Parade's End (38 page)

She said passionately:

‘They’re not! They’re not! How dare you say such a thing?’

He answered:

‘It doesn’t matter … No! I’m sure you’re not… . But, anyhow, these things are official. One can’t, if one’s scrupulous, even talk about them … And then … You see it means such infinite deaths of men, such an infinite prolongation … all this interference for side-ends! … I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over their heads… . And then … I’m to carry out their orders because they’re my superiors… . But helping them means unnumbered deaths… .’

He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile:

‘You see!’ he said, ‘we’re perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn’t think you’re the only one that sees all the deaths and all the sufferings. All, you see. I, too, am a conscientious objector. My conscience won’t let me continue any longer with these fellows… .’

She said:

‘But isn’t there any other …’

He interrupted:

‘No! There’s no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these affairs. I suppose I’m more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I’m not. But my conscience won’t let me use my brain in this service. So I’ve a great, hulking body! I’ll admit I’m probably not much good. But I’ve nothing to live for: what I stand for isn’t any more in this world. What I want, as you know, I can’t have. So …’

She exclaimed bitterly:

‘Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two bullets in front of two small anæmic fellows… . And how can you say you’ll have nothing to live for? You’ll come back. You’ll do your good work again. You know you did good work …’

He said:

‘Yes! I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I’ve come to believe I did… . But no! They’ll never let me back. They’ve got me out, with all sorts of bad marks against me. They’ll pursue me, systematically… . You see in such a world as this, an idealist – or perhaps it’s only a sentimentalist – must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf… . No, they’ll get me, one way or the other. And some fellow – Macmaster here – will do my jobs. He won’t do
them
so well, but he’ll do them more dishonestly. Or no. I oughtn’t to say dishonestly. He’ll do them with enthusiasm and righteousness. He’ll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense docility and unction. He’ll fake figures against our allies with the black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when
that
war comes, he’ll do the requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priest of Baal. And he’ll be right. It’s all we’re fitted for. We ought never to have come into this war. We ought to have snaffled other peoples’ colonies as the price of neutrality… .’

‘Oh!’ Valentine Wannop said, ‘how can you so hate your country?’

He said with great earnestness:

‘Don’t say it! Don’t believe it! Don’t even for a moment think it! I love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey, mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a grosser name … and all the rest of the rubbish – you remember the field between the Duchemins’ and your mother’s – and we have always been boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so we’ve built up the great tradition that we love… . But, for the moment, it’s painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than Walpole’s. But one’s too near them. One sees of Walpole that he consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt; one doesn’t see his methods… . My son, or his son, will only see the glory of the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won’t know about the methods. They’ll teach him at school that across the counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew… . Though that was another discreditable affair… .’

‘But you!’ Valentine Wannop exclaimed. ‘
You!
what will
you
do! After the war!’

‘I!’ he said rather bewilderedly. ‘I! … Oh, I shall go into the old furniture business. I’ve been offered a job… .’

She didn’t believe he was serious. He hadn’t, she knew, ever thought about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage sale. She cried out:

‘Why don’t you do it at once? Why don’t you take the job at once?’ for in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.

He said:

‘Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade’s probably not itself for the minute… .’ He was obviously thinking of something else.

‘I’ve probably been a low cad,’ he said, ‘wringing your heart with my doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We’ve always been – or we’ve seemed always to me – so alike in our thoughts. I daresay I wanted you to respect me… .’

‘Oh, I respect you! I respect you!’ she said. ‘You’re as innocent as a child.’

He went on:

‘And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn’t been often of late that one has had a quiet room and a fire and … you! To think in front of. You
do
make one collect one’s thoughts. I’ve been very muddled till today … till five minutes ago! Do you remember our drive? You analysed my character. I’d never have let another soul … But you see … Don’t you see?’

She said:

‘No! What am I to see? I remember …’

He said:

‘That I’m certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for me!’

She said:

‘Did I say that? … Yes, I said that!’

The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out her arms… . She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing, she was blind for tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word of love or she would have held it; it began with: ‘Well, I must be …’ He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great waves coming from him to her. But he wasn’t in the room… .

The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and unrelenting. Her mother’s paper cut
down
her money, no orders for serials came in; her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the Macmasters’ she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then her brother went to prison, somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. For three days Mrs. Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace, after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let his mother use her influence – of which she had still some – to get him appointed as an A.B. on a minesweeper. Great winds became an agony to Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better, she took pride in having a son in a service. She was then the more able to appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs. Wannop in effigy in front of their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs. Wannop ran out and in the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs. Wannop’s grey hair in the firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to London.

The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts, the air above it filled with aeroplanes, the roads covered with military cars. There was then no getting away from the sounds of the war.

Just as they had decided to move Tietjens came back. It was for a moment heaven to have him in this country.
But
when, a month later, Valentine Wannop saw him for a minute, he seemed very heavy, aged, and dull. It was then almost as bad as before, for it seemed to Valentine as if he hardly had his reason.

