Parade's End (27 page)

The great lady had said:

‘My dear Sylvia; it isn’t so much you as your husband. Your last exploit with the Esterhazys and Metternichs has pretty well done for
him
. You forget that the present powers that be are not logical… .’

Sylvia remembered that she had sprung up from her leather saddle-back chair, exclaiming:

‘You mean to say that those unspeakable swine think that
I’m
…’

Glorvina said patiently:

‘My dear Sylvia, I’ve already said it’s not you. It’s your husband that suffers. He appears to be too good a fellow to suffer. Mr. Waterhouse says so. I don’t know him myself, well.’

Sylvia remembered that she had said:

‘And who in the world is Mr. Waterhouse?’ and, hearing that Mr. Waterhouse was a late Liberal Minister, had lost interest. She couldn’t, indeed, remember any of the further words of her hostess, as words. The sense of them had too much overwhelmed her… .

She stood now, looking at Tietjens and only occasionally seeing him, in her mind completely occupied with the effort to recapture Glorvina’s own words in the desire for exactness. Usually she remembered conversations pretty well; but on this occasion her mad fury, her feeling of nausea, the pain of her own nails in her palms, an unrecoverable sequence of emotions had overwhelmed her.

She looked at Tietjens now with a sort of gloating curiosity. How was it possible that the most honourable man she knew should be so overwhelmed by foul and baseless rumours? It made you suspect that honour had, in itself, a quality of the evil eye… .

Tietjens, his face pallid, was fingering a piece of toast. He muttered:

‘Met … Met … It’s Met …’ He wiped his brow with a table-napkin, looked at it with a start, threw it on the floor and pulled out a handkerchief… . He muttered: ‘Mett … Metter …’ His face illuminated itself like the face of a child listening at a shell.

Sylvia screamed with a passion of hatred:

‘For God’s sake say
Metternich
… you’re driving me mad!’

When she looked at him again, his face had cleared and he was walking quickly to the telephone in the corner of the room. He asked her to excuse him and gave a number at Ealing. He said after a moment:

‘Mrs. Wannop? Oh! My wife has just reminded me that Metternich was the evil genius of the Congress of Vienna… .’ He said: ‘Yes! Yes!’ and listened. After a time he said: ‘Oh, you could put it stronger than that. You could put it that the Tory determination to ruin Napoleon at all costs was one of those pieces of party imbecility that, etc… . Yes; Castlereagh. And of course Wellington… . I’m very sorry I must ring off… . Yes; to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo… . No; I
shan’t
be seeing her again… . No; she’s made a mistake… . Yes; give her my love … goodbye.’ He was reversing the earpiece to hang it up, but a high-pitched series of yelps from the instrument forced it back to his ear: ‘Oh!
War babies!
’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve already sent the statistics off to you! No! there
isn’t
a marked increase of the illegitimacy rate, except in patches. The rate’s appallingly high in the lowlands of Scotland; but it always
is
appallingly high there …’ He laughed and said good-naturedly: ‘Oh, you’re an old journalist: you won’t let fifty quid go for that …’ He was breaking off. But: ‘
Or
,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘here’s another idea for you. The rate’s about the same, probably because of this: half the fellows who go out to France are reckless because it’s the last chance, as they see it. But the other half are made twice as conscientious. A decent Tommie thinks twice about leaving his girl in trouble just before he’s killed. The divorce statistics are up, of course, because people will chance making new starts within the law. Thanks … thanks …’ He hung up the earpiece… .

Listening to that conversation had extraordinarily cleared Sylvia’s mind. She said, almost sorrowfully:

‘I suppose that that’s why you don’t seduce that girl.’ And she knew – she had known at once from the suddenly changed inflection of Tietjens’ voice when he had said ‘a decent Tommie thinks twice before leaving his girl in trouble’! – that Tietjens himself had thought twice.

She looked at him now almost incredulously, but with great coolness. Why
shouldn’t
he, she asked herself, give himself a little pleasure with his girl before going to almost certain death… . She felt a real, sharp pain at her heart. A poor wretch in such a devil of a hole… .

She had moved to a chair close beside the fireplace and now sat looking at him, leaning interestedly forward, as if at a garden party she had been finding –
par impossible!
– a pastoral play not so badly produced. Tietjens was a fabulous monster… .

