Parade's End (13 page)

‘Well, anyhow,’ the General said, ‘I thank heaven you’re not on my staff for you’d talk my hind leg off in a week. It’s perfectly true that the public …’

But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady Claudine Sandbach with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband to believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!

The General was saying:

‘Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?’

Tietjens said:

‘From you. Three weeks ago!’

And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands… . They must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs! … Suddenly he thought that he didn’t know for certain that he was the father of his child, and he groaned.

‘Well, what have I said wrong now?’ the General asked. ‘Surely you don’t maintain that pheasants do eat mangolds… .’

Tietjens proved his reputation for sanity with:

‘No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That’s sound enough for you, isn’t it?’ But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn’t been able to pigeon-hole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been as good as talking to himself.

In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of Mr. Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr. Waterhouse was anxious that Tietjens – whom he assumed to be a man of sense – should
get
any pursuit of the two girls stopped off. He couldn’t move in the matter himself, but a five-pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might be handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account of their raid of that afternoon.

It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the mayor, the town clerk, the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his affability… .

Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn’t find him a disagreeable fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskies, and certainly not as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English working-class, you could see that Mr. Waterhouse didn’t want to be dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens’ emendations in the actuarial schedules… . And over their port they agreed on two fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left.

And Tietjens, who hated no man, in face of this simple-minded and agreeable schoolboy type of fellow, fell to wondering why it was that humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass, a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society. And he remembered the words of
some
Russian: ‘Cats and monkeys. Monkeys and cats. All humanity is there.’

Tietjens and Mr. Waterhouse spent the rest of the evening together.

Whilst Tietjens was interviewing the policeman, the Minister sat on the front steps of the cottage and smoked cheap cigarettes, and when Tietjens went to bed Mr. Waterhouse insisted on sending by him kindly messages to Miss Wannop, asking her to come and discuss female suffrage any afternoon she liked in his private room at the House of Commons. Mr. Waterhouse flatly refused to believe that Tietjens hadn’t arranged the raid with Miss Wannop. He said it had been too neatly planned for any woman, and he said Tietjens was a lucky fellow, for she was a ripping girl.

Back in his room under the rafters, Tietjens fell, nevertheless, at once a prey to real agitation. For a long time he pounded from wall to wall and, since he could not shake off the train of thought, he got out at last his patience cards, and devoted himself seriously to thinking out the conditions of his life with Sylvia. He wanted to stop scandal if he could; he wanted them to live within his income, he wanted to subtract that child from the influence of its mother. These were all definite but difficult things… . Then one half of his mind lost itself in the rearrangement of schedules, and on his brilliant table his hands set queens on kings and checked their recurrences.

In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible physical shock. He nearly vomited; his brain reeled and the room fell about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster’s goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn’t talk, and he dropped into his bed faintly aware of his friend’s efforts to loosen his clothes. He had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the time, paralysed both his body and his mind.

V

‘IT DOESN’T SEEM
quite fair, Valentine,’ Mrs. Duchemin said. She was rearranging in a glass bowl some minute
flowers
that floated on water. They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic amongst silver chafing dishes, silver epergnes piled with peaches in pyramids, and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to the damask cloth. A congeries of silver largenesses made as if a fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great silver kettle on a tripod and a couple of silver vases filled with the extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as if a fan. The eighteenth-century room was very tall and long; panelled in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: ‘J.M.W. Turner’. The chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an épergne that supported the large pale globes of grapefruit, a galantine, a cube of inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.

‘Oh, women have to back each other up in these days,’ Valentine Wannop said. ‘I couldn’t let you go through this alone after breakfasting with you every Saturday since I don’t know when.’

‘I do feel,’ Mrs. Duchemin said, ‘immensely grateful to you for your moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But I’ve told Parry to keep him out till 10.15.’

‘It’s, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you,’ the girl said. ‘I think it was worth trying.’

Mrs. Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position of the delphiniums.

‘I think they make a good screen,’ Mrs. Duchemin said.

‘Oh, nobody will be able to see him,’ the girl answered reassuringly. She added with a sudden resolution, ‘Look here, Edie. Stop worrying about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you’re
simply
mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let’s say no more about it.’

