"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. . . . 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. . . . Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . 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 . . . 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. . . . All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we've got a navy! . . . But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks . . . 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 . . . 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. . . . No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss! . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . 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 . . . Backbone of England! . . ."
He killed another flower.
"But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both! . . . That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale. . . . 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! . . . My dear boy: I so regret: your father's oldest friend. . . . By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich. . . . 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 . . . Das Pillen-Land, the Germans call us. Very properly . . . And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life . . . and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long! . . . Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as Duchemin! . . . I'd never have thought that . . . No wonder meat's turned to uric acid . . . prime cause of neurasthenia. . . . 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' . . . 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. . . ."
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 . . . who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . 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: