Parade's End (37 page)

And, till that moment, she had imagined herself on the skirts of such a colony. She presupposed a society of beautiful intellects centring in London round her friends. Ealing she just put out of her mind. She considered: she had, indeed, once heard Tietjens say that humanity was made up of exact and constructive intellects on the one hand and on the other of stuff to fill graveyards… . Now, what had become of the exact and constructive intellects?

Worst of all, what became of her beautiful inclination towards Tietjens, for she couldn’t regard it as anything more? Couldn’t her heart sing any more whilst she was in the housemaid’s pantry and he in her mother’s study? And what became, still more, of what she knew to be Tietjens’ beautiful inclination towards her? She asked herself the eternal question – and she knew it to be the eternal question – whether no man and woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. And, looking at Mrs. Duchemin, rushing backwards and forwards in the light of candles, blue-white of face and her hair flying, Valentine Wannop said: ‘No! no! The tiger lying in the reeds will always raise its head!’ But tiger … it was more like a peacock.

Tietjens, raising his head from the other side of the tea-table and looking at her with his long, meditative glance from beside her mother; ought he then, instead of blue and protruding, to have eyes divided longitudinally in the blacks of them – that should divide, closing
or
dilating, on a yellow ground, with green glowings of furtive light?

She was aware that Edith Ethel had done her an irreparable wrong, for you cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same. Or not for years. Nevertheless she stayed with Mrs. Duchemin until far into the small hours, when that lady fell, a mere parcel of bones in a peacock-blue wrapper, into a deep chair and refused to move or speak; nor did she afterwards slacken in her faithful waiting on her friend… .

On the next day came the war. That was a nightmare of pure suffering, with never a let-up, day or night. It began on the morning of the fourth with the arrival of her brother from some sort of Oxford Communist Summer School on the Broads. He was wearing a German corps student’s cap and was very drunk. He had been seeing German friends off from Harwich. It was the first time she had ever seen a drunken man, so that was a good present to her.

Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his father, he had his mother’s hooked nose and was always a little unbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn’t hitherto mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper; her brother, when he had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption. But her mother had only chuckled.

The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood and to torture; neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as if – so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived with her – in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture, and flay off all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling, and vitriolic, one hand clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom Edward
Wannop
affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being ducked in a horse-pond, shot or otherwise martyrised. That made it obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war. If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled and terrorised millions would have thrown down their arms!

Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother, who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs. Wannop had said:

‘What does your wife think about it?’

Tietjens had answered:

‘Oh, Mrs. Tietjens is a pro-German… . Or no, that isn’t exact! She has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war. She can’t bear the thought of physical suffering. I can’t blame her.’

Mrs. Wannop was no longer listening; her daughter was.

For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man and far less of an inclination – the war and Mrs. Duchemin between them. He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on. She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him.

One Friday afternoon at Macmaster’s she had had a long talk with him, the first she had had since the drive and the accident.

Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons – and that had been some time before the war – Valentine Wannop had accompanied Mrs. Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the rectory. Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs. Duchemin drifting about the large book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists.

On this occasion – a November day, very chilly, wet – there had been next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually full. Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin had taken a Mr. Spong, an architect, into the
dining-room
to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi’s
Views of Rome
that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster. A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting close together in the far window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr. Jegg used the word ‘inhibition’. Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat side by side on the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire warming their backs. He said:

‘Well, Miss Wannop. What have you been doing?’ and they drifted into talking of the war. You couldn’t not. She was astonished not to find him so loathsome as she had expected, for, just at that time, with the facts that were always being driven into her mind by the pacifist friends of her brother and with continual brooding over the morals of Mrs. Duchemin, she had an automatic feeling that all manly men were lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of sadism. She knew that this view of Tietjens was wrong, but she cherished it.

She found him – as subconsciously she knew he was – astonishingly mild. She had too often watched him whilst he listened to her mother’s tirades against the Kaiser, not to know that. He did not raise his voice, he showed no emotion. He said at last:

‘You and I are like two people …’ He paused and began again more quickly: ‘Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read “Monkey’s Soap”; if you look back when you’ve passed it’s “Needs no Rinsing.” … You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet a third… . But I hope we respect each other. We’re both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect you and I hope you respect me.’

She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr. Jegg, across the room, said: ‘The failure to co-ordinate …’ and then dropped his voice.

Tietjens looked at her attentively.

‘You don’t respect me?’ he asked. She kept obstinately silent.

‘I’d have liked you to have said it,’ he repeated.

‘Oh,’ she cried out, ‘how can I respect you when there is all this suffering? So much pain! Such torture … I can’t sleep … never … I haven’t slept a whole night since … Think of the immense spaces, stretching out under the night … I believe pain and fear must be worse at night… .’ She knew she was crying out like that because her dread had come true. When he had said: ‘I’d have liked you to have said it,’ using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, too, was going.

And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it; her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her, like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word ‘we’ – and perhaps without intention – he had let her know that he loved her.

Mr. Jegg drifted across from the window; Mrs. Haviland was already at the door.

‘We’ll leave you to have your war talk out,’ Mr. Jegg said. He added: ‘For myself, I believe it’s one’s sole duty to preserve the beauty of things that’s preservable. I can’t help saying that.’

She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:

‘Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He
must
!’ The deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly known to her. She could feel his arms round her; she had in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair – like the scent of the skin of an apple, but very faint. ‘You must! You
must
!’ she said to herself. There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden lapse, like the momentary dream when you fall… . She saw the white disc of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm night… .

Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing on the silver places of his hair. It had
grown
nearly dark outside. They had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great dining-room at the Duchemins’. He got down from the fire-seat with a weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue:

‘Well, I’ve got the business of telling Macmaster that I’m leaving the office. That, too, won’t be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor Vinnie thinks matters.’ He added: ‘It’s queer, dear …’ In the tumult of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said ‘dear’… . ‘Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at night… . And she, too, said that she could not respect me… .’

She sprang up.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘she didn’t mean it.
I
didn’t mean it. Almost every man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don’t you see it’s a desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?’ She added, and it was another stone that she didn’t leave unturned: ‘Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from your point of view? You’re more useful – you know you’re more useful to your country here than …’

He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great gentleness and concern.

‘I can’t reconcile it with my conscience,’ he said. ‘In this affair there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don’t mean that we oughtn’t to be in this affair and on the side we’re on. We ought. But I’ll put to you things I have put to no other soul.’

The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his conviction
that
that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again.

That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing straightforward, for him or for any man. One could have fought with a clean heart for a civilisation: if you like for the eighteenth century against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a catspaw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was just bearable. One could keep at one’s job – which was faking statistics against the other fellow – until you were sick and tired of faking and your brain reeled. And then some!

It was probably impolitic to fake – to overstate! – a case against enemy nations. The chickens would come home to roost in one way or another, probably. Perhaps they wouldn’t. That was a matter for one’s superiors. Obviously! And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows. Stupid, but relatively disinterested. But now! What was one to do? … He went on, almost mumbling… .

She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily unselfish. He didn’t betray one thought of self-interest … not one!

He was saying:

‘But now, with this crowd of boodlers! … Supposing one’s asked to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to, say, Salonika – when they and you and common sense and everyone and everything else, know it’s disastrous? … And from that to monkeying with our own forces… . Starving particular units for political …’ He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said:

‘I can’t, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations.’