a man wants to have a woman, he has her. And again, no talking about it. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda…’
‘You call that monogamy and chastity!’ Macmaster interjected.
‘I do,’ Tietjens answered, ‘and it probably is, at any rate it’s clean. What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placketholes and polysyllabic Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That’s all right if you can get your club to change its rules.’
‘You’re out of my depth,’ Macmaster said. ‘And being very disagreeable. You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don’t like it.’
‘I’m probably being disagreeable,’ Tietjens said. ‘Jeremiahs usually are. But there ought to be a twenty years’ close time for discussions of sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca—and Dante’s—went, very properly to Hell, and no bones about it. You don’t get Dante justifying them. But your fellow whines about creeping into Heaven.’
‘He doesn’t!’ Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with equanimity:
‘Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop boys…’
‘I’ll admit,’ Macmaster coincided, ‘that Briggs is going too far. I told him only last Thursday at Mrs Limoux’s…’
‘I’m not talking of anyone in particular,’ Tietjens said. ‘I don’t read novels. I’m supposing a case. And it’s a cleaner case than that of your Pre–Raphaelite horrors! No! I don’t read novels, but I follow tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the rights of man, it’s relatively respectable. It would, be better just to boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. But…’
‘You carry joking too far sometimes,’ Macmaster said. ‘I’ve warned you about it.’
‘I’m as solemn as an owl!’ Tietjens rejoined. ‘The lower classes are becoming vocal. Why shouldn’t they? They’re the only people in this country who are sound in wind and limb. They’ll save the country if the country’s to be saved.’
‘And you call yourself a Tory!’ Macmaster said.
‘The lower classes,’ Tietjens continued equably, ‘such of them as get through the secondary schools, want irregular and very transitory unions. During holidays they go together on personally conducted tours to Switzerland and such places. Wet afternoons they pass in their tiled bathrooms, slapping each other hilariously on the back and splashing white enamel paint about.’
‘You say you don’t read novels,’ Macmaster said, ‘but I recognize the quotation.’
‘I don’t read novels,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I know what’s in ‘em. There has been nothing worth reading written in England since the eighteenth century except by a woman…But it’s natural for your enamel splashers to want to see themselves in a bright and variegated literature. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a healthy, human desire, and now that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied. It’s healthy, I tell you. Infinitely healthier than…’ He paused.
‘Than what?’ Macmaster asked.
‘I’m thinking,’ Tietjens said, ‘thinking how not to be too rude.’
‘You want to be rude,’ Macmaster said bitterly, ‘to people who lead the contemplative…the circumspect life.’
‘It’s precisely that,’ Tietjens said. He quoted.
‘“She walks, the lady of my delight,
A shepherdess of sheep;
She is so circumspect and right:
She has her thoughts to keep.”‘
Macmaster said:
‘Confound you, Chrissie. You know everything.’
‘Well, yes,’ Tietjens said musingly, ‘I think I should want to be rude to her. I don’t say I should be. Certainly I shouldn’t if she were good looking. Or if she were your soul’s dimity. You can rely on that.’
Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens’ large and clumsy form walking beside the lady of his, Macmaster’s, delight, when ultimately she was found—walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn’t like Tietjens. Women didn’t, as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated him…Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said conciliatorily:
‘Yes, I think I could rely on that!’ He added: ‘All the same I don’t wonder that…’
He had been about to say:
‘I don’t wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral.’ For Tietjens’ wife alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his views…But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on:
‘All the same, when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will save England, because they’ve the courage to know what they want and to say so.’
Macmaster said loftily:
‘You’re extraordinarily old–fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to know as well as I do that a war is impossible—at any rate with this country in it. Simply because…’ He hesitated and then emboldened himself: ‘We—the circumspect—yes, the circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places.’
‘War, my good fellow,’ Tietjens said—the train was slowing down preparatorily to running into Ashford—’is inevitable, and with this country plumb centre in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows are such damn hypocrites. There’s not a country in the world that trusts us. We’re always, as it were, committing adultery—like your fellow!—with the name of Heaven on our lips.’ He was jibing again at the subject of Macmaster’s monograph.
‘He never!’ Macmaster said in almost a stutter. ‘He never whined about Heaven.’
‘He did,’ Tietjens said. ‘The beastly poem you quoted ends:
“Better far though hearts may break,
Since we dare not love,
Part till we once more may meet
In a Heaven above.”‘
And Macmaster, who had been dreading that shot—for he never knew how much or how little of any given poem his friend would have by heart—Macmaster collapsed, as it were, into fussily getting down his dressing–cases and clubs from the rack, a task he usually left to a porter. Tietjens who, however much a train might be running into a station he was bound for, sat like a rock until it was dead–still, said:
‘Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there’s you fellows who can’t be trusted. And
