Parade's End (80 page)

But she was there, being reminded of the dyspepsia of Thomas Carlyle!

‘
Oh!
’ she exclaimed into the instrument, ‘You’re Edith Ethel!’ Edith Ethel Duchemin, now of course Lady
Macmaster!
But you weren’t used to thinking of her as Lady Somebody.

The last person in the world, the very last! Because, long ago she had made up her mind that it was all over between herself and Edith Ethel. She certainly could not make any advance to the ennobled personage who vindictively disapproved of all things made – with a black thought in a black shade, as you might say. Of all things that were not being immediately useful to Edith Ethel!

And, æsthetically draped and meagre, she had sets of quotations for appropriate occasions. Rossetti for Love; Browning for optimism – not frequent that; Walter Savage Landor to show acquaintance with more esoteric prose. And the unfailing quotation from Carlyle for damping off saturnalia: for New Year’s Day, Te Deums, Victories, anniversaries, celebrations… . It was coming over the wire now, that quotation:

‘… And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer!’

How well Valentine knew it: how often with spiteful conceit had not Edith Ethel intoned that. A passage from the diary of the Sage of Chelsea who lived near the Barracks.

‘To-day,’ the quotation ran, ‘I saw that the soldiers by the public house at the corner were more than usually drunk. And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer!’

How superior of the Sage of Chelsea not to remember till then that that had been Christmas Day! Edith Ethel, too, was trying to show how superior she was. She wanted to prove that until she, Valentine Wannop, had reminded her, Lady Macmaster, that that day had about it something of the popular festival she, Lady Mac, had been unaware of the fact. Really quite unaware, you know. She lived in her rapt seclusion along with Sir Vincent – the critic, you know; their eyes fixed on the higher things, they disregarded maroons and had really a quite remarkable collection, by now, of first editions, official-titled friends and At Homes to their credit.

Yet Valentine remembered that once she had sat at the feet of the darkly mysterious Edith Ethel Duchemin – where had
that
all gone? – and had sympathised with her marital martyrdoms, her impressive taste in furniture, her
large
rooms, and her spiritual adulteries. So she said good-humouredly to the instrument:

‘Aren’t you just the same, Edith Ethel? And what can I do for you?’

The good-natured patronage in her tone astonished her, and she was astonished, too, at the ease with which she spoke. Then she realised that the noises had been going away, silence was falling, the cries receded. They were going towards a cumulation at a distance. The girls’ voices in the playground no longer existed: the Head must have let them go. Naturally, too, the local population wasn’t going to go on letting off crackers in side streets… . She was alone, cloistered with the utterly improbable!

Lady Macmaster had sought her out and here was she, Valentine Wannop, patronising Lady Macmaster! Why? What could Lady Macmaster want her to do? She
couldn’t
– but of course she jolly well could! – be thinking of being unfaithful to Macmaster and be wanting her, Valentine Wannop, to play the innocent, the virginal gooseberry or Disciple. Or alibi. Whatever it was. Goose was the most appropriate word … Obviously Macmaster was the sort of person to whom any Lady Macmaster would want – would have – to be unfaithful. A little, dark-bearded, drooping, deprecatory fellow. A typical Critic! All Critics’ wives were probably unfaithful to them. They lacked the creative gift. What did you call it? A word unfit for a young lady to use!

Her mind ran about in this unbridled Cockney schoolgirl’s vein. There was no stopping it. It was in honour of the
DAY
! She was temporarily inhibited from bashing policemen on the head, so she was mentally disrespectful to constituted authority – to Sir Vincent Macmaster, Principal Secretary to H.M. Department of Statistics, author of
Walter Savage Landor, a Critical Monograph
, and of twenty-two other Critical Monographs in the Eminent Bores’ Series… .
Such
books! And she was being disrespectful and patronising to Lady Macmaster, Egeria to innumerable Scottish Men of Letters! No more respect! Was that to be a lasting effect of the cataclysm that had involved the world? The
late
cataclysm! Thank God, since ten minutes ago they could call it the late cataclysm!

She was positively tittering in front of the telephone from which Lady Macmaster’s voice was now coming in
earnest,
cajoling tones – as if she knew that Valentine was not paying very much attention, saying:

‘Valentine!
Val
entine!
Valentine!
’

Valentine said negligently:

‘I’m listening!’

She wasn’t really. She was really reflecting on whether there had not been more sense in the Mistress’s Conference that that morning, solemnly, had taken place in the Head’s private room. Undoubtedly what the Mistresses with the Head at their head had feared was that if they, Headmistresses, Mistresses, Masters, Pastors – by whom I was made etcetera! – should cease to be respected because saturnalia broke out on the sounding of a maroon the world would go to pieces! An awful thought! The Girls no longer sitting silent in the nonconformist hall while the Head addressed repressive speeches to them… .

She had addressed a speech, containing the phrase: ‘the credit of a Great Public School’, in that Hall only last afternoon in which, fair, thin woman, square-elbowed, with a little of sunlight really still in her coiled fair hair, she had seriously requested the Girls not again to repeat the manifestations of joy of the day before. The day before there had been a false alarm and the School – horribly – had sung:

‘Hang Kaiser Bill from the hoar apple tree

And Glory, Glory, Glory till it’s tea-time!’

The Head, now, making her speech was certain that she had now before her a chastened School, a School that anyhow felt foolish because the rumour of the day before had turned out to be a canard. So she impressed on the Girls the nature of the joy they ought to feel, a joy repressed that should send them silent home. Blood was to cease to be shed: a fitting cause for home-joy – as it were a home-lesson. But there was to be no triumph. The very fact that you had ceased hostilities precluded triumph …

Valentine, to her surprise, had found herself wondering when you
might
feel triumph? … You couldn’t whilst you were still contending; you must not when you had won! Then when? The Head told the girls that it was their province as the future mothers of England – nay, of reunited Europe! – to – well, in fact, to go on with their
home-lessons
and not run about the streets with effigies of the Great Defeated! She put it that it was their function to shed further light of womanly culture – that there, Thank Heaven, they had never been allowed to forget! – athwart a re-illumined Continent… . As if you could light up now there was no fear of submarines or raids!

And Valentine wondered why, for a mutinous moment, she had wanted to feel triumph … had wanted
someone
to feel triumph. Well, he … they … had wanted it so much. Couldn’t they have it just for a moment – for the space of one Benkollerdy! Even if it were wrong? or vulgar? something human, someone had once said, is dearer than a wilderness of decalogues!

But at the Mistress’s Conference that morning Valentine had realised that what was really frightening them was the other note. A quite definite fear. If, at this parting of the ways, at this crack across the table of History, the School – the World, the future mothers of Europe – got out of hand, would they ever come back? The Authorities – Authority all over the world – were afraid of that; more afraid of that than of any other thing. Wasn’t it a possibility that there was to be no more Respect? None for constituted Authority and consecrated Experience?

And, listening to the fears of those careworn, faded, ill-nourished gentlewomen, Valentine Wannop had found herself speculating.

‘No more respect … For the Equator! For the Metric system. For Sir Walter Scott! Or George Washington! Or Abraham Lincoln! Or the Seventh Commandment!’

And she had a blushing vision of fair, shy, square-elbowed Miss Wanostrocht – the Head! – succumbing to some specious-tongued beguiler! … That was where the shoe really pinched! You had to keep them – the Girls, the Populace, everybody! – in hand now, for once you let go there was no knowing where They, like waters parted from the seas, mightn’t carry You. Goodness knew! You might arrive anywhere – at county families taking to trade; gentlefolk selling for profit! All the unthinkable sorts of things!

And with a little inward smirk of pleasure Valentine realised that that Conference was deciding that the Girls were to be kept in the playground that morning – at Physical Jerks. She hadn’t ever put up with
much
in the
way
of patronage from the rather untidy-haired bookish branch of the establishment. Still, accomplished Classicist as she once had been, she had had to acknowledge that the bookish branch of a School was what you might call the Senior Service. She was there only to oblige – because her distinguished father had insisted on paying minute attention to her physique which was vital and admirable. She had been there, for some time past only to oblige – War Work and all that – but still she had always kept her place and had never hitherto raised her voice at a Mistress’s Conference. So it was indeed the World Turned Upside Down – already! – when Miss Wanostrocht hopefully from behind her desk decorated with two pale pink carnations said:

‘The idea is, Miss Wannop, that They should be kept – that you should keep them, please – as nearly as possible – isn’t it called? – at attention until the – eh – noises … announce the … well,
you
know. Then we suppose they will have to give, say, three cheers. And then perhaps you could get them – in an orderly way – back to their classrooms… .’

