Parade's End (2 page)

‘Will you take Tommie for an indefinite period? Marchant will come with him. She offers to take charge of your two youngest as well, so you’ll save a maid, and I’ll pay their board and a bit over.’

The voice of his sister – from Yorkshire – had answered:

‘Certainly, Christopher.’ She was the wife of a vicar, near Groby, and she had several children.

To Macmaster Tietjens had said:

‘Sylvia has left me with that fellow Perowne.’

Macmaster had answered only: ‘Ah!’

Tietjens had continued:

‘I’m letting the house and warehousing the furniture. Tommie is going to my sister Effie. Marchant is going with him.’

Macmaster had said:

‘Then you’ll be wanting your old rooms.’ Macmaster occupied a very large storey of the Gray’s Inn buildings. After Tietjens had left him on his marriage he had continued to enjoy solitude, except that his man had moved down from the attic to the bedroom formerly occupied by Tietjens.

Tietjens said:

‘I’ll come in to-morrow night if I may. That will give Ferens time to get back into his attic.’

That morning, at breakfast, four months having passed, Tietjens had received a letter from his wife. She asked, without any contrition at all, to be taken back. She was fed up with Perowne and Brittany.

Tietjens looked up at Macmaster. Macmaster was already half out of his chair, looking at him with enlarged, steel-blue eyes, his beard quivering. By the time Tietjens spoke Macmaster had his hand on the neck of the cut-glass brandy decanter in the brown wood tantalus.

Tietjens said:

‘Sylvia asks me to take her back.’

Macmaster said:

‘Have a little of this!’

Tietjens was about to say: ‘No’, automatically. He changed that to:

‘Yes. Perhaps. A liqueur glass.’

He noticed that the lip of the decanter agitated, tinkling on the glass. Macmaster must be trembling.

Macmaster, with his back still turned, said:

‘Shall you take her back?’

Tietjens answered:

‘I imagine so.’ The brandy warmed his chest in its descent. Macmaster said:

‘Better have another.’

Tietjens answered:

‘Yes. Thanks.’

Macmaster went on with his breakfast and his letters. So did Tietjens. Ferens came in, removed the bacon plates and set on the table a silver water-heated dish that contained poached eggs and haddock. A long time afterwards Tietjens said:

‘Yes, in principle I’m determined to. But I shall take three days to think out the details.’

He seemed to have no feelings about the matter. Certain insolent phrases in Sylvia’s letter hung in his mind. He preferred a letter like that. The brandy made no difference to his mentality, but it seemed to keep him from shivering.

Macmaster said:

‘Suppose we go down to Rye by the 11.40. We could get a round after tea now the days are long. I want to call on a parson near there. He has helped me with my book.’

Tietjens said:

‘Did your poet know parsons? But of course he did. Duchemin is the name, isn’t it?’

Macmaster said:

‘We could call about 2.30. That will be all right in the country. We stay till four with a cab outside. We can be on the first tee at five. If we like the course we’ll stay next day: then Tuesday at Hythe and Wednesday at Sandwich. Or we could stay at Rye all your three days.’

‘It will probably suit me better to keep moving,’ Tietjens said. ‘There are those British Columbia figures of yours. If we took a cab now I could finish them for you in an hour and twelve minutes. Then British North America can go to the printers. It’s only 8.30 now.’

Macmaster said, with some concern:

‘Oh, but you
couldn’t
. I can make our going all right with Sir Reginald.’

Tietjens said:

‘Oh, yes I can. Ingleby will be pleased if you tell him they’re finished. I’ll have them ready for you to give him when he comes at ten.’

Macmaster said:

‘What an extraordinary fellow you are, Chrissie. Almost a genius!’

‘Oh,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I was looking at your papers yesterday after you’d left and I’ve got most of the totals in my head. I was thinking about them before I went to sleep. I think you make a mistake in overestimating the pull of Klondyke this year on the population. The passes are open, but relatively no one is going through. I’ll add a note to that effect.’

