Parade's End (54 page)

It was undoubtedly colder in the alley between the huts. A man was saying: ‘Hoo … Hooo … Hoo …’ A sound like that, and flapping his arms and hopping … ‘Hand and foot, mark time! …’ Somebody ought to fall these poor devils in and give them that to keep their
circulations
going. But they might not know the command… . It was a Guards’ trick, really… . What the devil were these fellows kept hanging about here for? he asked.

One or two voices said that they did not know. The majority said gutturally:

‘Waiting for our mates, sir… .’

‘I should have thought you could have waited under cover,’ Tietjens said caustically. ‘But never mind; it’s your funeral, if you like it… .’ This getting together … a strong passion. There was a warmed recreation-hut for waiting drafts not fifty yards away. But they stood, teeth chattering and mumbling ‘Hoo … Hooo …’ rather than miss thirty seconds of gabble… . About what the English sergeant-major said and about what the officer said and how many dollars did they give you… . And of course about what you answered back… . Or perhaps not that. These Canadian troops were husky, serious fellows, without the swank of the Cockney or the Lincolnshire Moonrakers. They wanted, apparently, to learn the rules of war. They discussed anxiously information that they received in orderly rooms, and looked at you as if you were expounding the gospels… .

But damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what he had answered back … to Destiny! … What was the fellow in the Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline. Always a bit of a swine, Dante… . Rather like … like whom? … Oh, Sylvia Tietjens… . A good hater! … He imagined hatred coming to him in waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself… . Gone into retreat… . He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said she was going. For the rest of the war… . For the duration of hostilities or life, whichever were the longer… . He imagined Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed… . Hating … Her certainly glorious hair all round her… . Hating … Slowly and coldly … Like the head of a snake when you examined it… . Eyes motionless, mouth closed tight… . Looking away into the distance and hating… . She was
presumably
in Birkenhead… . A long way to send your hatred… . Across a country and a sea in an icy night! Over all that black land and water … with the lights out because of air-raids and U-boats… . Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment. She was well out of it… .

It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on… . Even that ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of white stones… . In spite of his boasting about not wearing an overcoat; to catch women’s eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was carrying on like a leopard at feeding time.

Tietjens said:

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, old man… . Or rather your lady… . But there were some men to see to. And, you know … “The comfort and – what is it? – of the men comes before every – is it ‘consideration’? – except the exigencies of actual warfare” … My memory’s gone phut these days… . And you want me to slide down this hill and wheeze back again… . To see a woman!’

Levin screeched: ‘Damn you, you ass! It’s your wife who’s waiting for you at the bottom there.’

III

THE ONE THING
that stood out sharply in Tietjens’ mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his officer’s pocket-book complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability for giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a cheap French novel on a camp chair beside him he sat in his flea-bag with six army blankets over him – the one thing that stood out as sharply as Staff tabs was that that ass Levin was rather pathetic. His unnailed bootsoles very much cramping his action on the frozen hillside, he had alternately hobbled a step or two, and, reduced to inaction, had grabbed at Tietjens’ elbow, while he brought out breathlessly puzzled sentences.

There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright-coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then
hobbled
back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia’s activities, without any sequence, and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens himself… . All sorts of singular things seemed to have been going on round him in the vague zone, outside all this engrossed and dust-coloured world – in the vague zone that held … Oh, the civilian population, tea-parties short of butter! …

And as Tietjens, seated on his hams, his knees up, pulled the soft woolliness of his flea-bag under his chin and damned the paraffin heater for letting out a new and singular stink, it seemed to him that this affair was like coming back after two months and trying to get the hang of battalion orders… . You come back to the familiar, slightly battered mess ante-room. You tell the mess orderly to bring you the last two months’ orders, for it is as much as your life is worth not to know what is or is not in them… . There might be an A.C.I. ordering you to wear your helmet back to the front, or a battalion order that Mills bombs must always be worn in the left breast pocket. Or there might be the detail for putting on a new gas helmet! … The orderly hands you a dishevelled mass of faintly typewritten matter, thumbed out of all chance of legibility, with the orders for November 16 fastened inextricably into the middle of those for the 1st of December, and those for the 10th, 15th and 29th missing altogether… . And all that you gather is that headquarters has some exceedingly insulting things to say about A Company; that a fellow called Hartopp, whom you don’t know, has been deprived of his commission; that at a court of inquiry held to ascertain deficiencies in C Company Captain Wells – poor Wells! – has been assessed at £27 11
s
. 4d., which he is requested to pay forthwith to the adjutant… .

So, on that black hillside, going and returning, what stuck out for Tietjens was that Levin had been taught by the general to consider that he, Tietjens, was an extraordinarily violent chap who would certainly knock Levin down when he told him that his wife was at the camp gates; that Levin considered himself to be the descendant of an ancient Quaker family… . (Tietjens had said
Good God!
at that); that the mysterious ‘rows’ to which in his
fear
Levin had been continually referring had been successive letters from Sylvia to the harried general … and that Sylvia had accused him, Tietjens, of stealing two pairs of her best sheets… . There was a great deal more. But, having faced what he considered to be the worst of the situation, Tietjens set himself coolly to recapitulate every aspect of his separation from his wife. He had meant to face every aspect, not that merely social one upon which, hitherto, he had automatically imagined their disunion to rest. For, as he saw it, English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions, is the maxim: No scenes. Obviously for the sake of the servants – who are the same thing as the public. No scenes, then, for the sake of the public. And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy – as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives – was as strong as the instinct of life itself. He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.