He was a fabulous monster not because he was honourable and virtuous. She had known several very honourable and very virtuous men. If she had never known an honourable or virtuous woman except among her French or Austrian friends, that was, no doubt, because virtuous and honourable women did not amuse her or because, except just for the French and Austrians, they were not Roman Catholics… . But the honourable and virtuous men she had known had usually prospered and been respected. They weren’t the great fortunes, but they were well-offish: well spoken of, of the country gentleman type … Tietjens… .

She arranged her thoughts. To get one point settled in her mind, she asked:

‘What really happened to you in France? What is really the matter with your memory? Or your brain; is it?’

He said carefully:

‘It’s half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale. Without a proper blood supply… . So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone.’

She said:

‘But
you!
… without a brain! …’ As this was not a question he did not answer.

His going at once to the telephone, as soon as he was in the possession of the name ‘Metternich’, had at last convinced her that he had not been, for the last four
months,
acting hypochondriacal or merely lying to obtain sympathy or extended sick leave. Amongst Sylvia’s friends a wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival of lying, lechery, drink, and howling that this affair was, to pretend to a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous. At any rate if a man passed his time at garden parties – or, as for the last months Tietjens had done, passed his time in a tin hut amongst dust heaps, going to tea every afternoon in order to help Mrs. Wannop with her newspaper articles – when men were so engaged they were, at least, not trying to kill each other.

She said now:

‘Do you mind telling me what actually happened to you?’

He said:

‘I don’t know that I can very well… . Something burst – or “exploded” is probably the right word – near me, in the dark. I expect you’d rather not hear about it? …’

‘I want to!’ Sylvia said.

He said:

‘The point about it is that I
don’t
know what happened and I don’t remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life dead… . What I remember is being in a C.C.S. and not being able to remember my own name.’

‘You
mean
that?’ Sylvia asked. ‘It’s not just a way of talking?’

‘No, it’s not just a way of talking,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I lay in bed in the C.C.S… . Your friends were dropping bombs on it.’

‘You might not call them my friends,’ Sylvia said.

Tietjens said:

‘I beg your pardon. One gets into a loose way of speaking. The poor bloody Huns then were dropping bombs from aeroplanes on the hospital huts… . I’m not suggesting they knew it was a C.C.S.; it was, no doubt, just carelessness… .’

‘You needn’t spare the Germans for me!’ Sylvia said. ‘You needn’t spare any man who has killed another man.’

‘I was, then, dreadfully worried,’ Tietjens went on. ‘I was composing a preface for a book on Arminianism… .’

‘You haven’t written a book!’ Sylvia exclaimed eagerly, because she thought that if Tietjens took to writing a book there might be a way of his earning a living. Many people had told her that he ought to write a book.

‘No, I hadn’t written a book,’ Tietjens said, ‘and I didn’t know what Arminianism was… .’

‘You know perfectly well what the Arminian heresy is,’ Sylvia said sharply; ‘you explained it all to me years ago.’

‘Yes,’ Tietjens exclaimed. ‘Years ago I could have, but I couldn’t then. I could now, but I was a little worried about it then. It’s a little awkward to write a preface about a subject of which you know nothing. But it didn’t seem to me to be discreditable in an army sense… . Still it worried me dreadfully not to know my own name. I lay and worried and worried and thought how discreditable it would appear if a nurse came along and asked me and I didn’t know. Of course my name was on a luggage label tied to my collar; but I’d forgotten they did that to casualties… . Then a lot of people carried pieces of a nurse down the hut; the Germans’ bombs had done that of course. They were still dropping about the place.’

‘But good heavens,’ Sylvia cried out, ‘do you mean they carried a dead nurse past you?’

‘The poor dear wasn’t dead,’ Tietjens said. ‘I wish she had been. Her name was Beatrice Carmichael … the first name I learned after my collapse. She’s dead now of course… . That seemed to wake up a fellow on the other side of the room with a lot of blood coming through the bandages on his head… . He rolled out of his bed and, without a word, walked across the hut and began to strangle me… .’

‘But this isn’t believable,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t believe it… . You were an officer: they
couldn’t
have carried a wounded nurse under your nose. They must have known your sister Caroline was a nurse and was killed… .’

‘Carrie!’ Tietjens said, ‘was drowned on a hospital ship. I thank God I didn’t have to connect the other girl with her… . But you don’t suppose that in addition to one’s
name,
rank, unit, and date of admission they’d put that I’d lost a sister and two brothers in action and a father – of a broken heart I daresay… .’

‘But you only lost one brother,’ Sylvia said. ‘I went into mourning for him and your sister… .’

‘No, two,’ Tietjens said; ‘but the fellow who was strangling me was what I wanted to tell you about. He let out a number of earpiercing shrieks and lots of orderlies came and pulled him off me and sat all over him. Then he began to shout “
Faith!
” He shouted: “Faith! … Faith! … Faith! …” at intervals of two seconds, as far as I could tell by my pulse, until four in the morning, when he died… . I don’t know whether it was a religious exhortation or a woman’s name, but I disliked him a good deal because he started my tortures, such as they were… . There had been a girl I knew called Faith. Oh, not a love affair: the daughter of my father’s head gardener, a Scotsman. The point is that every time he said Faith I asked myself “Faith … Faith what?” I couldn’t remember the name of my father’s head gardener.’

Sylvia, who was thinking of other things, asked:

‘What
was
the name?’

Tietjens answered:

‘I don’t know, I don’t know to this day… . The point is that when I knew that I didn’t know
that
name, I was as ignorant, as
uninstructed
, as a new-born babe and much more worried about it… . The Koran says – I’ve got as far as K in my reading of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
every afternoon at Mrs. Wannop’s – “The strong man when smitten is smitten in his pride!” … Of course I got King’s Regs. And the M.M.L. and Infantry Field Training and all the A.C.I.s to date by heart very quickly. And that’s all a British officer is really encouraged to know… .’

‘Oh, Christopher!’ Sylvia said. ‘
You
read that
Encyclopædia
; it’s pitiful. You used to despise it so.’

‘That’s what’s meant by “smitten in his pride”,’ Tietjens said. ‘Of course what I read or hear now I remember… . But I haven’t got to M, much less V. That was why I was worried about Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. I
try
to remember things on my own, but I haven’t yet done so. You see it’s as if a certain area of my brain had been wiped white. Occasionally one name suggests another. You noticed, when I got Metternich it suggested
Castlereagh
and Wellington – and even other names… . But that’s what the Department of Statistics will get me on. When they fire me out. The real reason will be that I’ve served. But they’ll pretend it’s because I’ve no more general knowledge than is to be found in the
Encyclopædia
, or two-thirds or more or less – according to the duration of the war… . Or, of course, the real reason will be that I won’t fake statistics to dish the French with. They asked me to, the other day, as a holiday task. And when I refused you should have seen their faces.’

‘Have you
really
,’ Sylvia asked, ‘lost two brothers in action?’

‘Yes,’ Tietjens answered. ‘Curly and Longshanks. You never saw them because they were always in India. And they weren’t noticeable… .’

‘
Two!
’ Sylvia said. ‘I only wrote to your father about one called Edward. And your sister Caroline. In the same letter… .’

‘Carrie wasn’t noticeable either,’ Tietjens said. ‘She did Charity Organisation Society work… . But I remember: you didn’t like her. She was the born old maid… .’

‘Christopher!’ Sylvia asked, ‘do you still think your mother died of a broken heart because I left you?’

Tietjens said:

‘Good God; no. I never thought so and I don’t think so. I
know
she didn’t.’

‘
Then!
’ Sylvia exclaimed, ‘she died of a broken heart because I came back… . It’s no good protesting that you don’t think so. I remember your face when you opened the telegram at Lobscheid. Miss Wannop forwarded it from Rye. I remember the postmark. She was born to do me ill. The moment you got it I could see you thinking that you must conceal from me that you thought it was because of me she died. I could see you wondering if it wouldn’t be practicable to conceal from me that she was dead. You couldn’t, of course, do that because, you remember, we were to have gone to Wiesbaden and show ourselves; and we couldn’t do that because we should have to be in mourning. So you took me to Russia to get out of taking me to the funeral.’