In the cab he said:

‘I’m sorry to bother you with my beastly affairs. But how will it affect you and the office?’

‘The office,’ Macmaster said, ‘not at all. It is supposed that Sylvia is nursing Mrs. Satterthwaite abroad. As for me, I wish …’ – he closed his small, strong teeth – ‘I wish you would drag the woman through the mud. By God I do! Why should she mangle you for the rest of your life? She’s done enough!’

Tietjens gazed out over the flap of the cab.

That explained a question. Some days before, a young man, a friend of his wife’s rather than of his own, had approached him in the club and had said that he hoped Mrs. Satterthwaite – his wife’s mother – was better. He said now:

‘I see. Mrs. Satterthwaite has probably gone abroad to cover up Sylvia’s retreat. She’s a sensible woman, if a bitch.’

The hansom ran through nearly empty streets, it being very early for the public official quarters. The hoofs of the horse clattered precipitately. Tietjens preferred a hansom, horses being made for gentlefolk. He had known nothing of how his fellows had viewed his affairs. It was breaking up a great, numb inertia to enquire.

During the last few months he had employed himself in tabulating from memory the errors in the
Encyclopædia Britannica
, of which a new edition had lately appeared. He had even written an article for a dull monthly on the subject. It had been so caustic as to miss its mark, rather.
He
despised people who used works of reference; but the point of view had been so unfamiliar that his article had galled no one’s withers, except possibly Macmaster’s. Actually it had pleased Sir Reginald Ingleby, who had been glad to think that he had under him a young man with a memory so tenacious, and so encyclopædic a knowledge… .

That had been a congenial occupation, like a long drowse. Now he had to make enquiries. He said:

‘And my breaking up the establishment at twenty-nine? How’s that viewed? I’m not going to have a house again.’

‘It’s considered,’ Macmaster answered, ‘that Lowndes Street did not agree with Mrs. Satterthwaite. That accounted for her illness. Drains wrong. I may say that Sir Reginald entirely – expressly – approves. He does not think that young married men in Government offices should keep up expensive establishments in the S.W. district.’

Tietjens said:

‘Damn him.’ He added: ‘He’s probably right, though.’ He then said: ‘Thanks. That’s all I want to know. A certain discredit has always attached to cuckolds. Very properly. A man ought to be able to keep his wife.’

Macmaster exclaimed anxiously:

‘No! No! Chrissie.’

Tietjens continued:

‘And a first-class public office is very like a public school. It might very well object to having a man whose wife had bolted amongst its members. I remember Clifton hated it when the Governors decided to admit the first Jew and the first nigger.’

Macmaster said:

‘I wish you wouldn’t go on.’

‘There was a fellow,’ Tietjens continued, ‘whose land was next to ours. Conder his name was. His wife was habitually unfaithful to him. She used to retire with some fellow for three months out of every year. Conder never moved a finger. But we felt Groby and the neighbourhood were unsafe. It was awkward introducing him – not to mention her – in your drawing-room. All sorts of awkwardnesses. Everyone knew the younger children weren’t Conder’s. A fellow married the youngest daughter and took over the hounds. And not a soul called on her. It wasn’t rational or just. But that’s why society distrusts the
cuckold,
really. It never knows when it mayn’t be driven into something irrational and unjust.’

‘But you
aren’t
,’ Macmaster said with real anguish, ‘going to let Sylvia behave like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Tietjens said. ‘How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman accepts them. If the woman won’t divorce, he
must
accept them, and it gets talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You and, I suppose, Mrs. Satterthwaite between you. But you won’t be always there. Or I might come across another woman.’

Macmaster said:

‘Ah!’ and after a moment:

‘What then?’

Tietjens said:

‘God knows … There’s that poor little beggar to be considered. Marchant says he’s beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already.’

Macmaster said:

‘If it wasn’t for that… . That would be a solution.’

