Parade's End (128 page)

Descending the hill at the fly’s pace was the impossible. A black basket-work pony phaeton, the pony – you always look at the horse first – four hands too big; as round as a barrel, as shining as a mahogany dining-table, pacing for all the world like a
haute école
circus steed and in a panic bumping its behind into that black vehicle. It eased her to see … But, … fantastically horrible, behind that grotesque coward of a horse, holding the reins, was a black thing, like a funeral charger; beside it a top hat, a white face, a buff waistcoat, black coat, a thin, Jewish beard. In front of that a bare, blond head, the hair rather long – on the front seat, back to the view. Trust Edith Ethel to
be
accompanied by a boy-poet cicisbeo! Training Mr. Ruggles for his future condition as consort!

She exclaimed to Gunning:

‘By God, if you do not let me pass I will cut your face in half …’

It was justified! This in effect was too much – on the part of Gunning and God and Father Consett. All of a heap they had given her perplexity, immobility and a dreadful thought that was gripping her vitals… . Dreadful! Dreadful!

She must get down to the cottage. She must get down to the cottage.

She said to Gunning:

‘You damn fool… . You
damn
fool… . I want to save …’

He moved up – interminably – sweating and hairy from the gate on which he had been leaning, so that he no longer barred her way. She trotted smartly past him and cantered beautifully down the slope. It came to her from the bloodshot glance that his eyes gave her that he would like to outrage her with ferocity. She felt pleasure.

She came off her horse like a circus performer to the sound of ‘Mrs. Tietjens! Mrs. Tietjens’, in several voices from above. She let the chestnut go to hell.

It seemed queer that it did not seem queer. A shed of log-parings set upright, the gate banging behind her. Apple branches spreading down; grass up to the middle of her grey breeches. It was Tom Tiddler’s Grounds; it was near a place called Gemmenich on the Fourth of August 1914 … But just quietude: quietude.

Mark regarded her boy’s outline with beady, inquisitive eyes. She bent her switch into a half loop before her. She heard herself say:

‘Where are all these fools? I want to get them out of here!’

He continued to regard her, beadily, his head like mahogany against the pillows. An apple bough caught in her hair.

She said:

‘Damn it all,
I
had Groby Great Tree torn down: not that tin Maintenon. But, as God is my Saviour I would not tear another woman’s child in the womb!’

He said:

‘You poor bitch! You poor bitch! The riding has done it!’

She swore to herself afterwards that she had heard him say that, for at the time she had had too many emotions to regard his speaking as unusual. She took indeed a prolonged turn in the woods before she felt equal to facing the others. Tietjens’s had its woods onto which the garden gave directly.

Her main bitterness was that they had this peace. She was cutting the painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning. It was the fact that her friend Bobbie’s husband, Sir Gabriel Blantyre – formerly Bosenheir – was cutting down expenses like a lunatic. In her world there was the writing on the wall. Here they could afford to call her a poor bitch – and be in the right of it, as like as not!

III

VALENTINE WAS AWAKENED
by the shrill overtones of the voice of the little maid coming in through the open window. She had fallen asleep over the words ‘
Saepe te in somnis vidi!
’ to a vision of white limbs in the purple Adriatic. Eventually the child’s voice said:

‘We only sez “mem” to friends of the family!’ shrilly and self-assertively.

She was at the casement, dizzy and sickish with the change of position and the haste – and violently impatient of her condition. Of humanity she perceived only the top of a three-cornered grey hat and a grey panniered skirt in downward perspective. The sloping tiles of the potting-shed hid the little maid; aligned small lettuce plants like rosettes on the dark earth ran from under the window, closed by a wall of sticked peas, behind them the woods, slender grey ash trunks going to a great height. They were needed for shelter. They would have to change their bedroom; they could not have a night nursery that faced the north. The spring onions needed pricking out; she had meant to put the garden pellitory into the rocks in the half-circle, but the operation had daunted her. Pushing the little roots into crevices with her fingers; removing
stones,
trowelling in artificial manure, stooping, dirtying her fingers would make her retch… .

