Parade's End (22 page)

She said:

‘Oh, the poor horse! … I
meant
us to be out all night… . But the poor horse. What a brute I was not to think of it.’

‘We’re thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn’t read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere… .’ Tietjens said. ‘This is the road to Uddlemere.’

‘Oh, that was Grandfather’s Wantways all right,’ she declared. ‘I know it well. It’s called “Grandfather’s” because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran’fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845 – the effect of the repeal of
the
Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that.’

Tietjens sat patiently. He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.

‘Would you mind,’ he said then, ‘telling me …’

‘If,’ she interrupted, ‘that was really Gran’fer’s Want-ways: midland English. “Vent” equals four cross-roads: high French
carrefour
… . Or, perhaps, that isn’t the right word. But it’s the way your mind works… .’

‘You have, of course, often walked from your uncle’s to Gran’fer’s Wantways,’ Tietjens said, ‘with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old toll-gate house. That’s how you know the story of Gran’fer. You said you had never driven it; but you
have
walked it. That’s the way
your
mind works, isn’t it?’

She said: ‘
Oh!
’

‘Then,’ Tietjens went on, ‘would you mind telling me – for the sake of the poor horse – whether Uddlemere is or isn’t on our road home. I take it you don’t know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is the right road.’

‘The touch of pathos,’ the girl said, ‘is a wrong note. It’s you who’re in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn’t… .’

Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:

‘It
is
the right road. The Uddlemere turning
was
the right one. You wouldn’t let the horse go another five steps if it wasn’t. You’re as soppy about horses as … as I am.’

‘There’s at least that bond of sympathy between us,’ she said drily. ‘Gran’fer’s Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from “O’er the mere”. Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: “O’er the mere.” Obviously absurd! … Putrid! “
O’er the
” by Grimm’s law impossible as “
Udi
”; “
mere
” not a middle Low German word at all… .’

‘Why,’ Tietjens said, ‘are you giving me all this information?’

‘Because,’ the girl said, ‘it’s the way your mind works… . It picks up useless facts as silver after you’ve polished it picks up sulphur vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them… . I’ve never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up again out of bones. That’s what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist… .’

‘I know of course,’ Tietjens said.

‘Of course you know,’ the girl said. ‘You know everything… . And you’ve worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life.
You
want to be an English country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you’ll never stir a finger except to say I told you so.’

She touched him suddenly on the arm:

‘
Don’t
mind me!’ she said. ‘It’s reaction. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.’

He said:

‘That’s all right! That’s all right!’ But for a minute or two it wasn’t really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities – even merely with the velvet. He added: ‘Your mother works you very hard.’

She exclaimed:

‘How you
understand
. You’re amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!’ She said: ‘Yes, this is the first holiday I’ve had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day’s work for slips of the pen. And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety… . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother
had
gone to prison… . Oh, I’d have gone mad… . Week-days and Sundays… .’ She stopped: ‘I’m apologising, really,’ she went on. ‘Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all… . It
did
make you a rather awful figure, you know … and the
relief
to find you’re … oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. I’d dreaded this drive. I’d have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn’t been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn’t let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart… . I could still …’

‘You couldn’t,’ Tietjens said. ‘You couldn’t see the cart.’

They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn’t see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale… . They agreed that they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous… . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea… .

Tietjens had said:

‘You’d better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I’d get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse… .’ She had plunged in …

And he had sat, feeling he didn’t know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts – intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler’s epigrams. You couldn’t have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or if not that, the claret… . The
claret
in south country inns was often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept… .

On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife’s maid at Dover… .

He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men; free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings… .

The girl said:

‘I’m coming up now! I’ve found out something… .’ He watched intently the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the impenetrability of mist to the eye.

Her otter-skin cap had beads of dew; beads of dew were on her hair beneath; she scrambled up, a little awkwardly, her eyes sparkled with fun; panting a little; her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.

Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:

‘Steady, the Buffs!’ in his surprise.

She said:

‘Well, you might as well have given me a hand. I found,’ she went on, ‘a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and then the lamp went out. We’re not on the marsh because we’re between quick hedges. That’s all I’ve found… . But I’ve worked out what makes me so tart with you… .’

He couldn’t believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to catch her to him and had been foiled by her. She ought to be indignant, amused, even pleased… . She ought to show some emotion… .

She said:

‘It was your silencing me with that absurd non-sequitur about the Pimlico clothing factory. It was an insult to my intelligence.’

