Sylvia said:
“If… if your second brother is killed…. But your eldest brother…”
“He,” Tietjens said, “has got a French woman near Euston station. He’s lived with her for over fifteen years, of afternoons, when there were no race meetings. She’ll never let him marry and she’s past the child-bearing stage. So there’s no one else….”
Sylvia said:
“You mean that I may bring the child up as a Catholic.”
Tietjens said: C
“A Roman Catholic…. You’ll teach him, please, to use that term before myself if I ever see him again….”
Sylvia said:
“Oh, I thank God that he has softened your heart. This will take the curse off this house.”
Tietjens shook his head:
“I think not,” he said, “off you, perhaps. Off Groby very likely. It was, perhaps, time that there should be a Papist owner of Groby again. You’ve read Speldon on sacrilege about Groby?…”
She said:
“Yes! The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, was pretty bad to the Papist owners….”
“He was a tough Dutchman,” Tietjens said, “but let us get on! There’s enough time, but not too much…. I’ve got this man to see.”
“Who is he?” Sylvia asked.
Tietjens was collecting his thoughts.
“My dear!” he said. “You’ll permit me to call you ‘my dear’? We’re old enemies enough and we’re talking about the future of our child.”
Sylvia said:
“You said ‘our’ child, not ‘the’ child….”
Tietjens said with a great deal of concern:
“You will forgive me for bringing it up. You might prefer to think he was Drake’s child. He can’t be. It would be outside the course of nature…. I’m as poor as I am because… forgive me… I’ve spent a great deal of money on tracing the movements of you and Drake before our marriage. And if it’s a relief to you to know…”
“It is,” Sylvia said. “I… I’ve always been too beastly shy to put the matter before a specialist, or even before mother…. And we women are so ignorant….”
Tietjens said:
“I know… I know you were too shy even to think about it yourself, hard.” He went into months and days; then he continued: “But it would have made no difference: a child born in wedlock is by law the father’s, and if a man who’s a gentleman suffers the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences; the woman and the child must come before the man, be he who he may. And worse-begotten children than ours have inherited statelier names. And I loved the little beggar with all my heart and with all my soul from the first minute I saw him. That may be the secret clue, or it may be sheer sentimentality…. So I fought your influence because it was Papist, while I was a whole man. But I’m not a whole man any more, and the evil eye that is on me might transfer itself to him.”
He stopped and said:
“For I must to the greenwood go. Alone a banished man…. But have him well protected against the evil eye….”
“Oh, Christopher,” she said, “it’s true I’ve not been a bad woman to the child. And I never will be. And I will keep Marchant with him till she dies. You’ll tell her not to interfere with his religious instruction, and she won’t….”
Tietjens said with a friendly weariness:
“That’s right… and you’ll have Father… Father… the priest that was with us for a fortnight before he was born to give him his teachings. He was the best man I ever met and one of the most intelligent. It’s been a great comfort to me to think of the boy as in his hands….”
Sylvia stood up, her eyes blazing out of a pallid face of stone:
“Father Consett,” she said, “was hung on the day they shot Casement. They dare not put it into the papers because he was a priest and all the witnesses Ulster witnesses…. And yet I may not say this is an accursed war.”
Tietjens shook his head with the slow heaviness of an aged man.
“You may for me…” he said. “You might ring the bell, will you? Don’t go away….”
He sat with the blue gloom of that enclosed space all over him, lumped heavily in his chair.
“Speldon on sacrilege,” he said, “may be right after all. You’d say so from the Tietjenses. There’s not been a Tietjens since the first Lord Justice cheated the Papist Loundeses out of Groby, but died of a broken neck or of a broken heart; for all the fifteen thousand acres of good farming land and iron land, and for all the heather on the top of it…. What’s the quotation: ‘Be ye something as something and something and ye shall not escape….’ What is it?”
“Calumny!” Sylvia said. She spoke with intense bitterness…. “Chaste as ice and cold as… as you are….”
Tietjens said:
“Yes! Yes…. And mind you none of the Tietjens were ever soft. Not one! They had reason for their broken hearts…. Take my poor father….”
Sylvia said:
“Don’t!”
“Both my brothers were killed in Indian regiments on the same day and not a mile apart. And my sister in the same week, out at sea, not so far from them…. Unnoticeable people. But one can be fond of unnoticeable people….”
Hullo Central was at the door. Tietjens told her to ask Lord Port Scatho to step down….
“You must, of course, know these details,” Tietjens said, “as the mother to my father’s heir…. My father got the three notifications on the same day. It was enough to break his heart. He only lived a month. I saw him…”
Sylvia screamed piercingly:
“Stop! stop! stop!” She clutched at the mantelpiece to hold herself up. “Your father died of a broken heart,” she said, “because your brother’s best friend, Ruggles, told him you were a squit who lived on women’s money and had got the daughter of his oldest friend with child….”
Tietjens said:
“Ohl Ah! Yes!… I suspected that. I knew it, really. I suppose the poor dear knows better now. Or perhaps he doesn’t…. It doesn’t matter.”
II
IT has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. In the smaller matters of the general run of life he will be impeccable and not to be moved; but in sudden confrontations of anything but physical dangers he is apt — he is, indeed, almost certain – to go to pieces very badly. This, at least, was the view of Christopher Tietjens, and he very much dreaded his interview with Lord Port Scatho — because he feared that he must be near breaking point.
In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his temperament as he could control — for, though no man can choose the land of, his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his automatic habits — Tietjens had quite advisedly and of set purpose adopted a habit of behaviour that he considered to be the best in the world for the normal life. If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic and lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigrammaticaly imbecile over unessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome, and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at all — or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of death — except at sea, by fire, railway accident or accidental drowning in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or — and particularly — prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantage of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914. Death for man came but once: the danger of death so seldom as to be practically negligible; love of a distracting kind was a disease merely of the weak; public dishonour for persons of position, so great was the hushing up power of the ruling class, and the power of absorption of the remoter Colonies, was practically unknown.