Parade's End Page 10

  ‘Then what does the whole indictment amount to?’ Tietjens asked.

  ‘Oh, hang it,’ the General brought out, ‘I’m not a beastly detective, I only want a plausible story to tell Claudine. Or not even plausible. An obvious lie as long as it shows you’re not flying in the face of society – as walking up the Haymarket with the little Wannop when your wife’s left you because of her would be.’

  ‘What does it amount to?’ Tietjens said patiently: ‘What Sylvia “let drop”?’

  ‘Only,’ the General answered, ‘that you are – that your views are – immoral. Of course they often puzzle me. And, of course, if you have views that aren’t the same as other people’s, and don’t keep them to yourself, other people will suspect you of immorality. That’s what put Paul Sandbach on your track! … and that you’re extravagant… . Oh, hang it… . Eternal hansoms, and taxis and telegrams. … You know, my boy, times aren’t what they were when your father and I married. We used to say you could do it on five hundred a year as a younger son… . And then this girl too… .’ His voice took on a more agitated note of shyness – pain. ‘It probably hadn’t occurred to you… . But, of course, Sylvia has an income of her own… . And, don’t you see … if you outrun the constable and … In short, you’re spending Sylvia’s money on the other girl, and that’s what people can’t stand.’ He added quickly: ‘I’m bound to say that Mrs. Satterthwaite backs you through thick and thin. Thick and thin! Claudine wrote to her. But you know what women are with a handsome son-in-law that’s always polite to them. But I may tell you that but for your mother-in-law, Claudine would have cut you out of her visiting list months ago. And you’d have been cut out of some others too… .’

  Tietjens said:

  ‘Thanks. I think that’s enough to go on with. Give me a couple of minutes to reflect on what you’ve said …’

  ‘I’ll wash my hands and change my coat,’ the General said with intense relief.

  At the end of two minutes Tietjens said:

  ‘No; I don’t see that there is anything I want to say.’

  The General exclaimed with enthusiasm:

  ‘That’s my good lad! Open confession is next to reform… . And … and try to be more respectful to your superiors… . Damn it; they say you’re brilliant. But I thank heaven I haven’t got you in my command… . Though I believe you’re a good lad. But you’re the sort of fellow to set a whole division by the ears… . A regular … what’s ’is name? A regular Dreyfus!’

  ‘Did you think Dreyfus was guilty?’ Tietjens asked.

  ‘Hang it,’ the General said, ‘he was worse than guilty – the sort of fellow you couldn’t believe in and yet couldn’t prove anything against. The curse of the world… .’

  Tietjens said:

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well, they are,’ the General said: ‘fellows like that unsettle society. You don’t know where you are. You can’t judge. They make you uncomfortable… . A brilliant fellow too! I believe he’s a brigadier-general by now… .’ He put his arm round Tietjens’ shoulders.

  ‘There, there, my dear boy,’ he said, ‘come and have a sloe gin. That’s the real answer to all beastly problems.’

  It was some time before Tietjens could get to think of his own problems. The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid of the very old town. Tietjens had to listen to the General suggesting that it would be better if he didn’t come to the golf-club till Monday. He would get Macmaster some good games. A good, sound fellow that Macmaster, now. It was a pity Tietjens hadn’t some of his soundness!

  The two city men had approached the General on the course and had used some violent invectives against Tietjens: they had objected to being called ruddy swine to their faces; they were going to the police. The General said that he had told them himself, slowly and distinctly, that they were ruddy swine and that they would never get another ticket at that club after Monday. But till Monday, apparently, they had the right to be there and the club wouldn’t want scenes. Sandbach, too, was infuriated about Tietjens.

  Tietjens said that the fault lay with the times that permitted the introduction into gentlemen’s company of such social swipes as Sandbach. One acted perfectly correctly and then a dirty little beggar like that put dirty little constructions on it and ran about and bleated. He added that he knew Sandbach was the General’s brother-in-law, but he couldn’t help it. That was the truth… . The General said: ‘I know, my boy: I know… .’ But one had to take society as one found it. Claudine had to be provided for and Sandbach made a very good husband, careful, sober, and on the right side in politics. A bit of a rip; but they couldn’t ask for everything! And Claudine was using all the influence she had with the other side – which was not a little, women were so wonderful! – to get him a diplomatic job in Turkey, so as to get him out of the way of Mrs. Crundall! Mrs. Crundall was the leading Anti-Suffragette of the little town. That was what made Sandbach so bitter against Tietjens. He told Tietjens so that Tietjens might understand.

  Tietjens had hitherto flattered himself that he could examine a subject swiftly and put it away in his mind. To the General he hardly listened. The allegations against himself were beastly; but he could usually ignore allegations against himself and he imagined that if he said no more about them he would himself hear no more. If there were, in clubs and places where men talk, unpleasant rumours as to himself he preferred it to be thought that he was the rip, not his wife the strumpet. That was normal, male vanity; the preference of the English gentleman! Had it been a matter of Sylvia spotless and himself as spotless as he was – for in all these things he knew himself to be spotless! – he would certainly have defended himself, at least, to the General. But he had acted practically in not defending himself more vigorously. For he imagined that, had he really tried, he could have made the General believe him. But he had behaved rightly! It was not mere vanity. There was the child up at his sister Effie’s. It was better for a boy to have a rip of a father than a whore for a mother!

  The General was expatiating on the solidity of a squat castle, like a pile of draughts, away to the left, in the sun, on the flatness. He was saying that we didn’t build like that nowadays.

  Tietjens said:

  ‘You’re perfectly wrong, General. All the castles that Henry VIII built in 1543 along this coast are mere monuments of jerry-building… . “In 1543 jactat castra Delis, Sandgatto, Reia, Hastingas Henricus Rex” … That means he chucked them down… .’

  The General laughed:

  ‘You are an incorrigible fellow… . If ever there’s any known, certain fact …’

  ‘But go and look at the beastly things,’ Tietjens said. ‘You’ll see they’ve got just a facing of Caen stone that they tide-floated here, and the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish. Look here! It’s a known certain fact, isn’t it, that your eighteen-pounders are better than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the hustings, in the papers; the public believes it… . But would you put one of your tin-pot things firing – what is it? – four shells a minute? – with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the recoil – against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air cylinders… .’

  The General sat stiffly upon his cushions:

  ‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘How the devil do you get to know these things?’

  ‘It isn’t different,’ Tietjens said, ‘it’s the same muddle-headed frame of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII as lets us into wars with hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You’d fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute against the French.’

  ‘Well, anyhow,’ the General said, ‘I thank heaven you’re not on my staff for you’d talk my hind leg off in a week. It’s perfectly true that the public …’

  But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betra
y the solidarity that should exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady Claudine Sandbach with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband to believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!

  The General was saying:

  ‘Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?’

  Tietjens said:

  ‘From you. Three weeks ago!’

  And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands… . They must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs! … Suddenly he thought that he didn’t know for certain that he was the father of his child, and he groaned.

  ‘Well, what have I said wrong now?’ the General asked. ‘Surely you don’t maintain that pheasants do eat mangolds… .’

  Tietjens proved his reputation for sanity with:

  ‘No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That’s sound enough for you, isn’t it?’ But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn’t been able to pigeon-hole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been as good as talking to himself.

  In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of Mr. Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr. Waterhouse was anxious that Tietjens – whom he assumed to be a man of sense – should get any pursuit of the two girls stopped off. He couldn’t move in the matter himself, but a five-pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might be handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account of their raid of that afternoon.

  It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the mayor, the town clerk, the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his affability… .

  Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn’t find him a disagreeable fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskies, and certainly not as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English working-class, you could see that Mr. Waterhouse didn’t want to be dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens’ emendations in the actuarial schedules… . And over their port they agreed on two fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left.

  And Tietjens, who hated no man, in face of this simple-minded and agreeable schoolboy type of fellow, fell to wondering why it was that humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass, a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society. And he remembered the words of some Russian: ‘Cats and monkeys. Monkeys and cats. All humanity is there.’

  Tietjens and Mr. Waterhouse spent the rest of the evening together.

