Parade's End (85 page)

‘We appear,’ Valentine said, ‘to be getting into an extraordinary muddle.’

She added:

‘I haven’t, as you seem to think, been defending Mrs. Tietjens. I would have. I would at any time. I have always thought of her as beautiful and kind. But I heard you say the words: ‘
has been behaving very badly
,’ and I thought you meant that Captain Tietjens had. I denied it. If you meant that his wife has, I deny it, too. She’s an admirable wife … and mother … that sort of thing, for all I know… .’

She said to herself:

‘Now why do I say that? What’s Hecuba to me?’ and then:

‘It’s to defend
his
honour, of course … I’m trying to present Captain Tietjens as English Country Gentleman complete with admirably arranged establishment, stables,
kennels,
spouse, offspring… . That’s a queer thing to want to do!’

Miss Wanostrocht who had breathed deeply said now:

‘I’m extremely glad to hear that. Lady Macmaster certainly said that Mrs. Tietjens was – let us say – at least a neglectful wife… . Vain, you know; idle; overdressed… . All that… . And you appeared to defend Mrs. Tietjens.’

‘She’s a smart woman in smart Society,’ Valentine said, ‘but it’s with her husband’s concurrence. She has a right to be… .’

‘We shouldn’t,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘be in the extraordinary muddle to which you referred if you did not so continually interrupt me. I was trying to say that, for you, an inexperienced girl, brought up in a sheltered home, no pitfall could be more dangerous than a man with a wife who neglected her duties!’

Valentine said:

‘You will have to excuse my interrupting you. It
is
, you know, rather more my funeral than yours.’

Miss Wanostrocht said quickly:

‘You can’t say that. You don’t know how ardently …’

Valentine said:

‘Yes, yes… . Your
schwaerm
for my father’s memory and all. But my father couldn’t bring it about that I should lead a sheltered life… . I’m about as experienced as any girl of the lower classes… . No doubt it was his doing, but don’t make any mistakes.’

She added:

‘Still, it’s I that’s the corpse. You’re conducting the inquest. So it’s more fun for you.’

Miss Wanostrocht had grown slightly pale:

‘If; if …’ she stammered slightly, ‘by “experience” you mean …’

‘I don’t,’ Valentine exclaimed, ‘and you have no right to infer that I do on the strength of a conversation you’ve had, but shouldn’t have had, with one of the worst tongues in London… . I mean that my father left us so that I had to earn my and my mother’s living as a servant for some months after his death. That was what his training came to. But I can look after myself… . In consequence …’

Miss Wanostrocht had thrown herself back in her chair.

‘But …’ she exclaimed; she had grown completely pale – like discoloured wax. ‘There was a subscription… . We …’ she began: ‘We knew that he hadn’t …’

‘You subscribed,’ Valentine said, ‘to purchase his library and presented it to his wife … who had nothing to eat but what my wages as a tweeny maid got for her.’ But before the pallor of the other lady she tried to add a touch of generosity: ‘Of course the subscribers wanted, very naturally, to preserve as much as they could of his personality. A man’s books are very much himself. That was all right.’ She added: ‘All the same I had that training: in a suburban basement. So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In Ealing.’

Miss Wanostrocht said faintly:

‘This is very dreadful!’

‘It isn’t really!’ Valentine said. ‘I wasn’t badly treated as tweeny maids go. It would have been better if the Mistress hadn’t been a constant invalid and the cook constantly drunk… . After that I did a little office work. For the suffragettes. That was after old Mr. Tietjens came back from abroad and gave mother some work on a paper he owned. We scrambled along then, somehow. Old Mr. Tietjens was father’s greatest friend, so father’s side, as you might say, turned up trumps – if you like to think that to console you… .’

Miss Wanostrocht was bending her face down over her table, presumably to hide a little of it from Valentine or to avoid the girl’s eyes.

Valentine went on:

‘One knows all about the conflict between a man’s private duties and his public achievements. But with a very little less of the flamboyant in his life my father might have left us very much better off. It isn’t what I
want
– to be a cross between a sergeant in the army and an upper housemaid. Any more than I wanted to be an under one.’