Tietjens said: ‘Ah!’

When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled arch, reaching up, he said:

‘You’ve been giving the mare less licorice in her mash. I told you she’d go better.’

The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said:

‘Ah! Trust you to remember, sir.’

In the train, from beneath his pile of polished dressing and despatch cases – Tietjens had thrown his immense kit-bag with his own hands into the guard’s van – Macmaster looked across at his friend. It was, for him, a great day. Across his face were the proof-sheets of his first, small, delicate-looking volume… . A small page, the type black and still odorous! He had the agreeable smell of the printer’s ink in his nostrils; the fresh paper was still a little damp. In his white, rather spatulate, always slightly cold fingers, was the pressure of the small, flat, gold pencil he had purchased especially for these corrections. He had found none to make.

He had expected a wallowing of pleasure – almost the only sensuous pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean task. But to wallow in your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savour of your own shrewd pawkinesses, to feel your rhythm balanced and yet sober – that is a pleasure beyond most, and an inexpensive one at that. He had had it from mere ‘articles’ – on the philosophies and domestic lives of such great figures as Carlyle and Mill, or on the expansion of inter-colonial trade. This was a book.

He relied upon it to consolidate his position. In the office they were mostly ‘born’, and not vastly sympathetic. There was a sprinkling, too – it was beginning to be a large one – of young men who had obtained their entry by merit or by sheer industry. These watched promotions jealously, discerning nepotic increases of increment and clamouring amongst themselves at favouritisms.

To these he had been able to turn a cold shoulder. His intimacy with Tietjens permitted him to be rather on the ‘born’ side of the institution, his agreeableness – he knew he was agreeable and useful! – to Sir Reginald Ingleby, protecting him in the main from unpleasantness. His ‘articles’ had given him a certain right to an austerity of demeanour; his book he trusted to let him adopt an almost judicial attitude. He would then be
the
Mr. Macmaster, the critic, the authority. And the first-class departments are not averse to having distinguished men as ornaments to their company; at any rate the promotion of the distinguished are not objected to. So Macmaster saw – almost physically – Sir Reginald Ingleby perceiving the empressement with which his valued subordinate was treated in the drawing-rooms of Mrs. Leamington, Mrs. Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. de Limoux; Sir Reginald would perceive that, for he was not a reader himself of much else than Government publications, and he would feel fairly safe in making easy the path of his critically gifted and austere young helper. The son of a very poor shipping clerk in an obscure Scotch harbour town, Macmaster had very early decided on the career that he would make. As between the heroes of Mr. Smiles, an author enormously popular in Macmaster’s boyhood, and the more distinctly intellectual achievements open to the very poor
Scot,
Macmaster had had no difficulty in choosing. A pit lad
may
rise to be a mine owner; a hard, gifted, unsleeping Scots youth, pursuing unobtrusively and unobjectionably a course of study and of public usefulness,
will
certainly achieve distinction, security and the quiet admiration of those around him. It was the difference between the
may
and the
will
, and Macmaster had had no difficulty in making his choice. He saw himself by now almost certain of a career that should give him at fifty a knighthood, and long before that a competence, a drawing-room of his own, and a lady who should contribute to his unobtrusive fame, she moving about, in that room, amongst the best of the intellects of the day, gracious, devoted, a tribute at once to his discernment and his achievements. Without some disaster he was sure of himself. Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women. Against the first two he knew himself immune, though his expenses had a tendency to outrun his income, and he was always a little in debt to Tietjens. Tietjens fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women, and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberative, gracious to everyone around her. He could almost hear the very rustle of her garments.

And yet … He had had passages when a sort of blind unreason had attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked. It was only Tietjens who had saved him from the most questionable entanglements.

‘Hang it,’ Tietjens would say, ‘don’t get messing round that trollop. All you could do with her would be to set her up in a tobacco shop, and she would be tearing your beard out inside the quarter. Let alone, you can’t afford it.’