Parade's End (23 page)

He was at last at her side. It was true. But not so much like an apron. More like a red, varnished stocking. He said:

‘You’ve a white petticoat on. Get over the hedge; jump it, and take it off …’

‘Tear it into strips?’ she asked. ‘Yes!’

He called to her; she was suspended half-way up the bank:

‘Tear one half off first. The rest into strips.’

She said: ‘All right!’ She didn’t go over the quickset as neatly as he had expected. No take off. But she was over… .

The horse, trembling, was looking down, its nostrils distended, at the blood pooling from its near foot. The cut was just on the shoulder. He put his left arm right over the horse’s eyes. The horse stood it, almost with a sigh of relief… . A wonderful magnetism with horses. Perhaps with women too? God knew. He was almost certain she had said ‘Dear’.

She said: ‘Here.’ He caught a round ball of whitish stuff. He undid it. Thank God: what sense! A long, strong, white band. What the devil was the hissing? A small, closed car with crumpled mudguards, noiseless nearly, gleaming black … God curse it, it passed them, stopped ten yards down … the horse rearing back: mad! Clean mad … something like a scarlet and white cockatoo, fluttering out of the small car door … a general. In full tog. White feathers! Ninety medals! Scarlet coat! Black trousers with red stripe. Spurs too, by God!

Tietjens said:

‘God damn you, you bloody swine. Go away!’

The apparition, past the horse’s blinkers, said:

‘I can, at least, hold the horse for you. I went past to get you out of Claudine’s sight.’

‘Damn good-natured of you,’ Tietjens said as rudely as he could. ‘You’ll have to pay for the horse.’

The General exclaimed:

‘Damn it all! Why should I? You were driving your beastly camel right into my drive.’

‘You never sounded your horn,’ Tietjens said.

‘I was on private ground,’ the General shouted. ‘Besides I did.’ An enraged, scarlet scarecrow, very thin, he was holding the horse’s bridle. Tietjens was extending the half petticoat, with a measuring eye, before the horse’s chest. The General said:

‘Look here! I’ve got to take the escort for the Royal party at St. Peter-in-Manor, Dover. They’re laying the Buff’s colours on the altar or something.’

‘You never sounded your horn,’ Tietjens said. ‘Why didn’t you bring your chauffeur? He’s a capable man… . You talk very big about the widow and child. But when it comes to robbing them of fifty quid by slaughtering their horse …’

The General said:

‘What the devil were you doing coming into our drive at five in the morning?’

Tietjens, who had applied the half petticoat to the horse’s chest, exclaimed:

‘Pick up that thing and give it me.’ A thin roll of linen was at his feet: it had rolled down from the hedge.

‘Can I leave the horse?’ the General asked.

‘Of course you can,’ Tietjens said. ‘If I can’t quiet a horse better than you can run a car …’

He bound the new linen strips over the petticoat: the horse dropped its head, smelling his hand. The General, behind Tietjens, stood back on his heels, grasping his gold-mounted sword. Tietjens went on twisting and twisting the bandage.

‘Look here,’ the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens’ ear, ‘what am I tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl.’

‘Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter hounds,’ Tietjens said; ‘that’s a matutinal job… .’

The General’s voice had a really pathetic intonation:

‘On a Sunday!’ he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: ‘I shall tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin’s church at Pett.’

‘If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession, do,’ Tietjens said. ‘But you’ll have to pay for the horse.’

‘I’m damned if I will,’ the General shouted. ‘I tell you you were driving into my drive.’

‘Then I
shall
,’ Tietjens said, ‘and you know the construction you’ll put on
that
.’

He straightened his back to look at the horse.

‘Go away,’ he said, ‘say what you like. Do what you like! But as you go through Rye send up the horse-ambulance from the vet.’s. Don’t forget that. I’m going to save this horse… .’

‘You know, Chris,’ the General said, ‘you’re the most wonderful hand with a horse … There isn’t another man in England …’

‘I know it,’ Tietjens said. ‘Go away. And send up that ambulance… . There’s your sister getting out of your car… .’

The General began:

‘I’ve an awful lot to get explained …’ But, at a thin scream of: ‘General! General!’ he pressed on his sword hilt to keep it from between his long, black, scarlet-striped legs, and running to the car pushed back into its door a befeathered, black bolster. He waved his hand to Tietjens:

‘I’ll send the ambulance,’ he called.

The horse, its upper leg swathed with criss-crosses of white through which a purple stain was slowly penetrating, stood motionless, its head hanging down, mule-like, under the blinding sun. To ease it Tietjens began to undo the trace. The girl hopped over the hedge and, scrambling down, began to help him.

‘Well.
My
reputation’s gone,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I know what Lady Claudine is… . Why did you try to quarrel with the General?’

‘Oh, you’d better,’ Tietjens said wretchedly, ‘have a law-suit with him. It’ll account for … for you not going to Mountby …’

‘You think of everything,’ she said.

They wheeled the cart backwards off the motionless horse. Tietjens moved it two yards forward – to get it out
of
sight of its own blood. Then they sat down side by side on the slope of the bank.

‘Tell me about Groby,’ the girl said at last.

Tietjens began to tell her about his home… . There was, in front of it, an avenue that turned into the road at right angles. Just like the one at Mountby.

‘My great-great-grandfather made it,’ Tietjens said. ‘He liked privacy and didn’t want the house visible by vulgar people on the road … just like the fellow who planned Mountby, no doubt… . But it’s beastly dangerous with motors. We shall have to alter it … just at the bottom of a dip. We can’t have horses hurt… . You’ll see… .’ It came suddenly into his head that he wasn’t perhaps the father of the child who was actually the heir to that beloved place over which generation after generation had brooded. Ever since Dutch William! A damn Nonconformist swine!

On the bank his knees were almost level with his chin. He felt himself slipping down.

‘If I ever take you there …’ he began.

‘Oh, but you never will,’ she said.

The child wasn’t his. The heir to Groby! All his brothers were childless … There was a deep well in the stable yard. He had meant to teach the child how, if you dropped a pebble in, you waited to count twenty-three. And there came up a whispering roar… . But not his child! Perhaps he hadn’t even the power to beget children. His married brothers hadn’t… . Clumsy sobs shook him. It was the dreadful injury to the horse which had finished him. He felt as if the responsibility were his. The poor beast had trusted him and he had smashed it up. Miss Wannop had her arm over his shoulder.

‘My dear!’ she said, ‘you won’t ever take me to Groby … It’s perhaps … oh … short acquaintance; but I feel you’re the splendidest …’

He thought: ‘It
is
rather short acquaintance.’

He felt a great deal of pain, over which there presided the tall, eelskin, blonde figure of his wife… .

The girl said:

‘There’s a fly coming!’ and removed her arm.

A fly drew up before them with a blear-eyed driver. He said General Campion had kicked him out of bed, from beside his old woman. He wanted a pound to take them
to
Mrs. Wannop’s, waked out of his beauty sleep and all. The knacker’s cart was following.

‘You’ll take Miss Wannop home at once,’ Tietjens said, ‘she’s got her mother’s breakfast to see to… . I shan’t leave the horse till the knacker’s van comes.’

The fly-driver touched his age-green hat with his whip.

‘Aye,’ he said thickly, putting a sovereign into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Always the gentleman … a merciful man is merciful also to his beast. But I wouldn’t leave my little wooden ’ut, nor miss my breakfast, for no beast… . Some do and some … do not.’

He drove off with the girl in the interior of his antique conveyance.

Tietjens remained on the slope of the bank, in the strong sunlight, beside the drooping horse. It had done nearly forty miles and lost, at last, a lot of blood.

Tietjens said:

‘I suppose I could get the governor to pay fifty quid for it. They want the money… .’

He said:

‘But it wouldn’t be playing the game!’

A long time afterwards he said:

‘Damn all principles!’ And then:

‘But one has to keep on going… . Principles are like a skeleton map of a country – you know whether you’re going east or north.’

The knacker’s cart lumbered round the corner.

PART TWO

SYLVIA TIETJENS ROSE
from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along it, carrying her plate. She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her skirts as long as she possibly could; she didn’t, she said, with her height, intend to be taken for a girl guide. She hadn’t, in complexion, in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute. You couldn’t discover in the skin of her face any deadness; in her eyes the shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had purposely increased her air of scornful insolence. That was because she felt that her hold over men increased to the measure of her coldness. Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was Sylvia’s pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all the women in it realised with mortification – that they needn’t! For if coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: ‘Nothing doing!’ as barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn’t more plainly have conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured rubbish.

Once, on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire, where the moors come above the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a man had bidden her observe the demeanour of the herring gulls below. They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with none of the dignity of gulls. Some of them even let fall the herrings that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the blue motion. The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a pale flame against the sky was a bird. The man told her that that was some sort of
fish-eagle
or hawk. Its normal habit was to chase the gulls which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water. At the moment the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it had been.

Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle. It pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet screamed and dropped their herrings… . The whole affair reminded her of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard… . Not that there was the breath of a scandal against herself; that she very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice men – the ‘really nice men’ of commerce – was her hobby.

She practised every kind of ‘turning down’ on these creatures: the really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal’s brown eyes, the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and the admirable records – as long as you didn’t enquire
too
closely. Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man – she
had
smiled at him in mistake for someone more trustable – had followed in a taxi, hard on her motor, and flushed with wine, glory and the firm conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common property, had burst into her door from the public stairs… . She had overtopped him by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: a
chaud-froid
effect. He had come in like a stallion, red-eyed, and all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other.

Yet she hadn’t really told him more than the way one should behave to the wives of one’s brother officers then actually in the line, a point of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh. But it must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother – when his mother had been much younger, of course – speaking from paradise, and his conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness. This, however, had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn’t, therefore,
interested
her. She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains.

She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressment which a man would develop about herself at the first glance – the amount and the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on introduction couldn’t conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner, diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket, diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so, rather more quickly away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong – from the milder note to the more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of ‘turnings down’. The poor fellows next day would change their boot-makers, their sock merchants, their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts; they would sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that calamity came from the fact that she hadn’t deigned to look into their eyes… . Perhaps hadn’t dared was the right word!