Miss Wanostrocht uttered an ‘Oh!’ of pain. She exclaimed rapidly:

‘It was your moral rather than your mere athletic influence that made me so glad to have you here… . It was because I felt that you did not set such a high value on the physical… .’

‘Well, you aren’t going to have me here much longer,’ Valentine said. ‘Not an instant more than I can in decency help. I’m going to …’

She said to herself:

‘What on earth am I going to do? … What do I want?’

She wanted to lie in a hammock beside a blue, tideless sea and think about Tibullus … There was no nonsense about her. She did not want to engage in intellectual pursuits herself. She had not the training. But she intended to enjoy the more luxurious forms of the intellectual products of others… . That appeared to be the moral of the day!

And, looking rather minutely at Miss Wanostrocht’s inclined face, she wondered if, in the history of the world, there had ever been such another day. Had Miss Wanostrocht, for instance, ever known what it was to have a man come back. Ah, but amid the tumult of a million other men coming back! A collective impulse to slacken off! Immense! Softening!

Miss Wanostrocht had apparently loved her father. No doubt in company with fifty damsels. Did they ever get a collective kick out of that affair? It was even possible that she had spoken as she had …
pour cause
. Warning her, Valentine, against the deleterious effect of being connected with a man whose wife was unsatisfactory… . Because the fifty damsels had all, in duty bound, thought that her mother was an unsatisfactory wife for the brilliant, grey-black-haired Eminence with the figure of a stripling that her father had been… . They had probably thought that, without the untidy figure of Mrs. Wannop as a weight upon him, he might have become … Well, with one of
them
! … anything! Any sort of figure in the councils of the nation. Why not Prime Minister? For along with his pedagogic theories he had had political occupations. He had certainly had the friendship of Disraeli. He supplied – it was historic! – materials for eternally famous, meretricious speeches. He would have been head-trainer of the Empire’s pro-consuls if the other fellow, at Balliol, had not got in first… . As it was he had had to specialise in the Education of Women. Building up Primrose Dames… .

So Miss Wanostrocht warned her against the deleterious effect of neglected wives upon young, attached
virgins!
It probably
was
deleterious. Where would she, Valentine Wannop, have been by now if she had thought that Sylvia Tietjens was really a bad one?

Miss Wanostrocht said, as if with sudden anxiety:

‘You are going to do what? You propose to do what?’

Valentine said:

‘Obviously after your conversation with Edith Ethel you won’t be so glad to have me here. My moral influence has not been brightened in aspect!’ A wave of passionate resentment swept over her.

‘Look here,’ she said, ‘if you think that I am prepared to …’

She stopped however. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not going to introduce the housemaid note. But you will probably see that this is irritating.’ She added: ‘I would have the case of Pettigul One looked into, if I were you. It might become epidemic in a big school like this. And we’ve no means of knowing where we stand nowadays!’

PART TWO

MONTHS AND MONTHS
before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head – and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs – were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. These waves of conviction recurred continually: he was constantly glancing aside and upwards at that splash; it was in the shape of the comb of a healthy rooster; it gleamed, with five serrations, in the just-beginning light that shone along the thin, unroofed channel in the gravel slope. Wet half-light, just flickering; more visible there than in the surrounding desolation because the deep, narrow channel framed a section of just-illuminated rift in the watery eastwards!

Twice he had stood up on a rifleman’s step enforced by a bully-beef case to look over – in the last few minutes. Each time, on stepping down again, he had been struck by that phenomenon: the light seen from the trench seemed if not brighter, then more definite. So, from the bottom of a pit-shaft in broad day you can see the stars. The wind was light, but from the north-west. They had there the weariness of a beaten army, the weariness of having to begin always new days again… .

He glanced aside and upwards: that cockscomb of phosphorescence… . He felt waves of some X force propelling his temples towards it. He wondered if perhaps the night before he had not observed that that was a patch of reinforced concrete, therefore more resistant. He might of course have observed that and then forgotten it. He hadn’t! It was therefore irrational.

