The Last Post quotes

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.

Casimir-Bar, the lovers of married women, housemaids. …

Her mind, in fact, was like a cupboard, stuffed, packed with the most incongruous materials, tools, vessels and debris.

Once the door was opened you never knew what would tumble out or be followed by what.

“

Thank God there is one woman-Tietjens who is not a whore and a bitch!

” He winced a little; her tears had fallen on his face. For the first time she had said: “Mon pauvre homme, ce qu’ils ont fait de toi!” She had been hurrying from the room when Christopher had stopped her. Mark had said:

Millicent de Bray Pape. And hasn’t it struck you that but for his depravity—unbridled depravity—your brother might today be operating in Capel Court instead of peddling old furniture at the end of the world?”

“It’s nervousness that makes me talk like this. I have always been shy in the presence of notorious libertines. That is my education.”

Her name conveyed to him that this lady was going to occupy Groby. He saw no objection to it. She had, indeed, written to ask him if he saw any objection to it.

Now they would make a beastly row with that instrument. On Armistice Day they had played the Last Post on the steps of the church under Marie Léonie’s windows. …

The Last Post!⁠ ⁠… The Last of England!

He remembered thinking that. He had not by then had the full terms of that surrender, but he had had a dose enough of Christopher’s stuck-piggedness! … A full dose! He didn’t say he didn’t deserve it.

de Bray Pape—that he did not speak. Not to them, not to anybody. He was finished with the world. He perceived the trend of its actions, listened to its aspirations, and even to its prayers, but he would never again stir lip or finger.

It was like being dead⁠—or being God.

This boy was apparently asking for absolution. He was of opinion that it was not a very sporting thing of himself and Mrs. Bray to come there. …

He could not remember that, after childhood, he had ever had a penny out of Groby. They would not accept that post; they had taken others. …

Well this was his, Mark’s, last post.⁠ ⁠… He could have smiled at his grim joke.

Of Christopher he was not so sure. That ass was a terrific sentimentalist. Probably he would have liked to be a great landowner, keeping up the gates on the estate—like Fittleworth, who was a perfect lunatic about gates.

… That was the sort of thing that would happen to a Tietjens of the Christopher variety: to any Tietjens who would not get out or get under as he, Mark, had done.

Tietjenses took what they damn well got for doing what they damn well wanted to.

Well, it landed them in that sort of post. … A last post, for, if that boy was not Christopher’s, Groby went out of Tietjens hands. There would be no more Tietjenses. Spelden might well be justified.

Mark felt his bowels turning over within him with disgust. … The gal—that fellow’s half-sister as like as not—was waiting in an empty house for him to go and seduce her. In order to celebrate the salvation of the world by seven million deaths!

If you seduce a girl you don’t do it on forty pounds: you accept Groby and three, seven, ten thousand a year.

So he had told Christopher.

It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead. You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you mad.

The Dead ought to have all they could get.

If she had not made the necessary allowances that would have seemed to Marie Léonie an exaggerated sentiment.

There would be the title. She quite definitely did not want the title, and it would become more difficult to injure Christopher. People with titles and great possessions are vastly more difficult to discredit than impoverished commoners, because the scale of morality changes.

Titles and great possessions expose you to great temptations: it is scandalous, on the other hand, that the indigent should have any fun!

So that, sitting rather restfully in the sunlight on her horse, Sylvia felt like a general who is losing the fruits of victory. She did not much care. She had got down Groby Great Tree:

Suddenly it reminded her of her childhood. Her father had had a head gardener just as gnarled and just as apparently autocratic. That was it. She had not been much in the country for thirty years. Apparently country people had not changed much.

Times change; people not so much.

For it came back to her with sudden extraordinary clearness. The side of a greenhouse, down there in the west where she had been “Miss Sylvia, oh Miss Sylvia!”

She could not continue.

You cannot very well tell a person that their loathsomeness is so infectious as to spoil your baby’s bathing-place! It is not done!

Marie Léonie said in French to Mrs. de Bray Pape that Mrs. Tietjens did not require her presence. Mrs. de Bray Pape did not understand. It is difficult for a Maintenon to understand that her presence is not required!

Marie Léonie said in French to Mrs. de Bray Pape that Mrs. Tietjens did not require her presence. Mrs. de Bray Pape did not understand.

It is difficult for a Maintenon to understand that her presence is not required!

The first time that she, Valentine, had seen that face, in Edith Ethel’s drawing-room, she had thought how kind … how blindingly kind it was. When the lips had approached her mother’s cheek the tears had been in Valentine’s eyes.