Parade's End (104 page)

‘I’m pretty well. Weakish. I’ve just come out of hospital. Four days ago.’ He was never going back to that bloody show. He had his application for demobilisation in his pocket. The voice said:

‘Valentine thinks you are very ill. Very ill, indeed. She came to you because she thinks that.’ She hadn’t come,
then,
because … But, of course, she would not have. But she might have wanted them to spend Armistice Day together! She might have! A sense of disappointment went over him. Discouragement. He was very raw. That old devil, Campion! Still, one ought not to be as raw as that. He was saying, deferentially:

‘Oh, it was mental rather than physical. Though I had pneumonia all right.’ He went on saying that General Campion had put him in command over the escorts of German prisoners all through the lines of several armies. That really nearly had driven him mad. He couldn’t bear being a beastly gaoler.

Still – Still! – he saw those grey spectral shapes that had surrounded and interpenetrated all his later days. The image came over him with the mood of repulsion at odd moments – at the very oddest; without suggestion there floated before his eyes the image, the landscape of greyish forms. In thousands, seated on upturned buckets, with tins of fat from which they ate at their sides on the ground, holding up newspapers that were not really newspapers; on grey days. They were all round him. And he was their gaoler. He said: ‘A filthy job!’

Mrs. Wannop’s voice said:

‘Still, it’s kept you alive for us!’

He said:

‘I sometimes wish it hadn’t!’ He was astonished that he had said it; he was astonished at the bitterness of his voice. He added: ‘I don’t mean that in cold blood of course’, and he was again astonished at the deference in his voice. He was leaning down, positively, as if over a very distinguished, elderly, seated lady. He straightened himself. It struck him as distasteful hypocrisy to bow before an elderly lady when you entertained designs upon her daughter. Her voice said:

‘My dear boy … my dear, almost son …’

Panic overcame him. There was no mistaking those tones. He looked round at Valentine. She had her hands together as if she were wringing them. She said, exploring his face painfully with her eyes:

‘Oh, be kind to her. Be kind to her… .’

Then there had been revelation of their… you couldn’t call it intimacy!

He never liked her Girl Guide’s uniform. He liked her best in a white sweater and a fawn-coloured short skirt. She had taken off her hat – her cowboyish hat. She had had her hair cut. Her fair hair.

Mrs. Wannop said:

‘I’ve got to think that you have saved us. To-day I have to think that you have saved us… . And of all you have suffered.’ Her voice was melancholy, slow, and lofty.

Intense, hollow reverberations filled the house. He said:

‘That’s nothing. That’s over. You don’t have to think of it.’

The reverberations apparently reached her ear. She said:

‘I can’t hear you. There seems to be thunder.’

External silence came back. He said:

‘I was telling you not to think of my sufferings.’

She said:

‘Can’t you wait? You and she? Is there
no
…’ The reverberations began again. When he could again hear she was saying:

‘… Has had to contemplate such contingencies arising for one’s child. It is useless to contend with the tendency of one’s age. But I had hoped …’

The knocker below gave three isolated raps, but the echoes prolonged them. He said to Valentine:

‘That’s the knocking of a drunken man. But then half the population might well be drunk. If they knock again, go down and send them away.’

She said:

‘I’ll go in any case before they can knock again.’

She heard him say as she left the room – she could not help waiting for the end of the sentence; she
must
gather all that she could as to that agonising interview between her mother and her lover. Equally, she must go or she would go mad. It was no good saying that her head was screwed on straight. It wasn’t. It was as if it contained two balls of string with two ends. On the one her mother pulled, on the other, he… . She heard him say:

‘I don’t know. One has desperate need. Of talk. I have not really spoken to a soul for two years!’ Oh, blessed, adorable man! She heard him going on, getting into a stride of talk:

‘It’s that that’s desperate. I’ll tell you. I’ll give you an instance. I was carrying a boy. Under rifle-fire. His eye got knocked out. If I had left him where he was his eye would not have been knocked out. I thought at the time that he might have been drowned, but I ascertained afterwards that the water never rose high enough. So I am responsible for the loss of his eye. It’s a sort of monomania. You see, I am talking of it now. It recurs. Continuously. And to have to bear it in complete solitude …’

She was not frightened going now down the great stairs. They whispered, but she was like a calm Fatima.
He
was Sister Anne, and a brother, too. The enemy was fear. She must not fear. He rescued her from fear. It is to a woman that you must come for refuge from regrets about a boy’s eyes.