If you are lying down under fire – flat under pretty smart fire – and you have only a paper bag in front of your head for cover you feel immeasurably safer than you do without it. You have a mind at rest. This must be the same thing.

It remained dark and quiet. It was forty-five minutes. It became forty-four … Forty-three … Forty-two minutes and thirty seconds before a crucial moment and the slate grey cases of miniature metal pineapples had not come from the bothering place… . Who knew if there was anyone in charge there?

Twice that night he had sent runners back. No results yet. That bothering fellow might quite well have forgotten to leave a substitute. That was not likely. A careful man. But a man with a mania might forget. Still it was not likely! …

Thoughts menaced him as clouds threaten the heads of mountains, but for the moment they kept away. It was quiet; the wet cool air was agreeable. They had autumn mornings that felt like that in Yorkshire. The wheels of his physique moved smoothly; he was more free in the chest than he had been for months.

A single immense cannon, at a tremendous distance, said something. Something sulky. Aroused in its sleep and protesting. But it was not a signal to begin anything. Too heavy. Firing at something at a tremendous distance. At Paris, maybe, or the North Pole, or the moon! They were capable of that, those fellows!

It would be a tremendous piece of frightfulness to hit the moon. Great gain in prestige. And useless. There was no knowing what they would not be up to, as long as it was stupid and useless. And, naturally, boring… . And it was a mistake to be boring. One went on fighting to get rid of those bores – as you would to get rid of a bore in a club.

It was more descriptive to call what had spoken a cannon than a gun – though it was not done in the best local circles. It was all right to call 75s or the implements of the horse artillery ‘guns’; they were mobile and toy-like. But those immense things were cannons; the sullen muzzles always elevated. Sullen, like cathedral dignitaries or butlers. The thickness of barrel compared to the bore
appeared
enormous as they pointed at the moon, or Paris, or Nova Scotia.

Well, that cannon had not announced anything except itself! It was not the beginning of any barrage; our own fellows were not pooping off to shut it up. It had just announced itself, saying protestingly, ‘
CAN
…
NON
’, and its shell soaring away to an enormous height caught the reflection of the unrisen sun on its base. A shining disc, like a halo in flight… . Pretty! A pretty motive for a decoration, tiny pretty planes up on a blue sky amongst shiny, flying haloes! Dragonflies amongst saints… . No, ‘with angels and archangels!’ … Well, one had seen it!

Cannon… . Yes, that was the right thing to call them. Like the up-ended, rusted things that stuck up out of parades when one had been a child.

No, not the signal for a barrage! A good thing! One might as well say ‘Thank Goodness’, for the later they began the less long it lasted… . Less long it lasted was ugly alliteration. Sooner it was over was better… . No doubt half-past eight or at half-past eight to the stroke those boring fellows would let off their usual offering, probably plump, right on top of that spot… . As far as one could tell three salvoes of a dozen shells each at half-minute intervals between the salvoes. Perhaps salvoes was not the right word. Damn all artillery, anyhow!

Why did those fellows do it! Every morning at half-past eight; every afternoon at half-past two. Presumably just to show that they were still alive, and still boring. They were methodical. That was their secret. The secret of their boredom. Trying to kill them was like trying to shut up Liberals who would talk party politics in a nonpolitical club… . Had to be done, though! Otherwise the world was no place for … Oh, post-prandial naps! … Simple philosophy of the contest! … Forty minutes! And he glanced aside and upwards at the phosphorescent cockscomb! Within his mind something said that if he were only suspended up there… .

He stepped once more on to the rifle-step and on to the bully-beef-case. He elevated his head cautiously: grey desolation sloped down and away F.R.R.R.r.r.r.! A gentle purring sound!

He was automatically back, on the duckboard, his breakfast hurting his chest. He said:

‘By Jove! I got the fright of my life!’ A laugh was called for; he managed it, his whole stomach shaking. And cold!

A head in a metal pudding-basin – a Suffolk type of blond head, pushed itself from a withdrawn curtain of sacking in the gravel wall beside him, at his back. A voice said with concern: