Parade's End (83 page)

So it had been from the 1/7/12, say, to the 4/8/14!

After that, things had become more rubbled – mixed up with alarums. Excursions on his part to unapproved places. And trouble. He was quite damnably in trouble. With his Superiors; with, so unnecessarily, Hun projectiles, wire, mud; over Money; politics; mooning on without a good word from anyone… . Unravellable muddles that never got unravelled but that somehow got you caught up in them… .

Because he needed her moral support! When, during the late Hostilities, he hadn’t been out there, he had drifted to the tea-table much earlier of an afternoon and stayed beside it much longer, till after everyone else had gone and they could go and sit on the tall fender side by side, and argue … about the rights and wrongs of the War!

Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk… . They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic… . No doubt a touch … in him. Otherwise he would not have always been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was all right. But that those who sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes… . That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that!

Because … if you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest – those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst you moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his Nearest and Dearest… . Or had been! At that her nerves suddenly got the better of her and her mind went mad… . Supposing that that fellow, from whom she had not heard for two years,
hadn’t
now communicated with her… . Like an ass she had taken it for granted that he had
asked
Lady… . Blast her! … to ‘bring them together again’! She had imagined that even Edith Ethel would not have had the cheek to ring her up if he hadn’t asked her to!

But she had nothing to go on… . Feeble, oversexed ass that she was, she had let her mind jump at once to the conclusion, the moment the mere mention of him seemed implied – jump to the conclusion that he was asking her again to come and be his mistress… . Or nurse him through his present muddle till he should be fit to …

Mind, she did not say that she would have succumbed. But if she had not jumped at the idea that it was he, really, speaking through Edith Ethel, she would never have permitted her mind to dwell on … on his blasted, complacent perfections!

Because she had taken it for granted that if he had had her rung up he would not have been monkeying with other girls during the two years he hadn’t written to her… . Ah, but hadn’t he?

Look here!
Was
it reasonable? Here was a fellow who had all but … all
BUT
… ‘taken advantage of her’ one night just before going out to France, say, two years ago… . And not another word from him after that! … It was all very well to say that he was portentous, looming, luminous, loony: John Peel with his coat so grey, the English Country Gentleman
pur sang
, and then some; saintly, Godlike, Jesus Christ-like… . He was all that. But you don’t seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell, and not so much as send her, in two years, a picture-postcard with
MIZPAH
on it. You don’t. You don’t!

Or if you do you have to have your character revised. You have to have it taken for granted that you were only monkeying with her and that you’ve been monkeying ever since with Waacs in Rouen or some other Base… .

Of course, if you ring your young woman up when you come back … or have her rung up by a titled lady… . That might restore you in the eyes of the world, or at least in the eyes of the young woman if she was a bit of a softie… .

But
had
he?
Had
he? It was absurd to think that Edith Ethel hadn’t had the face to do it unasked! To save three thousand, two hundred pounds, not to mention interest – which was what Vincent owed
him
! – Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying… . She was quite right.
She
had to save her man. You go to any depths of ignominy to save your man.

But that did not help her, Valentine Wannop!

She sprang off the bench; she clenched her nails into her palms; she stamped her thin-soled shoes into the coke-brise floor that was singularly unresilient. She exclaimed:

‘Damn it all, he didn’t ask her to ring me up. He didn’t ask her to. He didn’t ask her to!’ still stamping about.

She marched straight at the telephone that was by now uttering long, tinny, night-jar’s calls and, with one snap, pulled the receiver right off the twisted, green-blue cord… . Broke it! With incidental satisfaction.

Then she said:

‘Steady the Buffs!’ not out of repentance for having damaged School Property, but because she was accustomed to call her thoughts The Buffs because of their practical, unromantic character as a rule… . A fine regiment, the Buffs!

Of course, if she had not broken the telephone she could have rung up Edith Ethel and have asked her whether he had or hadn’t asked to … to be brought together again… . It was like her, Valentine Wannop, to smash the only means of resolving a torturing doubt… .

It wasn’t, really, in the least like her.
She
was practical enough; none of the ‘under the ban of fatality’ business about her. She had smashed the telephone because it had been like smashing a connection with Edith Ethel; or because she hated tinny night-jars; or because she had smashed it. For nothing in the world; for nothing, nothing, nothing in the world would she ever ring up Edith Ethel and ask her:

‘Did
he
put you up to ringing me up?’

That would be to let Edith Ethel come between their intimacy.

A subconscious volition was directing her feet towards the great doors at the end of the Hall, varnished, pitch-pine doors of Gothic architecture; economically decorated as if with straps and tin-lids of Brunswick-blacked cast iron.

She said:

‘Of course if it’s his wife who has removed his furniture that would be a reason for his wanting to get into
communication.
They would have split… . But he does not hold with a man divorcing a woman, and she won’t divorce.’

As she went through the sticky postern – all that woodwork seemed sticky on account of its varnish! – beside the great doors she said:

‘Who cares!’

The great thing was … but she could not formulate what the great thing was. You had to settle the preliminaries.

III

SHE SAID EVENTUALLY
to Miss Wanostrocht who had sat down at her table behind two pink carnations:

‘I didn’t consciously want to bother you but a spirit in my feet has led me who knows how… . That’s Shelley, isn’t it?’

And indeed a quite unconscious but shrewd mind had pointed out to her whilst still in the School Hall and even before she had broken the telephone, that Miss Wanostrocht very probably would be able to tell her what she wanted to know and that if she didn’t hurry she might miss her, since the Head would probably go now the girls were gone. So she had hurried through gauntish corridors whose Decorated Gothic windows positively had bits of pink glass here and there interspersed in their lattices. Nevertheless a nearly deserted, darkish, locker-lined dressing-room being a short cut, she had paused in it before the figure of a clumsyish girl, freckled, in black and, on a stool, desultorily lacing a dull black boot, an ankle on her knee. She felt an impulse to say: ‘Goodbye, Pettigul!’ she didn’t know why.

The clumsy, fifteenish, bumpy-faced girl was a symbol of that place – healthyish, but not over healthy; honestish but with no craving for intellectual honesty; big-boned in unexpected places … and uncomelily blubbering so that her face appeared dirtyish… . It was in fact all ‘ishes’ about that Institution. They were all healthyish, honestish, clumsyish, twelve-to-eighteenish, and big-boned in unexpected places because of the late insufficient feeding… . Emotionalish, too; apt to blubber rather than to go into hysterics.

Instead of saying good-bye to the girl she said:

‘Here!’ and roughly, since she was exhibiting too much leg, pulled down the girl’s shortish skirt and set to work to lace the unyielding boot on the unyielding shin-bone… . After a period of youthful bloom, which would certainly come and as certainly go, this girl would, normally, find herself one of the Mothers of Europe, marriage being due to the period of youthful bloom… . Normally that is to say according to a normality that that day might restore. Of course it mightn’t!

A tepid drop of moisture fell on Valentine’s right knuckle.

‘My cousin Bob was killed the day before yesterday,’ the girl’s voice said above her head. Valentine bent her head still lower over the boot with the patience that, in educational establishments, you must, if you want to be businesslike and shrewd, acquire and display in face of unusual mental vagaries… . This girl had never had a cousin Bob, or anything else. Pettigul and her two sisters, Pettiguls Two and Three, were all in that Institution at extremely reduced rates precisely because they had not got, apart from their widowed mother, a discoverable relative. The father, a half-pay major, had been killed early in the war. All the mistresses had had to hand in reports on the moral qualities of the Pettiguls, so all the mistresses had this information.

‘He gave me his puppy to keep for him before he went out,’ the girl said. ‘It doesn’t seem just!’