Her physical interior turned within her. He had been under fire! He might never have been there, a grey badger, a tender, tender grey badger leaning down and holding a telephone. Explaining things with tender care. It was lovely how he spoke to her mother; it was lovely that they were all three together. But her mother would keep them apart. She was taking the only way to keep them apart if she was talking to him as she had talked to her.

There was no knowing. She had heard him say:

He was pretty well… . ‘Thank God!’ … Weakish… . ‘Ah, give
me
the chance to cherish him!’ He had just come out of hospital. Four days ago. He had had pneumonia all right, but it had been mental rather than physical… .

Ah, the dreadful thing about the whole war was that it had been – the suffering had been – mental rather than physical. And they had not thought of it… . He had been under fire. She had pictured him always as being in a Base, thinking. If he had been killed it would not have been so dreadful for him. But now he had come back with his obsessions and mental troubles… . And he needed his woman! That was what was terrible. He had suffered mental torture and now his pity was being worked on to make him abstain from the woman that could atone.

Hitherto, she had thought of the War as physical suffering only; now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds. That remained. Men might stand up on hills, but the mental torture could not be expelled.

She ran suddenly down the steps that remained to her and was fumbling at the bolts of the front door. She was not skilful at that. She was thinking about the conversation that dreadfully she felt to be continuing. She must stop the knocking. The knocker had stayed for just long enough for the abstention of an impatient man knocking on a great door. Her mother was too cunning for them. With the cunning that makes the mother wild-duck tumble apparently broken-winged just under your feet to decoy you away from her little things. STORGE, Gilbert White calls it! For, of course, she could never have his lips upon hers when she thought of that crafty, beloved, grey Eminence sitting at home and shuddering… . But she
would
!

She found the gadget that opened the door – the third she had tried amongst incomprehensible, painted century-old fixings. The door came open exactly upon a frustrated sound. A man was being propelled towards her by the knocker to which he held… . She had saved
his
thoughts. Without the interruption of the knocker he might be able to see that mother’s device was just cunning. They were cunning, the great Victorians… . Oh, poor mother!

A horrible man in uniform looked at her hatefully, with piercing, hollow, black eyes in a fallen-away face. He said:

‘I must see that fellow Tietjens; you’re not Tietjens!’ As if she were defrauding him. ‘It’s urgent,’ he said. ‘About a sonnet. I was dismissed the Army yesterday.
His
doing. And Campion’s. His wife’s lover!’

She said fiercely:

‘He’s engaged. You can’t see him. If you want to see him you must wait!’ She felt horror that Tietjens should ever have had to do with such a brute beast. He was unshaven; black. And filled with hatred. He raised his voice to say:

‘I’m McKechnie. Captain McKechnie of the Ninth. Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prizeman! One of the Old Pals!’ He added: ‘Tietjens forced himself in on the Old Pals!’

She felt the contempt of the scholar’s daughter for the Prizeman; she felt that Apollo with Admetus was as nothing for sheer disgust compared with Tietjens buried in a band of such beings.

She said:

‘It is not necessary to shout. You can come in and wait.’

At all costs Tietjens must finish his conversation with her mother undisturbed. She led this fellow round the corner of the hall. A sort of wireless emanation seemed to connect her with the upper conversation. She was aware of it going on, through the wall above, diagonally; then through the ceiling in perpendicular waves. It seemed to work inside her head, her end of it, like waves, churning her mind.

She opened the shutters of the empty room round the corner, on the right. She did not wish to be alone in the dark with this hating man. She did not dare to go up and warn Tietjens. At all costs he must not be disturbed. It was not fair to call what her mother was doing, cunning. It was instinct, set in her breast by the Almighty, as the saying is… . Still, it was early-Victorian instinct! Tremendously cunning in itself.

The hateful man was grumbling:

‘He’s been sold up, I see. That’s what comes of selling your wife to Generals. To get promotion. They’re a cunning lot. But he overreached himself. Campion went back on him. But Campion, too, overreached
himself
… .’