She was suddenly intensely distressed at the thought of those coloured prints. She had searched the whole house – all imaginable drawers, cupboards, presses. It was like their fate that when they had at last got a good – an English – client their first commission from her should go wrong. She thought again of every imaginable, unsearched parallelogram in the house, standing erect, her head up, neglecting to look down on the intruder.

She considered all their customers to be intruders. It was true that Christopher’s gifts lay in the way of old-furniture dealing – and farming. But farming was ruinous. Obviously if you sold old furniture straight out of use in your own house it fetched better prices than from a shop. She did not deny Christopher’s ingenuity – or that he was right to rely on her hardihood. He had at least the right so to rely. Nor did she mean to let him down. Only …

She passionately desired little Chrissie to be born in that bed with the thin fine posts, his blond head with the thin, fine hair on those pillows. She passionately desired that he should lie with blue eyes gazing at those curtains on the low windows… .
Those!
With those peacocks and globes. Surely a child should lie gazing at what his mother had seen whilst she was awaiting him!

And, where were those lost prints? … Four parallelograms of faint, silly colour. Promised for to-morrow morning. The margins needed breadcrumbing… . She imagined her chin brushing gently, gently back and forward on the floss of his head; she imagined holding him in the air as, in that bed, she lay, her arms extended upwards, her hair spread on those pillows! Flowers perhaps spread on that quilt. Lavender!

But if Christopher reported that one of those dreadful people with querulous voices wanted a bedroom complete… .

If she begged him to retain it for her! Well, he would. He prized her above money. She thought – ah, she knew – that he prized the child within her above the world.

Nevertheless she imagined that she would go all on to the end with her longings unvoiced… . Because there was the game… . His game … oh, hang it,
their
game! And you have to think whether it is worse for the unborn
child
to have a mother with unsatisfied longings or a father beaten at his … No, you must not call it a game. Still, roosters beaten by other roosters lose their masculinity… . Like roosters, men… . Then, for a child to have a father lacking masculinity … for the sake of some peacock and globe curtains, spindly bed-posts, old, old glass tumblers with thumb-mark indentations …

On the other hand, for the mother, the soft feeling that those things give! … The room had a barrel-shaped ceiling, following the lines of the roof almost up to the roof tree; dark oak beams, beeswaxed – ah, that bees-waxing! Tiny, low windows almost down to the oaken floor… . You would say, too much of the show-place, but you lived into it. You lived yourself into it in spite of the Americans who took, sometimes embarrassed, peeps from the doorway.

Would they have to peek into the nursery? Oh, God, who knew? What would he decree? It was an extraordinary thing to live with Americans all over you, dropping down in aeroplanes, seeming to come up out of the earth… . There, all of a sudden, you didn’t know how …

That woman below the window was one, now. How in the world had she got below that window? … But there were so many entrances – from the spinney, from the Common, through the fourteen-acre, down from the road… . You never knew who was coming. It was eerie; at times she shivered over it. You seemed to be beset – with stealthy people, creeping up all the paths… .

Apparently the little tweeny was disputing the right of that American woman to call herself a friend of the family and thus to be addressed as: ‘Mem!’ The American was asserting her descent from Madame de Maintenon… . It was astonishing the descents they all had! She herself was descended from the surgeon-butler to Henry VII – Henry the Somethingth. And of course from the great Professor Wannop, beloved of lady-educators and by ladies whom he had educated… . And Christopher was eleventh Tietjens of Groby – with an eventual burgomaster of Scheveningen or somewhere in some century or other: time of Alva. Number one came over with Dutch William, the Protestant Hero! … If he had not come and if Professor Wannop had not educated her, Valentine Wannop – or educated her differently – she would not have … Ah, but
she
would! If there had not been any HE, looking like a great Dutch
treckschluyt
or whatever you call it – she would have had to invent one to live with in open sin. But her father might have educated her so as to have – at least presentable underclothes… .

He could have educated her so as to be able to say – oh, but tactfully:

‘Look here, you … Examine my … my
cache-corsets
… . Wouldn’t some new ones be better than a new pedigree sow? …’

The fellow never had looked at her …
cache-corsets
. Marie Léonie had!

