birds should amuse him. He had always sought after larger quarry!… A hedge-sparrow, noiseless and quaker-grey, was ghost-like on his shelf. It flitted hiding itself deep in hedgerows. He thought of it as an American bird — or perhaps that was because there were so many Americans about there, though he never saw them…. A voiceless nightingale, slim, long, thin-billed, almost without markings as becomes a bird that seldom sees the sun, but lives in the deep twilight of deep hedges…. American because it ought to wear a scarlet letter. Nearly all he knew of Americans came from a book he had once read — about a woman like a hedge-sparrow, creeping furtive in hedgerows and getting into trouble with a priest…. But no doubt there were other types.
This desultory, slim, obviously Puritan bird, inserted its thin bill into the dripping that Gunning had put on the shelf for the tomtits. The riotous tomtit, the great tit, the bottle-tit… all that family love dripping. The hedge-sparrow obviously did not; the dripping on that warmish June day had become oleaginous. The hedge-sparrow, its bill all greased, mumbled its upper mandible with its lower but took no more dripping. It looked at Mark’s eyes. Because these regarded it motionlessly it uttered a long warning note and flitted, noiseless, into invisibility. All hedge things ignore you whilst you move on and do not regard them. The moment you stay still and fix your eyes on them they warn the rest of the hedge and flit off. This hedge-sparrow no doubt had its young within ear-shot. Or the warning might have been just co-operative.
Marie Léonie née Riotor, was coming up the steps and then the path. He knew, that by the sound of her breathing. She stood beside him, shapeless in her long pinafore of printed cotton, holding a plate of soup and saying:
“Mon pauvre homme! Mon pauvre homme! Ce qu’ils ont fait de toil”
She began a breathless discourse in French. She was of the large, blond, Norman type; in the middle forties, her extremely fair hair very voluminous and noticeable. She had lived with Mark Tietjens for twenty years now, but she had always refused to speak a word of English, having an invincible scorn for both language and people of her adopted country.