She was looking out of the window, across the green square. Light was an agreeable thing. You could breathe more deeply when it was light… . Early-Victorian instinct! … The Mid-Victorians had had to loosen the bonds. Her mother, to be in the van of Mid-Victorian thought, had had to allow virtue to ‘irregular unions’. As long as they were high-minded. But the high-minded do not consummate irregular unions. So all her books had showed you high-minded creatures contracting irregular unions of the mind or of sympathy; but never carrying them to the necessary conclusion. They would have been ethically at liberty to, but they didn’t. They ran with the ethical hare, but hunted with the ecclesiastical hounds… . Still, of course, she could not go back on her premises just because it was her own daughter!

She said:

‘I beg your pardon!’ to that fellow. He had been saying:

‘They’re too damn cunning. They overreach themselves!’ Her mind spun. She did not know what he had been talking about. Her mind retained his words, but she did not understand what they meant. She had been sunk
in
the contemplation of Early-Victorian Thought. She remembered the long – call it ‘liaison’ of Edith Ethel Duchemin and little Vincent Macmaster. Edith Ethel, swathed in opaque crêpe, creeping widow-like along the very palings she could see across the square, to her high-minded adulteries, amidst the whispered applause of Mid-Victorian England. So circumspect and right! … She had her thoughts to keep, all right. Well under control! … Well, she had been patient.

The man said agonisedly:

‘My filthy, bloody, swinish uncle, Vincent Macmaster.
Sir
Vincent Macmaster! And this fellow Tietjens. All in a league against me… . Campion too… . But he overreached himself… . A man got into Tietjens’ wife’s bedroom. At the Base. And Campion sent him to the front. To get him killed. Her other lover, you see?’

She listened. She listened with all her attention straining. She wanted to be able to … She did not know what she wanted to be able to do! The man said:

‘Major-General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., K.C.M.G., tantivy tum, tum, etcetera. Too cunning. Too b—y cunning by half. Sent Tietjens to the front too to get him killed. Me too. We all three went up to Division in a box-car – Tietjens, his wife’s lover, and me. Tietjens confessed that bleedin’ swab. Like a beastly monk. Told him that when you die –
in articulo mortis
, but you won’t understand what that means! – your faculties are so numbed that you feel neither pain nor fear. He said death was no more than an anæsthetic. And that trembling, whining pup drank it in… . I can see them now. In a box-car. In a cutting.’

She said:

‘You’ve had shell-shock? You’ve got shell-shock now!’

He said, like a badger snapping:

‘I haven’t. I’ve got a bad wife. Like Tietjens. At least she isn’t a bad wife. She’s a woman with appetites. She satisfies her appetites. That’s why they’re hoofing me out of the Army. But at least, I don’t sell her to Generals. To Major-General Lord Edward Campion, VC., K.C.M.G., etc. I got divorce leave and didn’t divorce her. Then I got second divorce leave. And didn’t divorce her. It’s against my principles. She lives with a British Museum Palæontologist and he’d lose his job. I owe that fellow Tietjens a
hundred
and seventy quid. Over my second divorce leave. I can’t pay him. I didn’t divorce, but I’ve spent the money. Going about with my wife and her friend. On principle!’

He spoke so inexhaustibly and fast, and his topics changed so quickly that she could do no more than let the words go into her ears. She listened to the words and stored them up. One main line of topic held her; otherwise she could not think. She only let her eyes run over the friezes of the opposite houses. She gathered that Tietjens had been unjustly dismissed by Campion, whilst saving two lives under fire. McKechnie grudgingly admitted heroism to Tietjens in order to blacken the General. The General wanted Sylvia Tietjens. So as to get her he had sent Tietjens into the hottest part of the line. But Tietjens had refused to get killed. He had a charmed life. That was Provvy spiting the General. All the same, Providence could not like Tietjens, a cully who comforted his wife’s lover. A dirty thing to do. When Tietjens would not be killed the General came down into the Line and
strafed
him to Hell. Didn’t she, Valentine, understand why? He wanted Tietjens cashiered so that he, Campion, might be less disgustingly disgraced for taking up with the wife. But he had overreached himself. You can’t be cashiered for not being on the spot to lick a General’s boots when you are saving life under rifle-fire. So the General had to withdraw his words and find Tietjens a dirty scavenger’s job. Made a bleedin’ gaoler of him!