‘You recognised that it was a fallacy!’ Tietjens said. He was looking hard at her. He didn’t know what had happened to him. She took a long look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was as if for a moment destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him. ‘Can’t,’ he argued with destiny, ‘a man want to kiss a schoolgirl in a scuffle… .’ His own voice, a caricature
of
his own voice, seemed to come to him: ‘Gentlemen don’t …’ He exclaimed:

‘Don’t gentlemen? …’ and then stopped because he realised that he had spoken aloud.

She said:

‘Oh,
gentlemen
do!’ she said, ‘use fallacies to glide over tight places in arguments. And they browbeat schoolgirls with them. It’s that, that underneath, has been exasperating me with you. You regarded me at that date – three-quarters of a day ago – as a schoolgirl.’

Tietjens said:

‘I don’t now!’ He added: ‘Heaven knows I don’t now!’

She said: ‘No; you don’t now!’

He said:

‘It didn’t need your putting up all that blue stocking erudition to convince me… .’

‘Blue stocking!’ she exclaimed contemptuously. ‘There’s nothing of the blue stocking about me. I know Latin because father spoke it with us. It was your pompous blue socks I was pulling.’

Suddenly she began to laugh. Tietjens was feeling sick, physically sick. She went on laughing. He stuttered:

‘What is it?’

‘The sun!’ she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun; not a red sun: shining, burnished.

‘I don’t see …’ Tietjens said.

‘What there is to laugh at?’ she asked. ‘It’s the day! … The longest day’s begun … and tomorrow’s as long… . The summer solstice, you know. After to-morrow the days shorten towards winter. But tomorrow’s as long… . I’m so glad …’

‘That we’ve got through the night? …’ Tietjens asked.

She looked at him for a long time. ‘You’re not so dreadfully ugly, really,’ she said.

Tietjens said:

‘What’s that church?’

Rising out of the mist on a fantastically green knoll, a quarter of a mile away, was an unnoticeable place of worship; an oak-shingle tower roof that shone grey like lead; an impossibly bright weather-cock, brighter than the sun. Dark elms all round it, holding wetnesses of mist.

‘Icklesham!’ she cried softly. ‘Oh, we’re nearly home. Just above Mountby… . That’s the Mountby drive… .’

Trees existed, black and hoary with the dripping mist. Trees in the hedgerow and the avenue that led to Mountby; it made a right-angle just before coming into the road and the road went away at right-angles across the gate.

‘You’ll have to pull to the left before you reach the avenue,’ the girl said. ‘Or as like as not the horse will walk right up to the house. The higgler who had him used to buy Lady Claudine’s eggs.’

Tietjens exclaimed barbarously:

‘Damn Mountby. I wish we’d never come near it,’ and he whipped the horse into a sudden trot. The hoofs sounded suddenly loud. She placed her hand on his gloved driving hand. Had it been his flesh she wouldn’t have done it.

She said:

‘My dear, it couldn’t have lasted for ever … But you’re a good man. And very clever… . You will get through… .’

Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them, mathematically straight, just rising from the mist. He shouted, mad, the blood in his head. His shout was drowned by the scream of the horse; he had swung it to the left. The cart turned up, the horse emerged from the mist, head and shoulders, pawing. A stone sea-horse from the fountain of Versailles! Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity; the girl looking at it, leaning slightly forward.

The horse didn’t come over backwards: he had loosened the reins. It wasn’t there any more. The damnedest thing that
could
happen! He had known it would happen. He said:

‘We’re all right now!’ There was a crash and scraping like twenty tea-trays, a prolonged sound. They must be scraping along the mudguard of the invisible car. He had the pressure of the horse’s mouth; the horse was away, going hell for leather. He increased the pressure. The girl said:

‘I know I’m all right with you.’

They were suddenly in bright sunlight: cart, horse, commonplace hedgerows. They were going uphill: a steep brae. He wasn’t certain she hadn’t said: ‘Dear!’ or ‘My dear!’ Was it possible after so short …? But it had been a long night. He was, no doubt, saving her life too. He
increased
his pressure on the horse’s mouth gently, up to all his twelve stone, all his strength. The hill told too. Steep, white road between shaven grass banks!

Stop, damn you! Poor beast … The girl fell out of the cart. No! jumped clear! Out to the animal’s head. It threw its head up. Nearly off her feet: she was holding the bit… . She couldn’t! Tender mouth … afraid of horses… . He said:

‘Horse cut!’ Her face like a little white blancmange!

‘Come quick,’ she said.

‘I must hold a minute,’ he said, ‘might go off if I let go to get down. Badly cut?’

‘Blood running down solid! Like an apron,’ she said.