Parade's End (108 page)

Her grandmother Bourdreau remembered a crockery-merchant of the ambulating sort who had once filled one of those implements – a
vase de nuit
– but of course new, with milk and had offered the whole gratuitously to any passer-by who would drink the milk. A young woman called Laborde accepted his challenge there in the
market-place
of Noisy-Lebrun. She has lost her fiancé who found the gesture exaggerated. But he was a farceur, that crockery-dealer!

She drew from the pocket of her pinafore several folded pages of a newspaper and from under the bed a double picture-frame – two frames hinged together so that they would close. She inserted a sheet of the paper between the two frames and then hung the whole on a piece of picture wire that depended from the roof-tree beneath the thatch. Two braces of picture-wire too came from the supporting posts, to right and left. They held the picture-frames motionless and a little inclined towards Mark’s face. She was agreeable to look at, stretching up her arms. She lifted his torso with great strength and infinite solicitude, propped it a little with the pillows and looked to see that his eyes fell on the printed sheet. She said:

‘You can see well, like that?’

His eyes took in the fact that he was to read of the Newbury Summer Meeting and the one at Newcastle. He closed them twice to signify Yes! The tears came into hers. She murmured:

‘Mon pauvre homme! Mon pauvre homme! What they have done to you!’ She drew from another pocket in her pinafore a flask of eau de Cologne and a wad of cotton-wool. With that, moistened, she wiped even more solicitously his face and then his thin, mahogany hands which she uncovered. She had the air of women in France when they change the white satin clothes and wash the faces of favourite Virgins at the church doors in August.

Then she stood back and apostrophised him. He took in that the King’s filly had won the Berkshire Foal plate and the horse of a friend the Seaton Delaval Handicap, at Newcastle. Both might have been expected. He had meant to go to the Newcastle meeting this year and give Newbury a by. During the last year when he had gone racing he had done rather well at Newbury so he had then thought he would try Newcastle for a change and, whilst he was there, take a look at Groby and see what that bitch Sylvia was doing with the house. Well, that was done with. They would presumably bury him at Groby.

She said, in deep, rehearsed, tones:

‘My Man!’ She might almost have well said: ‘My Deity!’ ‘What sort of life is this we lead here? Was there ever anything so singular and unreasonable? If we sit to drink a cup of tea, the cup may at any moment be snatched from our mouths; if we recline upon a divan – at any moment the divan may go. I do not comment on this that you lie by night as by day for ever here in the open air, for I understand that it is by your desire and consent that you lie here and I will never exhibit aversion from that which you desire and that to which you consent. But cannot you bring it about that we should inhabit a house of some reason, one more suited to human beings of this age, and one that is less of a procession of goods and chattles? You can bring that about. You are all-powerful here. I do not know what are your resources. It was never your habit to tell me. You kept me in comfort. Never did I express a desire that you did not satisfy, though it is true that my desires were always reasonable. So I know nothing though I read once in a paper that you were a man of extravagant riches and that can hardly all have vanished for there can have been fewer men of as great a frugality and you were always fortunate and moderate in your wagers. So I know nothing and I would scorn to ask of these others, for that would imply doubt of your trust in me. I do not doubt that you have made arrangements for my future comfort and I am in no uncertainty of the continuance of those arrangements. It is not material fears that I have. But all this appears to be a madness. Why are we here? What is the meaning of all this? Why do you inhabit this singular erection? It may be that the open air is of necessity for your malady. I do not believe that you lived in perpetual currents of air in your chambers, though I never saw them. But on the days you gave to me you had everything of the most comfortable and you seemed contented with my arrangements. And your brother and his woman appear so mad in all the other affairs of life that they may well be mad in this also. Why then will you not end it? You have the power. You are all-powerful here. Your brother will spring from one corner to the other of this lugubrious place in order to anticipate your slightest wish.
Elle
, too!’

Stretching out her hands she had the air of a Greek woman who invoked a deity, she was so large and fair and
her
hair was so luxuriantly blond. And indeed, to her, in his mystery and silence he had the air of a deity who could discharge unthinkable darts and vouchsafe unimaginable favours. Though all their circumstances had changed, that had not changed, so that even his immobility enhanced his mystery. In all their life together, not merely here, he had been silent whilst she had talked. On the two regular days of the week on which he had been used to visit her, from the moment when she would open her door exactly at seven in the evening and see him in his bowler hat with his carefully rolled umbrella, his racing glasses slung diagonally across him, to the moment when, next morning at half-past ten she would brush his bowler and hand him that and his umbrella, he would hardly speak a word – he would speak such few words as to give the idea of an absolute taciturnity whilst she entertained him with an unceasing flow of talk and of comments on the news of the Quartier – of the French colonists of that part of London, or on the news in the French papers. He would remain seated on a hard chair, bending slightly forward, with, round the corners of his mouth little creases that suggested an endless, indulgent smile. Occasionally he would suggest that she should put half a sovereign upon a horse; occasionally he would bring her an opulent present, heavy gold bangles floridly chased and set with large emeralds, sumptuous furs, expensive travelling trunks for when she had visited Paris or went to the seaside in the autumn. That sort of thing. Once he had bought her a complete set of the works of Victor Hugo bound in purple morocco and all the works that had been illustrated by Gustave Doré, in green calf, once a hoof of a racehorse, trained in France, set in silver in the form of an inkstand. On her forty-first birthday – though she had no idea how he had ascertained that it was her forty-first birthday – he had given her a string of pearls and had taken her to a hotel at Brighton kept by an ex-prizefighter. He had told her to wear the pearls at dinner, but to be careful of them because they had cost five hundred pounds. He asked her once about her investment of her savings and when she had told him that she was investing in French
rentes viagères
he had told her that he could do better than that for her and afterwards, from time to time
he
had told her of odd but very profitable ways of investing small sums.