Valentine, straightening herself, said:

‘I should wash my face if I were you, before I went out. Or you might get yourself taken for a German!’ She pulled the girl’s clumsyish blouse straight on her shoulders.

‘Try,’ she added, ‘to imagine that you’ve got someone just come back! It’s just as easy and it will make you look more attractive!’

Scurrying along the corridors she said to herself:

‘Heaven help me, does it make
me
look more attractive?’

She caught the Head, as she had anticipated, just on the point of going to her home in Fulham, an unattractive suburb but near a bishop’s palace nevertheless. It seemed somehow appropriate. The lady was episcopally minded, but experienced in the vicissitudes of suburban children:
very
astonishing some of them unless you took them very much in the lump.

Miss Head had stood behind her table for the first three questions and answers in an attitude of someone who is a little at bay, but she had sat down just before Valentine had quoted her Shelley at her, and she had now the air of one who is ready to make a night of it. Valentine continued to stand.

‘This,’ Miss Wanostrocht said very gently, ‘is a day on which one might … take steps … that might influence one’s whole life.’

‘That’s,’ Valentine answered, ‘exactly why I’ve come to you. I want to know what that woman said to you so as to know where I stand before I take a step.’

The Head said:

‘I had to let the girls go. I don’t mind saying that you are very valuable to me. The Governors – I had an express from Lord Boulnois – ordered them to be given a holiday to-morrow. It’s very inconsistent. But that makes it all the …’

She stopped. Valentine said to herself:

‘By Jove, I don’t know anything about men; but how little I know about women. What’s she getting at?’

She added:

‘She’s nervous. She must be wanting to say something she thinks I won’t like!’

She said chivalrously:

‘I don’t believe anybody could have kept those girls in to-day. It’s a thing one has no experience of. There’s never been a day like this before.’

Out there in Piccadilly there would be mobs shoulder to shoulder; she had never seen the Nelson column stand out of a solid mass. They might roast oxen whole in the Strand. Whitechapel would be seething, enamelled iron advertisements looking down on millions of bowler hats. All sordid and immense London stretched out under her gaze. She felt herself
of
London as the grouse feels itself of the heather, and there she was in an emptied suburb looking at two pink carnations. Dyed probably: offering of Lord Boulnois to Miss Wanostrocht! You never saw a natural-grown carnation that shade!

She said:

‘I’d be glad to know what that woman – Lady Macmaster – told you.’

Miss Wanostrocht looked down at her hands. She had the little-fingers hooked together, the hands back to back; it was a demoded gesture… . Girton of 1897, Valentine thought; indulged in by the thoughtfully blonde… . Fair girl graduates the sympathetic comic papers of those days had called them. It pointed to a long sitting. Well, she, Valentine, was not going to brusque the issue! … French-derived expression that. But how would you put it otherwise?

Miss Wanostrocht said:

‘I sat at the feet of your father!’

‘You see!’ Valentine said to herself. ‘But she must then have gone to Oxford, not Newnham!’ She could not remember whether there had been women’s colleges at Oxford as early as 1895 or 1897. There must have been.

‘The greatest Teacher … The greatest influence in the world,’ Miss Wanostrocht said.

It was queer, Valentine thought: This woman had known all about her – at any rate all about her distinguished descent all the time she, Valentine, had been Physical Instructress at that Great Public School (Girls’). Yet except for an invariable courtesy such as she imagined Generals might show to non-commissioned officers, Miss Wanostrocht had hitherto taken no more notice of her than she might have taken of a superior parlourmaid. On the other hand she had let Valentine arrange her physical training exactly as she liked, without any interference.

‘We used to hear,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘how he spoke Latin with you and your brother from the day of your births… . He used to be regarded as eccentric, but how
right
! … Miss Hall says that you are the most remarkable Latinist she has ever so much as imagined.’

‘It’s not true,’ Valentine said, ‘I can’t
think
in Latin. You cannot be a real Latinist unless you do that. He did of course.’