  Whilst Tietjens was interviewing the policeman, the Minister sat on the front steps of the cottage and smoked cheap cigarettes, and when Tietjens went to bed Mr. Waterhouse insisted on sending by him kindly messages to Miss Wannop, asking her to come and discuss female suffrage any afternoon she liked in his private room at the House of Commons. Mr. Waterhouse flatly refused to believe that Tietjens hadn’t arranged the raid with Miss Wannop. He said it had been too neatly planned for any woman, and he said Tietjens was a lucky fellow, for she was a ripping girl.

  Back in his room under the rafters, Tietjens fell, nevertheless, at once a prey to real agitation. For a long time he pounded from wall to wall and, since he could not shake off the train of thought, he got out at last his patience cards, and devoted himself seriously to thinking out the conditions of his life with Sylvia. He wanted to stop scandal if he could; he wanted them to live within his income, he wanted to subtract that child from the influence of its mother. These were all definite but difficult things… . Then one half of his mind lost itself in the rearrangement of schedules, and on his brilliant table his hands set queens on kings and checked their recurrences.

  In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible physical shock. He nearly vomited; his brain reeled and the room fell about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster’s goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn’t talk, and he dropped into his bed faintly aware of his friend’s efforts to loosen his clothes. He had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the time, paralysed both his body and his mind.

  V

  ‘IT DOESN’T SEEM quite fair, Valentine,’ Mrs. Duchemin said. She was rearranging in a glass bowl some minute flowers that floated on water. They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic amongst silver chafing dishes, silver epergnes piled with peaches in pyramids, and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to the damask cloth. A congeries of silver largenesses made as if a fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great silver kettle on a tripod and a couple of silver vases filled with the extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as if a fan. The eighteenth-century room was very tall and long; panelled in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: ‘J.M.W. Turner’. The chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an épergne that supported the large pale globes of grapefruit, a galantine, a cube of inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.

  ‘Oh, women have to back each other up in these days,’ Valentine Wannop said. ‘I couldn’t let you go through this alone after breakfasting with you every Saturday since I don’t know when.’

  ‘I do feel,’ Mrs. Duchemin said, ‘immensely grateful to you for your moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But I’ve told Parry to keep him out till 10.15.’

  ‘It’s, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you,’ the girl said. ‘I think it was worth trying.’

  Mrs. Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position of the delphiniums.

  ‘I think they make a good screen,’ Mrs. Duchemin said.

  ‘Oh, nobody will be able to see him,’ the girl answered reassuringly. She added with a sudden resolution, ‘Look here, Edie. Stop worrying about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you’re simply mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let’s say no more about it.’

  Mrs. Duchemin said, ‘Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?’

  ‘She didn’t know,’ the girl said. ‘She was out of her mind for grief. She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it took the five shillings a week that I earned to mak
e up the money.’ She added, ‘Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays, too.’

  ‘I don’t understand!’ Mrs. Duchemin said. ‘I simply don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ the girl answered. ‘You’re like the kindly people who subscribed at the sale to buy my father’s library back and present it to my mother. That cost us five shillings a week for warehousing, and at Ealing they were always nagging at me for the state of my print dresses… .’

  She broke off and said:

  ‘Let’s not talk about it any more if you don’t mind. You have me in your house, so I suppose you’ve a right to references, as the mistresses call them. But you’ve been very good to me and never asked. Still, it’s come up; do you know I told a man on the links yesterday that I’d been a slavey for nine months. I was trying to explain why I was a suffragette; and, as I was asking him a favour, I suppose I felt I needed to give him references too.’

  Mrs. Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively, exclaimed:

  ‘You darling!’

  Miss Wannop said:

  ‘Wait a minute. I haven’t finished. I want to say this: I never talk about that stage of my career because I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed of it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if we’ve inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we’ve inherited the Wannop pride. And I couldn’t do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we were going into the country after the sale. I’m not educated at all, as you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don’t know why he had that tic… . But I’d like you to understand two things. One I’ve said already: what I hear in this house won’t ever shock or corrupt me; that it’s said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and Gilbert as soon as we talked at all… . And, oh yes: I’m a suffragette because I’ve been a slavey. But I’d like you to understand that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette – you’re an old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two things – then I’d like you to understand that in spite of it all I’m pure! Chaste, you know… . Perfectly virtuous.’