Parade's End (53 page)

If Tietjens should say that to this popinjay, would that be going farther than an officer in charge of detachment should go with a member of the Staff set above him, though not on parade and in a conversation of intimacy? Off parade and in intimate conversation all His Majesty’s poor — officers are equals … gentlemen having His Majesty’s commission, there can be no higher rank and all that Bilge! … For how off parade could this descendant of an old-clo’ man from Frankfurt be the equal of him, Tietjens of Groby? He wasn’t his equal in any way – let alone socially. If Tietjens hit him he would drop dead; if he addressed a little sneering remark to Levin, the fellow would melt so that you would see the old spluttering Jew swimming up through his carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn’t shoot as well as Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he, Tietjens, hadn’t the least doubt that he could paint better water-colour pictures… . And, as for returns … he would undertake to tear the guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A.C.I.s – Army Council Instructions – and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them, before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first one… . He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a French blue stocking’s salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters… . He had written Levin’s blessed command orders while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle de Bailly … and curled his delicate moustache… . Mlle de Bailly, chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon!

Mlle de Bailly was a long, dark, high-coloured Provençale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep arm-chair, saying the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws. With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose … Almost Japanese … And with a terrific cortège of relatives, swell in a French way. One brother a
chauffeur
to a Marshal of France … An aristocratic way of shirking!

With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel, but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he
was
a silly ass – you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn’t prove it! – you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible… . So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to … any other command in the whole service… .

And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him… . Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you could be in contact with … if you had to be in contact with your kind… . So he just said:

‘Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass,’ and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion.

The colonel said:

‘Why, what have I been doing now? … I
wish
you would walk the other way… .’

Tietjens said:

‘No, I can’t afford to go out of camp… . I’ve got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract to-morrow afternoon, haven’t I? … I can’t leave camp twice in one week… .’

‘You’ve got to come down to the camp-guard,’ Levin said. ‘I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold … though she
is
in the general’s car… .’

Tietjens exclaimed:

‘You’ve not been … oh, extraordinary enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?’

Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear:

‘It isn’t Miss de Bailly!’ Then he exclaimed quite aloud: ‘Damn it all, Tietjens, haven’t you had hints enough? …’

For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens’ mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general’s car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guard-room. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid… .

For a minute Tietjens’ backbone stiffened. He didn’t intend to interfere between Mlle de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress… . Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman… . He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn’t be… . An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him. Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather pug-nosed face; under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward she would be, on the seat of the general’s illuminated car, glazed in, a regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the reflections on the inside of the glass… .

He was saying to Levin:

‘Look here, Stanley … why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss de Bailly has one chief luxury. It’s exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling it; exhibiting it.’

‘
Ought
you,’ Levin asked ironically, ‘to discuss my fiancée before me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all.’

‘Why, of course,’ Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. ‘As a sort of swollen best man, it’s my duty to
instruct
you. Mothers tell their daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent Benedict… . And you’re always consulting me about the young woman… .’

‘I’m not doing it now,’ Levin grumbled direly.

‘Then what, in God’s name, are you doing? You’ve got a cast mistress, haven’t you, down there in old Campion’s car? …’ They were beside the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim, and desultory, still half filled it, a little way down.

‘I
haven’t
,’ Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. ‘I never
had
a mistress… .’

‘And you’re not married?’ Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the schoolboy’s ejaculation ‘Lummy!’ to soften the jibe. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I must just go and take a look at my crowd. To see if your orders have come down.’

He found no orders in a hut as full as ever of the dull mists and odours of khaki, but he found in revenge a fine upstanding, blond, Canadian-born lance-corporal of old Colonial lineage, with a moving story as related by Sergeant-Major Cowley:

‘This man, sir, of the Canadian Railway lot, ’is mother’s just turned up in the town, come on from Eetarpels. Come all the way from Toronto where she was bedridden.’

Tietjens said:

‘Well, what about it? Get a move on.’

The man wanted leave to go to his mother who was waiting in a decent estaminet at the end of the tramline, just outside the camp where the houses of the town began.

Tietjens said: ‘It’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. You know that.’

The man stood erect and expressionless; his blue eyes looked confoundedly honest to Tietjens who was cursing himself. He said to the man:

‘You can see for yourself that it’s impossible, can’t you?’

The man said slowly:

‘Not knowing the regulations in these circumstances I can’t say, sir. But my mother’s is a very special case… . She’s lost two sons already.’

Tietjens said:

‘A great many people have… . Do you understand, if you went absent off my pass I might – I quite possibly
might
– lose my commission? I’m responsible for you fellows getting up the line.’

The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it was so. He said to the man:

‘You said good-bye to your mother, didn’t you, in Toronto, before you left?’

