The Last Post

“Oh, Rokehope is a pleasant place
If the fause thieves would let it be.”

Border Ballad

Madame et cher Confrère,

I have for some years now had to consider you as being my fairy godmother in the United States—though how one can have a godmother junior to oneself I have yet to figure out. Perhaps godmothers of the kind that can turn pumpkins into glass coaches can achieve miracles in seniority. Or, when I come to think of it, I seem to remember that, for a whole tribe of Incas converted who knows how and simultaneously, in the days of the Conquistadores, an Infanta of Spain went to the font, she being, whatever her age, of necessity junior to the elders at least of the tribe. That, however, is all a trifle—except for my gratitude!—compared with your present responsibility.

For, but for you, this book would only nebularly have existed—in space, in my brain, where you will, so it be not on paper and between boards. Save, that is to say, for your stern, contemptuous and almost virulent insistence on knowing “what became of Tietjens” I never should have conducted this chronicle to the stage it has now reached. The soldier, tired of war’s alarms, it has always seemed to me, might be allowed to rest beneath bowery vines. But you would not have it so.

You—and for once you align yourself with the Great Public—demand an ending: if possible a happy ending. Alas, I cannot provide you with the end of Tietjens for a reason upon which I will later dwell—but I here provide you with a slice of one of Christopher’s later days so that you may know how more or less he at present stands. For in this world of ours though lives may end Affairs do not. Even though Valentine and Tietjens were dead the Affair that they set going would go rolling on down the generations—Mark junior and Mrs. Lowther, the unborn child and the rest will go on beneath the nut-boughs or over the seas—or in the best Clubs. It is not your day nor mine that shall see the end of them.

And think: How many people have we not known intimately and seen daily for years! Then they move into another township, and, bad correspondents as we all are and sit-at-homes as Fate makes most of us, they drop out of our sights. They may—those friends of yours—go and settle in Paris. You may see them for fortnights at decennial intervals, or you may not.

So I would have preferred to let it be with Tietjens, but you would not have it. I have always jeered at authors who sentimentalised over their characters, and after finishing a book exclaim like, say, Thackeray: “Roll up the curtains; put the puppets in their boxes; quench the tallow footlights” … something like that. But I am bound to say that in certain moods in Avignon this year it would less have surprised me to go up to the upper chamber of the mill where I wrote and there to find that friend of mine than to find you. For you are to remember that for me Tietjens is the recreation of a friend I had—a friend so vivid to me that though he died many years ago I cannot feel that he is yet dead. In the dedicatory letter of an earlier instalment of this series of books I said that in these volumes I was trying to project how this world would have appeared to that friend today and how, in it, he would have acted—or you, I believe, would say reacted. And that is the exact truth of the matter.

Do you not find—you yourself, too—that, however it may be with the mass of humanity, in the case of certain dead people you cannot feel that they are indeed gone from this world? You can only know it, you can only believe it. That is, at any rate, the case with me—and in my case the world daily becomes more and more peopled with such revenants and less and less with those who still walk this earth. It is only yesterday that I read of the death of another human being who will for the rest of time have for me that effect. That person died thousands of miles away, and yesterday it would have astonished me if she had walked into my room here in New York. Today it would no longer. It would have the aspect of the simplest thing in the world.

So then, for me, it is with Tietjens. With his prototype I set out on several enterprises—one of them being a considerable periodical publication of a Tory kind—and for many years I was accustomed as it were to “set” my mind by his comments on public or other affairs. He was, as I have elsewhere said, the English Tory—the last English Tory, omniscient, slightly contemptuous—and sentimental in his human contacts. And for many years before I contemplated the writing of these books—before the War even—I was accustomed to ask myself not merely what he would have said of certain public or private affairs, but how he would have acted in certain positions. And I do so still. I have only to say to my mind, as the child on the knees of an adult says to its senior: “Tell us a fairy tale!”—I have only to say: “Tell us what he would here have done!” and at once he is there.

So, you see, I cannot tell you the end of Tietjens, for he will end only when I am beyond pens and paper. For me at this moment he is, oddly enough, in Avignon, rather disappointed in the quality of the Louis Seize furniture that he has found there, and seated in front of the Taverne Riche under the planes he is finding his Harris tweeds oppressive. Perhaps he is even mopping the whitish brow under his silver-streaked hair. And I have a strong itch to write to him that if he wants to find Louis Treize stuff of the most admirable—perfectly fabulous armoires and chests—for almost nothing, he should go westward into the Limousin to … But nothing shall make me here write that name. …

And so he will go jogging along with ups and downs and plenty of worries and some satisfaction, the Tory Englishman, running his head perhaps against fewer walls, perhaps against more, until I myself cease from those pursuits. … Perhaps he will go on even longer if you, as Marraine, succeed in conferring upon these works that longevity. …

But out and alas, now you can never write about me again: for it would, wouldn’t it? look too much like: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!

So don’t write about Tietjens: write your own projections of the lives around you in terms of your delicate and fierce art. Then you will find me still more

Part I

I

He lay staring at the withy binders of his thatch; the grass was infinitely green; his view embraced four counties; the roof was supported by six small oak sapling-trunks, roughly trimmed and brushed from above by apple boughs. French crab-apple! The hut had no sides.

The Italian proverb says: “He who allows the boughs of trees to spread above his roof, invites the doctor daily.” Words to that effect. He would have grinned, but that might have been seen.

For a man who never moved, his face was singularly walnut-coloured; his head, indenting the skim-milk white of the pillows should have been a gipsy’s, the dark, silvered hair cut extremely close, the whole face very carefully shaven and completely immobile. The eyes moved, however, with unusual vivacity, all the life of the man being concentrated in them and their lids.

Down the path that had been cut in swathes from the knee-high grass, and came from the stable to the hut, a heavy elderly peasant rolled in his gait. His over-long, hairy arms swung as if he needed an axe or a log or a full sack to make him a complete man. He was broad-beamed, in cord breeches, very tight in the buttock; he wore black leggings, an unbuttoned blue waistcoat, a striped flannel shirt, open at the perspiring neck, and a square, high hat of black felt.

He said:

“Want to be shifted?”

The man in the bed closed his eyelids slowly.

“ ’Ave a droper cider?”

The other again similarly closed his eyes. The standing man supported himself with an immense hand, gorilla-like, by one of the oaken posts.

“Best droper cider ever I tasted,” he said. “ ’Is Lordship give me. ’Is Lordship sester me: ‘Gunning,’ ’e ses, … ‘the day the vixen got into keeper’s coop enclosure …’ ”

He began and slowly completed a very long story, going to prove that English noble landlords preferred foxes to pheasants. Or should! English landowners of the right sort.

’Is Lordship would no more ’ave that vixen killed or so much as flurried, she being gravid like than. … Dreadful work a gravid vixen can do among encoops with pheasant poults. … Have to eat fer six or seven, she have! All a-growing. … So ’is Lordship sester Gunning. …

And then the description of the cider. … ’Ard! Thet cider was ’arder than a miser’s ’art or’n ol’ 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 thought.

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 foxhunting, pheasant-rearing, woodcraft, hedging, dyking, pig-rearing and the habits of King Edward when shooting. Smoking endless great cigars! One finished, light another, throw away the stub. …

Foxhunting, the sport of kings with only twenty percent 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.