And, until that afternoon, he had imagined that his wife, too, would rather be dead than have her affairs canvassed by the other ranks. But that assumption had to be gone over. Revised … Of course he might say she had gone mad. But, if he said she had gone mad he would have to revise a great deal of their relationships, so it would be as broad as it was long… .

The doctor’s batman, from the other end of the hut, said:

‘Poor — O Nine Morgan! …’ in a sing-song, mocking voice… .

For though, hours before, Tietjens had appointed this moment of physical ease that usually followed on his splurging heavily down on to his creaking camp-bed in the doctor’s lent hut, for the cool consideration of his relations with his wife, it was not turning out a very easy matter. The hut was unreasonably warm: he had invited Mackenzie – whose real name turned out to be McKechnie, James Grant McKechnie – to occupy the other end of it. The other end of it was divided from him by a partition of canvas and a striped Indian curtain. And McKechnie, who was unable to sleep, had elected to carry on a long – an interminable – conversation with the doctor’s batman.

The doctor’s batman also could not sleep and, like McKechnie, was more than a little barmy on the crumpet – an almost non-English-speaking Welshman from God knows what up-country valley. He had shaggy hair like a Caribbean savage and two dark, resentful wall-eyes; being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair and his almost incomprehensible voice went on in a low sort of ululation, with an occasionally and startlingly comprehensible phrase sticking out now and then.

It was troublesome, but orthodox enough. The batman had been blown literally out of most of his senses and the VIth Battalion of the Glamorganshire Regiment by some German high explosive or other, more than a year ago. But before then, it appeared, he had been in McKechnie’s own company in that battalion. It was perfectly in order that an officer should gossip with a private formerly of his own platoon or company, especially on first meeting him after long separation caused by a casualty to one or the other. And McKechnie had first re-met this scoundrel Jonce, or Evanns, at eleven that night – two and a half hours before. So there, in the light of a single candle stuck in a stout bottle they were tranquilly at it: the batman sitting on his heel by the officer’s head; the officer, in his pyjamas, sprawling half out of bed over his pillows, stretching his arms abroad, occasionally yawning, occasionally asking: ‘What became of Company-Sergeant-Major Hoyt?’ They might talk till half-past three.

But that was troublesome to a gentleman seeking to recapture what exactly were his relations with his wife.

Before the doctor’s batman had interrupted him by speaking startlingly of O Nine Morgan, Tietjens had got as far as what follows with his recapitulation: The lady, Mrs. Tietjens, was certainly without mitigation a whore; he himself equally certainly and without qualification had been physically faithful to the lady and their marriage tie. In law, then, he was absolutely in the right of it. But that fact had less weight than a cobweb. For after the last of her high-handed divagations from fidelity he had accorded to the lady the shelter of his roof and of his name. She had lived for years beside him, apparently on terms of hatred and miscomprehension. But certainly in conditions of chastity. Then, during the tenuous and lugubrious small hours, before his coming out there again
to
France, she had given evidence of a madly vindictive passion for his person. A physical passion at any rate.

Well, those were times of mad, fugitive emotions. But even in the calmest times a man could not expect to have a woman live with him as the mistress of his house and mother of his heir without establishing some sort of claim upon him. They hadn’t slept together. But was it not possible that a constant measuring together of your minds was as proper to give you a proprietary right as the measuring together of the limbs? It was perfectly possible. Well then …

What, in the eyes of God, severed a union? … Certainly he had imagined – until that very afternoon – that their union had been cut, as the tendon of Achilles is cut in a hamstringing, by Sylvia’s clear voice, outside his house, saying in the dawn to a cabman, ‘Paddington!’ He tried to go with extreme care through every detail of their last interview in his still nearly dark drawing-room at the other end of which she had seemed a mere white phosphorescence… .

They had, then, parted for good on that day. He was going out to France; she into retreat in a convent near Birkenhead – to which place you go from Paddington. Well then, that was one parting. That, surely, set him free for the girl!

He took a sip from the glass of rum and water on the canvas chair beside him. It was tepid and therefore beastly. He had ordered the batman to bring it him hot, strong, and sweet, because he had been certain of an incipient cold. He had refrained from drinking it because he had remembered that he was to think cold-bloodedly of Sylvia, and he made a practice of never touching alcohol when about to engage in protracted reflection. That had always been his theory; it had been immensely and empirically strengthened by his warlike experience. On the Somme, in the summer, when stand-to had been at four in the morning, you would come out of your dug-out and survey, with a complete outfit of pessimistic thoughts, a dim, grey, repulsive landscape over a dull and much too thin parapet. There would be repellent posts, altogether too fragile entanglements of barbed wire, broken wheels, detritus, coils of mist over the positions of revolting Germans. Grey stillness; grey horrors, in front, and behind
amongst
the civilian populations! And clear, hard outlines to every thought… . Then your batman brought you a cup of tea with a little – quite a little – rum in it. In three or four minutes the whole world changed beneath your eyes. The wire aprons became jolly efficient protections that your skill had devised and for which you might thank God; the broken wheels were convenient landmarks for raiding at night in No Man’s Land. You had to confess that, when you had re-erected that parapet, after it had last been jammed in, your company had made a pretty good job of it. And, even as far as the Germans were concerned, you were there to kill the swine; but you didn’t feel that the thought of them would make you sick beforehand… . You were, in fact, a changed man. With a mind of a different specific gravity. You could not even tell that the roseate touches of dawn on the mists were not really the effects of rum… .