Parade's End (78 page)

Tietjens said:

‘No, sir, it’s not really… . But what is a man to do if his wife is unfaithful to him?’

The general said as if it were an insult:

‘Divorce the harlot! Or live with her! …’ Only a beast, he went on, would expect a woman to live all her life alone in a cock-loft! She’s bound to die. Or go on the streets… . What sort of a fellow wouldn’t see that? Was there any sort of beast who’d expect a woman to live … with a man beside her… . Why, she’d … she’d be bound to… . He’d have to take the consequences of whatever happened. The general repeated: ‘Whatever happened! If she pulled all the strings of all the shower-baths in the world!’

Tietjens said:

‘Still, sir … there are … there used to be … in families of … position … a certain …’ He stopped.

The general said:

‘Well …’

Tietjens said:

‘On the part of the man … a certain … Call it … parade!’

The general said:

‘Then there had better be no more parades… .’ He said: ‘Damn it! … Beside us, all women are saints… . Think of what child-bearing is. I know the world… . Who would stand that? … You? … I … I’d rather be the last poor devil in Perry’s lines!’

He looked at Tietjens with a sort of injurious cunning:

‘Why
don’t
you divorce?’ he asked.

Panic came over Tietjens. He knew it would be his last panic of that interview. No brain could stand more. Fragments of scenes of fighting, voices, names, went before his eyes and ears. Elaborate problems… . The whole map of the embattled world ran out in front of him – as large as a field. An embossed map in greenish
papier mâché
– a ten-acre field of embossed
papier mâché
, with the blood of O Nine Morgan blurring luminously over it. Years before … How many months? … Nineteen, to be exact, he had sat on some tobacco plants on the Mont de Kats… . No, the Montagne Noire. In Belgium… . What had he been doing? … Trying to get the lie of the land… . No… . Waiting to point out positions to some fat home general who had never come. The Belgian proprietor of the tobacco plants had arrived, and had screamed his head off over the damaged plants… .

But, up there you saw the whole war… . Infinite miles away, over the sullied land that the enemy forces held; into Germany proper. Presumably you could breathe in Germany proper… . Over your right shoulder you could see a stump of a tooth. The Cloth Hall at Ypres, at an angle of 50° below… . Dark lines behind it… . The German trenches before Wytschaete! …

That was before the great mines had blown Wytschaete to hell.

But – every half-minute by his wrist-watch – white puffs of cotton-wool existed on the dark lines – the German trenches before Wytschaete. Our artillery practice… . Good shooting. Jolly good shooting!

Miles and miles away to the left … beneath the haze of light that, on a clouded day, the sea threw off, a shaft of sunlight fell, and was reflected in a grey blur… . It was the glass roofs of a great aeroplane shelter!

A great plane, the largest he had then seen, was moving over, behind his back, with four little planes as an escort… . Over the vast slag-heaps by Béthune… . High, purplish-blue heaps, like the steam domes of engines or the breasts of women… . Bluish-purple. More blue than purple… . Like all Franco-Belgian Gobelin tapestry… . And all quiet… . Under the vast pall of quiet cloud! …

There were shells dropping in Poperinghe… . Five miles out, under his nose the shells dropped. White vapour rose and ran away in plumes… . What sort of shells? … There were twenty different kinds of shells… .

The Huns were shelling Poperinghe! A senseless cruelty. It was five miles behind the line! Prussian brutality … There were two girls who kept a tea-shop in Poperinghe… . High-coloured… . General Plumer had liked them … a fine old general. The shells had killed them both … Any man might have slept with either of them with pleasure and profit… . Six thousand of H.M. officers must have thought the same about those high-coloured girls. Good girls! … But the Hun shells got them… . What sort of fate was that? … To be desired by six thousand men and smashed into little gobbets of flesh by Hun shells?

It appeared to be mere Prussianism – the senseless cruelty of the Hun! – to shell Poperinghe. An innocent town with a tea-shop five miles behind Ypres… . Little
noiseless
plumes of smoke rising under the quiet blanketing of the pale maroon skies, with the haze from the aeroplane shelters, and the great aeroplanes over the Béthune slag-heaps… . What a dreadful name – Béthune… .