The man said:

‘No, sir.’ He had not seen his mother in seven years. He had been up in the Chilkoot when war broke out and had not heard of it for ten months. Then he had at once joined up in British Columbia, and had been sent straight through for railway work, on to Aldershot where the Canadians have a camp in building. He had not known that his brothers were killed till he got there and his mother, being bedridden at the news, had not been able to get down to Toronto when his batch had passed through. She lived about sixty miles from Toronto. Now she had risen from her bed like a miracle and come all the way. A widow, sixty-two years of age. Very feeble.

It occurred to Tietjens as it occurred to him ten times a day that it was idiotic of him to figure Valentine Wannop to himself. He had not the slightest idea where she was: in what circumstances, or even in what house. He did not suppose she and her mother had stayed on in that dog kennel of a place in Bedford Park. They would be fairly comfortable. His father had left them money. ‘It is preposterous,’ he said to himself, ‘to persist in figuring a person to yourself when you have no idea of where they are.’ He said to the man:

‘Wouldn’t it do if you saw your mother at the camp gate, by the guard-room?’

‘Not much of a leave-taking, sir,’ the man said; ‘she not allowed in the camp and I not allowed out. Talking under a sentry’s nose very likely.’

Tietjens said to himself:

‘What a monstrous absurdity this is of seeing and talking, for a minute or so! You meet and talk …’ And next day at the same hour. Nothing… . As well not to meet or talk… . Yet the mere fantastic idea of seeing Valentine Wannop for a minute… . She not allowed in the camp
and
he not going out. Talking under a sentry’s nose, very likely… . It had made him smell primroses. Primroses, like Miss Wannop. He said to the sergeant-major:

‘What sort of a fellow is this?’ Cowley, in open-mouthed suspense, gasped like a fish. Tietjens said:

‘I suppose your mother is fairly feeble to stand in the cold?’

‘A very decent man, sir,’ the sergeant-major got out, ‘one of the best. No trouble. A perfectly clean conduct sheet. Very good education. A railway engineer in civil life… . Volunteered, of course, sir.’

‘That’s the odd thing,’ Tietjens said to the man, ‘that the percentages of absentees is as great amongst the volunteers as the Derby men or the compulsorily enlisted… . Do you understand what will happen to you if you miss the draft?’

The man said soberly:

‘Yes, sir. Perfectly well.’

‘You understand that you will be shot? As certainly as that you stand there. And that you haven’t a chance of escape.’

He wondered what Valentine Wannop, hot pacifist, would think of him if she heard him. Yet it was his duty to talk like that: his human, not merely his military duty. As much his duty as that of a doctor to warn a man that if he drank of typhoid-contaminated water he would get typhoid. But people are unreasonable. Valentine too was unreasonable. She would consider it brutal to speak to a man of the possibility of his being shot by a firing party. A groan burst from him at the thought that there was no sense in bothering about what Valentine Wannop would or would not think of him. No sense. No sense. No sense …

The man, fortunately, was assuring him that he knew, very soberly, all about the penalty for going absent off a draft. The sergeant-major, catching a sound from Tietjens, said with admirable fussiness to the man:

‘There, there! Don’t you hear the officer’s speaking? Never interrupt an officer.’

‘You’ll be shot,’ Tietjens said, ‘at dawn… . Literally at dawn.’ Why did they shoot them at dawn? To rub it in that they were never going to see another sunrise. But they drugged the fellows so that they wouldn’t know the
sun
if they saw it; all roped in a chair… . It was really the worse for the firing party. He added to the man:

‘Don’t think I’m insulting you. You appear to be a very decent fellow. But very decent fellows have gone absent… .’ He said to the sergeant-major:

‘Give this man a two-hours’ pass to go to the … whatever’s the name of the estaminet… . The draft won’t move off for two hours, will it?’ He added to the man: ‘If you see your draft passing the pub you run out and fall in. Like mad, you understand. You’d never get another chance.’

There was a mumble like applause and envy of a mate’s good luck from a packed audience that had hung on the lips of simple melodrama … an audience that seemed to be all enlarged eyes, the khaki was so colourless… . They came as near applause as they dared, but there was no sense in worrying about whether Valentine Wannop would have applauded or not… . And there was no knowing whether the fellow would not go absent, either. As likely as not there was no mother. A girl very likely. And very likely the man would desert… . The man looked you straight in the eyes. But a strong passion, like that for escape – or a girl – will give you control over the muscles of the eyes. A little thing that, before a strong passion! One would look God in the face on the day of judgment and lie, in that case.

Because what the devil did he want of Valentine Wannop? Why could he not stall off the thought of her? He could stall off the thought of his wife … or his not-wife. But Valentine Wannop came wriggling in. At all hours of the day and night. It was an obsession. A madness … what those fools called ‘a complex’! … Due, no doubt, to something your nurse had done, or your parents said to you. At birth … A strong passion … or no doubt not strong enough. Otherwise he, too, would have gone absent. At any rate, from Sylvia … Which he hadn’t done. Which he hadn’t done. Or hadn’t he? There was no saying… .