Some Do Not... — Part 1, Chapter 6, Section 1
VI
Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won't corrode and is indestructible.
He wiped off methodically, with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back.
As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket.
Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show.
On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed.
The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: "Pink!
pink!"
: the young woman had an agreeable back.
This, Tietjens thought, is England!
A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe.
The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth;
she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest.
Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church--two clergy--the State: two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids.
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Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (_not_, my dear, hammer!
_ammer_ from the Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher."
(These _charming_ local dialect names.
) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam).
In the hedge: Our Lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor's button (but in _Sussex_ they call it ragged robin, my dear): So interesting!
cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French _pasque_, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!
); violet leaves, the flowers of course over;
black briony; wild clematis: later it's old man's beard; purple loose-strife.
(That our young maids long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name.
_So_ racy of the soil!
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Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets!
Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch.
The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish.
(_No_!
_Not_ genuine willow-pattern, of _course_, Mr. Tietjens.
) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall.
A glass of invalid port .
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for the _gentleman_!
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and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10. 15. Mid-day now!
"God's England!"
Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour.
"'Land of Hope and Glory!'
--F natural descending to tonic, C major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major.
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All absolutely correct!
Double basses, 'cellos, all violins: all wood wind: all brass.
Full grand organ: all stops: special _vox humana_ and key-bugle effect.
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Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew.
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Pipe exactly right.
It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco.
Attractive young woman's back.
English mid-day midsummer.
Best climate in the world!
No day on which man may not go abroad!"
Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flower.
The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!
"Now I'm a bloody murderer!"
Tietjens said.
"Not gory!
Green-stained with vital fluid of innocent plant .
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And by God!
Not a woman in the country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!"
He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle!
A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!
"By God," he said, "Church!
State!
Army!
H.
M.
Ministry: H. M.
Opposition;
H.
M.
City Man.
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All the governing class!
All rotten!
Thank God we've got a navy!
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But perhaps that's rotten too!
Who knows!
Britannia needs no bulwarks .
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Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here in earth .
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as she should be!
As she should be!
In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome!
Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's helmets.
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No!
It's I do that: my part, I think, miss!
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Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of Sodom.
All splendid!
I bet she's virtuous.
But you don't have to bet.
It isn't done on certainties.
You can tell it in the eye.
Nice eyes!
Attractive back.
Virginal cockiness.
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Yes, better occupation for mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat.
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You could see it in her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em!
Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the Suffragette kid .
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Backbone of England!
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He killed another flower.
"But by God!
we're both under a cloud!
Both!
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That kid and I!
And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M. P.
(suspended) to spread the tale.
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And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy!
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My dear boy: I so regret: your father's oldest friend.
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By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine!
Repeating!
Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections!
Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich.
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But no!
Gloomy reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore!
For same reason!
Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary.
England the land of pills .
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_Das Pillen-Land_, the Germans call us.
Very properly .
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And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life .
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and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long!
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Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she.
Sylvia's as bad as Duchemin!
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I'd never have thought that .
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No wonder meat's turned to uric acid .
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prime cause of neurasthenia.
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What a beastly muddle!
Poor Macmaster!
He's finished.
Poor devil: he'd better have ogled this kid.
He could have sung: 'Highland Mary' a better tune than 'This is the end of every man's desire' .
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You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute.
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He stopped suddenly in his walk.
It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!
"But damn it all," he said to himself, "she makes a good screen for Sylvia .
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who cares!
She must chance it.
She's probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already .
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as a suffragette!"
Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross.
She stood waiting, her back still to him.
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Her nimble foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic.
To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside this thistle-tops.
No; damn it!
it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch.
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Infinitely pathetic!
Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: "Pink!
pink!"
The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird: "Damn your eyes!
_Have_ them put out, then!"
The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tom-tit.
Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists!
In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: "Damn your eyes!
_Have_ your chastity impugned them?
What do you speak to strange men in public for!
You know you can't do it in this country.
If it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot.
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well, you could!
You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met.
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'Rich and rare were the gems she wore .
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To every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth: _that_ would deflower you!"
He was scrambling clumsily over the stile.
"Well!
_be_ deflowered then: _lose_ your infantile reputation.
You've spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled .
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with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England.
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They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other.
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Then _be_ a screen for Sylvia: _get_ struck off the visiting books!
The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I am!
I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it.
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Nevertheless, when at the road-side he stood level with Miss Wannop who did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her: "Where's the next stile?
I hate walking on roads!"
She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow.
"Fifty yards!"
she said.
"Come along!"
he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost.
It had come into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected.
He said to himself: "By God!
If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee!"
and he hastened.
"Just the beastly thing that _would_ happen."
The road probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!
Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear.
She thought him the most extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious.
Sane people, if they're going to hurry--but _why_ hurry!
--do it in the shade of field hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads.
Well, he could go ahead.
In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn't intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she cool and denunciatory in her pretty blouse.