Probably, however, the Germans had heard that we were massing men in Poperinghe. It was reasonable to shell a town where men were being assembled… . Or we might have been shelling one of their towns with an Army H.Q. in it. So they shelled Poperinghe in the silent grey day… .

That was according to the rules of the service… . General Campion, accepting with equanimity what German aeroplanes did to the hospitals, camps, stables, brothels, theatres, boulevards, chocolate stalls, and hotels of his town would have been vastly outraged if Hun planes had dropped bombs on his private lodgings… . The rules of war! … You spare, mutually, each other’s headquarters and blow to pieces girls that are desired by six thousand men apiece… .

That had been nineteen months before! … Now, having lost so much emotion, he saw the embattled world as a map… . An embossed map of greenish
papier mâché
. The blood of O Nine Morgan was blurring luminously over it. At the extreme horizon was territory labelled
White Ruthenians
! Who the devil were
those
poor wretches?

He exclaimed to himself: ‘By heavens! Is this epilepsy?’ He prayed: ‘Blessed saints, get me spared that!’ He exclaimed: ‘No, it isn’t! … I’ve complete control of my mind. My uppermost mind.’ He said to the general:

‘I can’t divorce, sir. I’ve no grounds.’

The general said:

‘Don’t lie. You know what Thurston knows. Do you mean that you have been guilty of contributory misconduct… . Whatever it is? And can’t divorce! I don’t believe it.’

Tietjens said to himself:

‘
Why
the devil am I so anxious to shield that whore? It’s not reasonable. It is an obsession!’

White Ruthenians are miserable peoples to the south of Lithuania. You don’t know whether they incline to the Germans or to the Poles. The Germans don’t even know… . The Germans were beginning to take their people out of the line where we were weak; they were going to give
them
proper infantry training. That gave him, Tietjens, a chance. They would not come over strong for at least two months. It meant, though, a great offensive in the spring. Those fellows had sense. In the poor, beastly trenches the Tommies knew nothing but how to chuck bombs. Both sides did that. But the Germans were going to cure it! Stood chucking bombs at each other from forty yards. The rifle was obsolete! Ha! ha! Obsolete! … The civilian psychology!

The general said:

‘No I don’t believe it. I know you did not keep any girl in any tobacco-shop. I remember every word you said at Rye in 1912. I wasn’t sure then. I am now. You tried to let me think it. You had shut up your house because of your wife’s misbehaviour. You let me believe you had been sold up. You weren’t sold up at all.’

…
Why
should it be the civilian psychology to chuckle with delight, uproariously, when the imbecile idea was promulgated that the rifle was obsolete?
Why
should public opinion force on the War Office a training-camp course that completely cut out any thorough instruction in the rifle and communication drill? It was queer… . It was of course disastrous. Queer. Not altogether mean. Pathetic, too… .

‘Love of truth!’ the general said. ‘Doesn’t that include a hatred for white lies? No; I suppose it doesn’t, or your servants could not say you were not at home… .’

… Pathetic! Tietjens said to himself. Naturally the civilian population wanted soldiers to be made to look like fools, and to be done in. They wanted the war won by men who would at the end be either humiliated or dead. Or both. Except, naturally, their own cousins or fiancées’ relatives. That was what it came to. That was what it meant when important gentlemen said that they had rather the war were lost than that cavalry should gain any distinction in it! … But it was partly the simple, pathetic illusion of the day that great things could only be done by new inventions. You extinguished the Horse, invented something very simple and became God! That is the real pathetic fallacy. You fill a flower-pot with gun-powder and chuck it in the other fellow’s face, and heigh presto! the war is won.
All
the soldiers fall down dead! And You: you who forced the idea on the reluctant
military,
are the Man that Won the War. You deserve all the women in the world. And … you get them! Once the cavalry are out of the way! …

The general was using the words:

‘Head master!’ It brought Tietjens completely back.

He said collectedly:

‘Really, sir, why this strafe of yours is so terribly long is that it embraces the whole of life.’

The general said:

‘You’re not going to drag a red herring across the trail… . I say you regarded me as a head master in 1912. Now I am your commanding officer – which is the same thing. You must not peach to me. That’s what you call the Arnold of Rugby touch… . But who was it said:
Magna est veritas et prev … Prev
something?’