Valentine felt that she was by no means certain that she
could
. It was not really practicable to keep every one of six hundred aligned girls under your eye. Still she was ready to have a shot. She was ready to concede that it might not be altogether – oh, expedient! – to turn six hundred girls stark mad with excitement into the streets already filled with populations that would no doubt be also stark mad with excitement. You had better keep them in if you could. She would have a shot. And she was pleased. She felt fit: amazingly fit! Fit to do the quarter in … oh, in any time? And to give a clump on the jaw to any large, troublesome Jewish type of maiden – or Anglo-Teutonic – who should try to break ranks. Which was more than the Head or any one of the other worried and underfed ones could do. She was pleased that they recognised it. Still she was also generous and recognising that the world ought not really to be turned upside down at any rate until the maroons went, she said:

‘Of course I will have a shot at it. But it would be a reinforcement, in the way of keeping order, if the Head – you Miss Wanostrocht – and one or two others of the
Mistresses
would be strolling about. In relays, of course; not all of the staff all the morning …’

That had been two and a half hours or so ago: before the world changed, the Conference having taken place at eight-thirty. Now here she was, after having kept those girls pretty exhaustingly jumping about for most of the intervening time – here she was treating with disrespect obviously constituted Authority. For whom
ought
you to respect if not the wife of the Head of a Department, with a title, a country place, and most highly attended Thursday afternoons?

She was not really listening to the telephone because Edith Ethel was telling her about the condition of Sir Vincent: so overworked, poor man, over Statistics that a nervous breakdown was imminently to be expected. Worried over money, too. Those dreadful taxes for this iniquitous affair… .

Valentine took leisure to wonder why – why in the world! – Miss Wanostrocht who must know at the least the burden of Edith Ethel’s story had sent for her to hear this farrago? Miss Wanostrocht must know: she had obviously been talked to by Edith Ethel for long enough to form a judgment. Then the matter must be of importance. Urgent even, since the keeping of discipline in the playground was of such utter importance to Miss Wanostrocht; a crucial point in the history of the School and the mothers of Europe.

But to whom, then, could Lady Macmaster’s communication be of life and death importance? To her, Valentine Wannop? It could not be: there were no events of importance that could affect her life outside the playground, her mother safe at home and her brother safe on a minesweeper in Pembroke Dock …

Then … of importance to Lady Macmaster herself? But how? What could she do for Lady Macmaster? Was she wanted to teach Sir Vincent to perform physical exercises so that he might avoid his nervous breakdown and, in excess of physical health, get the mortgage taken off his country place which she gathered was proving an overwhelming burden on account of iniquitous taxes, the result of a war that ought never to have been waged?

It was absurd to think that she could be wanted for that! An absurd business … There she was, bursting with health, strength, good-humour, perfectly
full
of beans – there she was, ready in the cause of order to give Leah Heldenstamm, the large girl, no end of a clump on the side of the jaw or, alternatively, for the sake of all the beanfeastishnesses in the world to assist in the amiable discomfiture of the police. There she was in a sort of nonconformist cloister. Nunlike! Positively nunlike! At the parting of the ways of the universe!

She whistled slightly to herself.

‘By Jove,’ she exclaimed coolly, ‘I hope it does not mean an omen that I’m to be – oh, nunlike – for the rest of my career in the reconstructed world!’

She began for a moment seriously to take stock of her position – of her whole position in life. It had certainly been hitherto rather nunlike. She was twenty-threeish, rising twenty-four. As fit as a fiddle; as clean as a whistle. Five foot in her gym shoes. And no one had ever wanted to marry her. No doubt that was because she was so clean and fit. No one even had ever tried to seduce her. That was
certainly
because she was so clean-run. She didn’t obviously offer – what was it the fellow called it? – promise of pneumatic bliss to the gentlemen with sergeant-majors’ horse-shoe moustaches and gurglish voices! She never would. Then perhaps she would never marry. And never be seduced!