Marie Léonie was of opinion that she would lose Christopher if she did not deluge herself with a perfume called Houbigant and wear pink silk next the skin. Elle ne demandait pas mieux – but she could not borrow twenty pounds from Marie Léonie. Nor yet forty… . Because although Christopher might never notice the condition of her all-wools he jolly well would be struck by the ocean of Houbigant and the surf of pink… . She would give the world for them… . But he would notice – and then she might lose his love, because she had borrowed the forty pounds. On the other hand she might lose it because of the all-wools. And heaven knew what condition the other pair would be in when they came back from Mrs. Cramp’s newest laundry attentions… . You could never teach Mrs. Cramp that wool must not be put into boiling water!

Oh God, she ought to lie between lavendered linen sheets with little Chrissie on soft, pink silk, air-cushionish bosoms! … Little Chrissie, descended from surgeon-butler – surgeon-barber, to be correct! – and burgomaster. Not to mention the world-famous Professor Wannop … Who was to become … who was to become, if it was as she wished it …

But she did not know what she wished because she did not know what was to become of England or the world… . But if he became what Christopher wished he would be a contemplative parson farming his own tythe-fields and with a Greek Testament in folio under his arm… . A sort of White of Selborne… . Selborne was only thirty miles away, but they had never had the time to go there … As who should say:
Je n’ai jamais vu Carcassonne
… . For if they had never found time, because of pigs,
hens,
pea-sticking, sales, sellings, mending all-wool undergarments, sitting with dear Mark – before Chrissie came with the floss silk on his palpitating soft poll and his spinning pebble-blue eyes; if they had never found time now, before, how in the world would there be time when, added on to all the other, there should be the bottles, and the bandagings and the bathing before the fire with the warm, warm water and feeling the slubbing of the soap-saturated flannel on the adorable, adorable limbs? And Christopher looking on… . He would never find time to go to Selborne, nor Arundel, nor Carcassonne nor after the Strange Woman … Never. Never!

He had been away now for a day and a half. But it was known between them – without speaking! – that he would never be away for a day and a half again. Now, before her pains began he could … seize the opportunity! Well, he had seized it with a vengeance… . A day and a half! To go to Wilbraham sale! With nothing much that they wanted… . She believed … she believed that he had gone to Groby in an aeroplane… . He had once mentioned that. Or she knew that he had thought of it. Because the day before yesterday when he had been almost out of his mind about the letting of Groby he had suddenly looked up at an aeroplane and had remained looking at it for long, silent… . Another woman it could not be.

He had forgotten about those prints. That was dreadful. She knew that he had forgotten about them. How could he, when they wanted to get a good, English client, for the sake of little Chrissie? How could he? How could he? It is true that he was almost out of his mind about Groby and Groby Great Tree. He had begun to talk about that in his sleep as for years, at times, he had talked, dreadfully, about the war.

‘
Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze
… . Bring the Captain a candle,’ he would shout dreadfully beside her in the blackness. And she would know that he was remembering the sound of picks in the earth beneath the trenches. And he would groan and sweat dreadfully and she would not dare to wake him… . And there had been the matter of the boy, Aranjuez’ eye. It appeared that he had run away over a shifting landscape, screaming and holding his hand to his eye. After Christopher had carried him out
of
a hole … Mrs. Aranjuez had been rude to her at the Armistice-night dinner… . The first time in her life that anyone – except of course Edith Ethel – had ever been rude to her. Of course you did not count Edith Ethel Duchemin, Lady Macmaster! … But it’s queer. Your man saves the life of a boy at the desperate risk of his own. Without that there would not have been any Mrs. Aranjuez; then Mrs. Aranjuez is the first person that ever in your life is rude to you. Leaving permanent memories that made you shudder in the night! Hideous eyes!

Yet, but for a miracle there might have been no Christopher! Little Aranjuez – it had been because he had talked to her for so long, praising Christopher, that Mrs. Aranjuez had been rude to her! – little Aranjuez had said that the German bullets had gone over them as thick as the swarm of bees that came out when Gunning cut the leg off the skep with his scythe! … Well, there might have been no Christopher. Then there would have been no Valentine Wannop! She could not have lived… . But Mrs. Aranjuez should not have been rude to her. The woman must have seen with half an eye that Valentine Wannop could not live without Christopher… . Then, why should she fear for her little, imploring, eyeless soldier boy!