In this way, because his gifts filled her with rapture on account of their opulence and weightiness, he had assumed for her the aspect by degrees of a godhead who could bless – and possibly blast – inscrutably. For many years after he had first picked her up in the Edgware Road outside the old Apollo she had regarded him with suspicion since he was a man and it is the nature of men to treat women with treachery, lust, and meanness. Now she regarded herself as the companion of a godhead, secure and immune from the evil workings of Fortune – as if she had been seated on the shoulder of one of Jove’s eagles, beside his throne. The Immortals had been known to choose human companions; when they had so done, fortunate indeed had been the lot of the chosen. Of them she felt herself to be one.

Even his seizure had not deprived her of her sense of his widespreading and inscrutable powers and she could not rid herself of the conviction that if he would, he could talk, walk, and perform the feats of strength of a Hercules. It was impossible not to think so; the vigour of his glance was undiminished and it was the dark glance of a man, proud, alert, and commanding. And the mysterious nature and occurrence of the seizure itself only confirmed her subconscious conviction. The fit had come so undramatically that although the several pompous and, for her nearly imbecile, English physicians who had been called in to attend on him, agreed that some sort of fit must have visited him as he lay in his bed, that had done nothing to change her mind. Indeed, even when her own Doctor, Drouant-Rouault, asserted with certitude and knowledge that this was a case of fulminant hemiplegia of a characteristic sort, though her reason accepted his conclusion, her subconscious intuition remained the same. Doctor Drouant-Rouault was a sensible man; that he had proved by pointing out the anatomical excellence of the works of sculpture by Monsieur Casimir-Bar and agreeing that only a conspiracy of rivals could have prevented his arriving at the post of President of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He was then, a man of sense and his reputation amongst the French tradesmen of the Quartier stood very high. She had never herself needed the attentions of a
doctor.
But if you needed a doctor, obviously you went to a Frenchman and acquiesced in what he said.

But although she acquiesced in words to others, and indeed to herself, she could not convince herself in her
for intérieur
, nor indeed had she arrived at that amount of exterior conviction without some argument at least. She had pointed out, not only to Doctor Drouant-Rouault, but she had even conceived it to be her duty to point out to the English practitioners to whom she would not otherwise have spoken, that the man lying there in her bed was a North-Countryman, from Yorkshire where men were of an inconceivable obstinacy. She had asked them to consider that it was not unusual for Yorkshire brothers and sisters or other relatives to live for decades together in the same house and never address a word to each other and she had pointed out that she knew Mark Tietjens to be of an unspeakable determination. She knew it from their life-long intimacy. She had never, for instance, been able to make him change his diet by an ounce in weight or the shaking of a pepper-pot as to flavour – not once in twenty years during which she had cooked for him. She pleaded with these gentlemen to consider as a possibility that the terms of the armistice were of such a nature as to make a person of Mark’s determination and idiosyncrasies resolve to withdraw himself for ever from all human contacts and, that if he did so determine, nothing would cause him to change his determination. The last word he had spoken had been whilst one of his colleagues at the Ministry had been telephoning to tell her, for Mark’s information, what the terms of the Armistice were. At the news, which she had had to give him over her shoulder, he had made from the bed some remark. He had been recovering from double pneumonia at the time. What the remark had been she could not exactly repeat; she was almost certain that it had been to the effect – in English – that he would never speak again. But she was aware that her own predilection was sufficient to bias her hearing. She had felt herself at the news that the Allies did not intend to pursue the Germans into their own country – she had felt herself as if she could say to the High Official at the other end of the telephone that she would never speak word to him and his race again. It was the first thing that had come
into
her mind and no doubt it had been the first thing to come into Mark’s.

So she had pleaded with the doctors. They had paid practically no attention to her and she was aware that that was very likely due to her ambiguous position as the companion, until lately without any legal security, of a man whom they considered as in no position to continue his protection of her. That she in no way resented; it was in the nature of English male humanity. The Frenchman had naturally listened with deference, bowing even a little. But he had remarked with a sort of deaf obstinacy: Madame must consider that the occasion of the stroke only made more certain that it
was
a stroke. And that argument to her, as Frenchwoman, must seem almost controvertible. For the betrayal of France by her Allies at the supreme moment of triumph had been a crime the news of which might well cause the end of the world to seem desirable.

II

SHE CONTINUED TO
stand beside him and to apostrophise him until it should be time to turn round the framed newspaper so that he could read the other side of the sheet. What he read first contained the remarks of various writers on racing. That he took in rapidly, as if it were a mere
hors d’œuvre
. She knew that he regarded with contempt the opinions of all writers on racing, but the two who wrote in this particular sheet with less contempt than the others. But the serious reading began when she turned the page. Here were endless, serried columns of the names of race-horses, their jockeys, and entrants at various race-meetings, their ages, ancestries, former achievements. That he would peruse with minuteness and attention. It would cost him just under an hour. She would have liked to stay with him whilst he read it, for the intensive study of matters connected with race-horses had always been their single topic of communion. She had spent almost sentimental hours leaning over the back of his arm-chair reading news of the turf simultaneously with himself, and the compliments he had been used to pay her over her predictions of Form, if they were the only
compliments
he ever paid her, had filled her with the warm pleasure and confusion that she might have felt had he addressed the same compliments to her on the subject of her person. She did not indeed need compliments from him as to her person; his complete contentment with her sufficed – but she had rejoiced in, and now missed, these long, quiet times of communing. She remarked to him indeed that Seattle had won her race as she had several days ago predicted because there had been no other competitors in any way of the same class as the filly, but there had been no answering, half contemptuous grunt of acquiescence such as in the old days had been hers.