Mrs. Duchemin said, ‘Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?’

‘She didn’t know,’ the girl said. ‘She was out of her mind for grief. She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it took the five shillings a week that I earned to make up the money.’ She added, ‘Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays, too.’

‘I don’t understand!’ Mrs. Duchemin said. ‘I simply don’t understand.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ the girl answered. ‘You’re like the kindly people who subscribed at the sale to buy my father’s library back and present it to my mother. That cost us five shillings a week for warehousing, and at Ealing they were always nagging at me for the state of my print dresses… .’

She broke off and said:

‘Let’s not talk about it any more if you don’t mind. You have me in your house, so I suppose you’ve a right to references, as the mistresses call them. But you’ve been very good to me and never asked. Still, it’s come up; do you know I told a man on the links yesterday that I’d been a slavey for nine months. I was trying to explain why I was a suffragette; and, as I was asking him a favour, I suppose I felt I needed to give
him
references too.’

Mrs. Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively, exclaimed:

‘You darling!’

Miss Wannop said:

‘Wait a minute. I haven’t finished. I want to say this: I never talk about that stage of my career because I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed of it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if we’ve inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we’ve inherited the Wannop pride. And I
couldn’t
do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we were going into the country after the sale. I’m not educated at
all,
as you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don’t know why he had that tic… . But I’d like you to understand two things. One I’ve said already: what I hear in this house won’t ever shock or corrupt me; that it’s said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and Gilbert as soon as we talked at all… . And, oh yes: I’m a suffragette because I’ve been a slavey. But I’d like you to understand that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette – you’re an old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two things – then I’d like you to understand that in spite of it all I’m pure! Chaste, you know… . Perfectly virtuous.’

Mrs. Duchemin said:

‘Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap and apron.’

Miss Wannop replied:

‘Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled, “M’m!” to the mistress; and slept under the stairs too. Because I would not sleep with the beast of a cook.’

Mrs. Duchemin now ran forward and catching Miss Wannop by both hands kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek.

‘Oh, Valentine,’ she said, ‘you’re a heroine. And you only twenty-two! … Isn’t that the motor coming?’

But it wasn’t the motor coming and Miss Wannop said:

‘Oh, no! I’m not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister yesterday, I just couldn’t. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: “V … V … Votes for W … W … W … omen!” … If I’d been decently brave I shouldn’t have been too shy to speak to a strange man… . For that was what it really came to.’

‘But that surely,’ Mrs. Duchemin said – she continued to hold both the girl’s hands – ‘makes you all the braver… . It’s the person who does the thing he’s afraid of who’s the real hero, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten. You can’t tell. You’ve got to define the term “brave”. I was just abject… . I could harangue the
whole
crowd when I got them together. But speak to one man in cold blood I couldn’t… . Of course I
did
speak to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. But that was different.’

Mrs. Duchemin moved both the girl’s hands up and down in her own.

‘As you know, Valentine,’ she said, ‘I’m an old-fashioned woman. I believe that woman’s true place is at her husband’s side. At the same time …’

Miss Wannop moved away.

‘Now, don’t, Edie, don’t!’ she said. ‘If you believe that, you’re an anti. Don’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It’s your defect really… . I tell you I’m
not
a heroine. I
dread
a prison; I
hate
rows. I’m thankful to goodness that it’s my duty to stop and housemaid-type-write for mother, so that I can’t really
do things
… . Look at that miserable, adenoidy little Gertie, hiding upstairs in our garret. She was crying all last night – but that’s just nerves. Yet she’s been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a moment of funk about her! … But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock that prison wouldn’t touch… . Why, I’m all of a jump now. That’s why I’m talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound may be the police coming for me.’

Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl’s fair hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear.

‘I wish you’d let me show you how to do your hair,’ she said. ‘The right man might come along at any moment.’

‘Oh, the right man!’ Miss Wannop said. ‘Thanks for tactfully changing the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a married man. That’s the Wannop luck!’

Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern:

‘Don’t talk like that… . Why should you regard yourself as being less lucky than other people? Surely your mother’s done well. She has a position; she makes money… .’