Tietjens said:

‘I don’t remember, sir.’

The general said:

‘What was the secret grief your mother had? In 1912? She died of it. She wrote to me just before her death and said she had great troubles. And begged me to look after you, very specially! Why did she do that?’ He paused and meditated. He asked: ‘How do you define Anglican sainthood? The other fellows have canonisations, all shipshape like Sandhurst examinations. But us Anglicans … I’ve heard fifty persons say your mother was a saint. She was. But why?’

Tietjens said:

‘It’s the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with your own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.’

The general said:

‘Ah, that’s beyond me… . I suppose you will refuse any money I leave you in my will?’

Tietjens said:

‘Why, no, sir.’

The general said:

‘But you refused your father’s money. Because he believed things against you. What’s the difference?’

Tietjens said:

‘One’s friends ought to believe that one is a gentleman. Automatically. That is what makes one and them in harmony. Probably your friends are your friends because
they
look at situations automatically as you look at them… . Mr. Ruggles knew that I was hard up. He envisaged the situation. If he were hard up, what would he do? Make a living out of the immoral earnings of women… . That translated into the Government circles in which he lives means selling your wife or mistress. Naturally he believed that I was the sort of fellow to sell my wife. So that’s what he told my father. The point is, my father should not have believed him.’

‘But I …’ the general said.

Tietjens said:

‘You never believed anything against me, sir.’

The general said:

‘I know I’ve damn well worried myself to death over you …’

Tietjens was sentimentally at rest, still with wet eyes. He was walking near Salisbury in a grove, regarding long pastures and plough-lands running to dark, high elms from which, embowered … Embowered was the word! – peeped the spire of George Herbert’s church. One ought to be a seventeenth-century parson at the time of the renaissance of Anglican saintliness … who wrote, perhaps, poems. No, not poems. Prose. The statelier vehicle!

That was home-sickness! … He himself was never to go home!

The general said:

‘Look here … Your father … I’m concerned about your father… . Didn’t Sylvia perhaps tell him some of the things that distressed him?’

Tietjens said distinctly:

‘No, sir. That responsibility cannot be put on to Sylvia. My father chose to believe things that were said against me by a perfect – or a nearly perfect – stranger… .’ He added: ‘As a matter of fact, Sylvia and my father were not on any sort of terms. I don’t believe they exchanged two words for the last five years of my father’s life.’

The general’s eyes were fixed with an extreme hardness on Tietjens’. He watched Tietjens’ face, beginning with the edges round the nostrils, go chalk white. He said: ‘He knows he’s given his wife away! … Good God!’ With his face colourless, Tietjens’ eyes of porcelain-blue stuck
out
extraordinarily. The general thought: ‘What an ugly fellow! His face is all crooked!’ They remained looking at each other.

In the silence the voices of men talking over the game of House came as a murmur to them. A rudimentary card game monstrously in favour of the dealer. When you heard voices going on like that you knew they were playing House… . So they had had their dinners.

The general said:

‘It isn’t Sunday, is it?’

Tietjens said:

‘No, sir; Thursday, the seventeenth, I think, of January… .’

The general said:

‘Stupid of me… .’

The men’s voices had reminded him of church bells on a Sunday. And of his youth… . He was sitting beside Mrs. Tietjens’ hammock under the great cedar at the corner of the stone house at Groby. The wind being from the east-north-east the bells of Middlesbrough came to them faintly. Mrs. Tietjens was thirty; he himself thirty; Tietjens – the father – thirty-five or so. A most powerful, quiet man; a wonderful landowner, like his predecessors for generations. It was not from him that this fellow got his … his … his what? … Was it mysticism? … Another word! He himself home on leave from India, his head full of polo. Talking for hours about points in ponies with Tietjens’ father, who was a wonderful hand with a horse… . But this fellow was much more wonderful! … Well, he got that from the sire, not the dam! … He and Tietjens continued to look at each other. It was as if they were hypnotised. The men’s voices went on in a mournful cadence. The general supposed that he too must be pale. He said to himself: ‘This fellow’s mother died of a broken heart in 1912. The father committed suicide five years after. He had not spoken to the son’s wife for four or five years! That takes us back to 1912… . Then, when I strafed him in Rye, the wife was in France with Perowne.’