On hearing that Tietjens was to be quartered – or, at any rate, occupied – in the neighbourhood of Ealing, Mrs. Wannop at once took a small house in Bedford Park, whilst, to make ends meet – for her mother made terribly little – Valentine Wannop took a post as athletic mistress in a great school in a not very near suburb. Thus, though Tietjens came in for a cup of tea almost every afternoon with Mrs. Wannop in the dilapidated little suburban house, Valentine Wannop hardly ever saw him. The only free afternoon she had was the Friday, and on that day she still regularly chaperoned Mrs. Duchemin, meeting her at Charing Cross towards noon and taking her back to the same station in time to catch the last train to Rye. On Saturdays and Sundays she was occupied all day in typing her mother’s manuscript.

Of Tietjens, then, she saw almost nothing. She knew that his poor mind was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said he was a great help to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory conclusions – of quite startling and attractive theories – with extreme rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her whenever – though it wasn’t now very often – she had an article to write for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing.

Mrs. Duchemin, then, Valentine Wannop still chaperoned, though there was no bond any more between them. Valentine knew, for instance, perfectly well that Mrs. Duchemin, after she had been seen off by train from Charing Cross, got out at Clapham Junction, took a taxicab back to Gray’s Inn after dark and spent the night with Macmaster, and Mrs. Duchemin knew quite well that Valentine knew. It was a sort of parade of circumspection and rightness, and they kept it up even after, at a sinister registry office, the wedding had taken place, Valentine being the one witness and an obscure-looking substitute for the usual pew opener another. There seemed to be, by then, no very obvious reason why Valentine should support Mrs. Macmaster any more on these rather dreary
occasions,
but Mrs. Macmaster said she might just as well, until they saw fit to make the marriage public. There were, Mrs. Macmaster said, censorious tongues, and even if these were confuted afterwards it is difficult, if not impossible, to outrun scandal. Besides, Mrs. Macmaster was of opinion that the Macmaster afternoons with these geniuses must be a liberal education for Valentine. But, as Valentine sat most of the time at the tea-table near the door, it was the backs and side faces of the distinguished rather than their intellects with which she was most acquainted. Occasionally, however, Mrs. Duchemin would show Valentine, as an enormous privilege, one of the letters to herself from men of genius – usually North British, written, as a rule, from the Continent or more distant and peaceful climates, for most of them believed it their duty in these hideous times to keep alive in the world the only glimmering spark of beauty. Couched in terms so eulogistic as to resemble those used in passionate love-letters by men more profane, these epistles recounted, or consulted Mrs. Duchemin as to, their love affairs with foreign princesses, the progress of their ailments or the progresses of their souls towards those higher regions of morality in which floated their so beautiful-souled correspondent.

The letters entertained Valentine and, indeed, she was entertained by that whole mirage. It was only the Macmasters’ treatment of her mother that finally decided Valentine that this friendship had died; for the friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing disillusionments, and Valentine Wannop was a woman of more than usual loyalty. Indeed, if she couldn’t respect Mrs. Duchemin on the old grounds, she could very really respect her for her tenacity of purpose, her determination to advance Macmaster, and for the sort of ruthlessness that she put into these pursuits.

Valentine’s affection had, indeed, survived even Edith Ethel’s continued denigrations of Tietjens – for Edith Ethel regarded Tietjens as a clog round her husband’s neck, if only because he was a very unpopular man, grown personally rather unpresentable and always extremely rude to the geniuses on Fridays. Edith Ethel, however, never made these complaints that grew more and more frequent as more and more the distinguished flocked to
the
Fridays, before Macmaster. And they ceased very suddenly and in a way that struck Valentine as odd.

Mrs. Duchemin’s grievance against Tietjens was that, Macmaster being a weak man, Tietjens had acted as his banker until, what with interest and the rest of it, Macmaster owed Tietjens a great sum: several thousand pounds. And there had been no real reason: Macmaster had spent most of the money either on costly furnishings for his rooms or on his costly journeys to Rye. On the one hand Mrs. Duchemin could have found Macmaster all the bric-à-brac he could possibly have wanted from amongst the things at the rectory, where no one would have missed them and, on the other, she, Mrs. Duchemin, would have paid all Macmaster’s travelling expenses. She had had unlimited money from her husband, who never asked for accounts. But, whilst Tietjens still had influence with Macmaster, he had used it uncompromisingly against this course, giving him the delusion – it enraged Mrs. Duchemin to think! – that it would have been dishonourable. So that Macmaster had continued to draw upon him.

And, most enraging of all, at a period when she had had a power of attorney over all Mr. Duchemin’s fortune and could, perfectly easily, have sold out something that no one would have missed for the couple of thousand or so that Macmaster owed, Tietjens had very forcibly refused to allow Macmaster to agree to anything of the sort. He had again put into Macmaster’s weak head that it would be dishonourable. But Mrs. Duchemin – and she closed her lips determinedly after she had said it – knew perfectly well Tietjens’ motive. So long as Macmaster owed him money he imagined that they couldn’t close their doors upon him. And their establishment was beginning to be a place where you met people of great influence who might well get for a person as lazy as Tietjens a sinecure that would suit him. Tietjens, in fact, knew which side his bread was buttered.