Parade's End Read online

  ‘It’s just like Oxford to use an eighteenth-century crib. I suppose that’s Whiston and Ditton? Something like that …’ He observed Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering – as if he were coming awake in a strange place! He added:

  ‘Anyhow it’s wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have some galantine. I’m going to. Your sole’s cold.’

  Mr. Duchemin looked down at his plate.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ he muttered. ‘Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce!’ The prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable quiet fellow; as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said:

  ‘You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What became of Maggie … Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was Rossetti’s model for Alla Finestra del Cielo?’

  Mr. Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted eyes:

  ‘Alla Finestra!’ he exclaimed: ‘Oh yes! I’ve got the water-colour. I saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot… .’ He looked again at his plate, started at sight of the galantine and began to eat ravenously: ‘A beautiful girl!’ he said: ‘Very long-necked … She wasn’t of course … eh … respectable! She’s living yet, I think. Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of course! … In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of that class… .’ He went muttering on, his head above his plate. Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled to turn to Mrs. Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly:

  ‘If he’ll eat a little: get his stomach filled … It calls the blood down from the head… .’

  She said:

  ‘Oh, forgive! It’s dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive!’

  He said:

  ‘No! No! … Why; it’s what I’m for!’

  A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life:

  ‘Oh, you good man!’ she said in her profound tones, and they remained gazing at each other.

  Suddenly, from behind Macmaster’s back Mr. Duchemin shouted:

  ‘I say he made a settlement on her, dum casta et sola, of course. Whilst she remained chaste and alone!’

  Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on his feet, panting and delighted:

  ‘Chaste!’ he shouted. ‘Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion in the word …’ He surveyed the opulent broadness of his table-cloth; it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford Movement voice: ‘But chastity …’

  Mrs. Wannop suddenly said:

  ‘Oh!’ and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her and said:

  ‘You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned than my poor readers would care for …’ Mr. Horsley had been preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a description of an article he had been writing about the Mosella of Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, said to her as loudly as he could:

  ‘I’ve got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if you’ll …’

  The completely deaf Miss Fox – who had had her training by writing – remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin:

  ‘I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of minute insects… .’

  ‘When my revered preceptor,’ Mr. Duchemin thundered on, ‘drove away in the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: “We will live like the blessed angels!” How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials …’

  Mrs. Duchemin suddenly screamed:

  ‘Oh … no!’

  As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others paused – for a breath. Then they continued talking with polite animation and listening with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the highest achievement and justification of English manners!

  Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that he and the Rev. Horsley could get Mr. Duchemin away, but there’d be a hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: ‘Wait!’ and, turning to Mrs. Duchemin he said: ‘I can stop him. Shall I?’ She said:

  ‘Yes! Yes! Anything!’ He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered into the prize-fighter’s hairy ear that was held down to him:

  ‘Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As hard as you can without breaking your thumb …’

  Mr. Duchemin had just declaimed:

  ‘I, too, after my nuptials …’ He began to wave his arms, pausing and looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs. Duchemin had just screamed.

  Mr. Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes.

  ‘He won’t get up again,’ Macmaster whispered to the appreciative pugilist. ‘He’ll want to. But he’ll be afraid.’

  He said to Mrs. Duchemin:

  ‘Dearest lady! It’s all over. I assure you of that. It’s a scientific nerve counter-irritant.’

  Mr. Duchemin said:

  ‘Forgive!’ with one deep sob: ‘You can never respect …’ She felt her eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath suspended itself… .

  Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed themselves.

  In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not to endure, sharp physical pain – which of course is a nervous matter, too! …

  Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master’s ear:

  ‘It’s time you prepared your sermon for to-morrow, sir,’ and Mr. Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick carpet to the small door.

  Then Macmaster said to her:

  ‘You come from Edinburgh? You’ll know the Fifeshire coast then.’

  ‘Do I not?’ she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if much of her life went. She said: ‘You’ll be knowing Kingussie House, just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child.’

  He answered:

  ‘Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur within.’

  She said:

  ‘Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And … And indeed there are other things I will tell you.’

  She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm buckled on again:

  ‘Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our youths.’

  He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:

  ‘Then you’re an older friend than I,’ he asked, ‘though I’ve known him since I was fourteen, and I don’t believe you could be a better. He’s a good fellow… .’

  She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his warning – she knew it was
a warning – to her to spare his friend.

  Mrs. Wannop gave a distinct, but not an alarming scream. Mr. Horsley had been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the Moselle in Roman times. The Mosella of Ausonius; the subject of the essay he was writing is mostly about fish… .

  ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘it’s been said to be the roach. But there are no roach in the river now. Vannulis viridis, oculisque. No. It’s the other way round: Red fins …’

  Mrs. Wannop’s scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate! – were enough to interrupt him.

  ‘Tietjens!’ she again screamed. ‘Is it possible? …’

  She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had turned to speak to Mrs. Duchemin she had recognised his aquiline half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding-breakfast. To the table that knew it by heart – though Tietjens himself didn’t! – she recited the story of how his father had saved her life, and was her mascot. And she offered the son – for to the father she had never been allowed to make any return – her house, her purse, her heart, her time, her all. She was so completely sincere that, as the party broke up, she just nodded to Macmaster and, catching Tietjens forcibly by the arm, said perfunctorily to the critic:

  ‘Sorry I can’t help you any more with the article. But my dear Chrissie must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute!’

  She moved off, Tietjens grappled to her, her daughter following as a young swan follows its parents. In her gracious manner Mrs. Duchemin had received the thanks of her guests for her wonderful breakfast, and had hoped that now that they had found their ways there… .

  The echoes of the dispersed festival seemed to whisper in the room. Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin faced each other, their eyes wary – and longing.

  He said:

  ‘It’s dreadful to have to go now. But I have an engagement.’

  She said:

  ‘Yes! I know! With your great friends.’

  He answered:

  ‘Oh, only with Mr. Waterhouse and General Campion … and Mr. Sandbach, of course… .’

  She had a moment of fierce pleasure at the thought that Tietjens was not to be of the company: her man would be outsoaring the vulgarian of his youth, of his past that she didn’t know… . Almost harshly she exclaimed:

  ‘I don’t want you to be mistaken about Kingussie House. It was just a holiday school. Not a grand place.’

  ‘It was very costly,’ he said, and she seemed to waver on her feet.

  ‘Yes! yes!’ she said, nearly in a whisper. ‘But you’re so grand now! I was only the child of very poor bodies. Johnstons of Midlothian. But very poor bodies… . I … He bought me, you might say. You know… . Put me to very rich schools: when I was fourteen … my people were glad… . But I think if my mother had known when I married …’ She writhed her whole body. ‘Oh, dreadful! dreadful!’ she exclaimed. ‘I want you to know …’

  His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart… .

  Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to say: ‘I must see you this evening… . I shall be mad with anxiety about you.’ She whispered: ‘Yes! yes! … In the yew walk.’ Her eyes were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. ‘You are the … first … man …’ she breathed.

  ‘I will be the only one for ever,’ he said.

  He began to see himself: in the tall room, with the long curtains: a round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture with great depths: the entwined figures.

  They drew apart to gaze at each other, holding hands… . The voice of Tietjens said:

  ‘Macmaster! You’re to dine at Mrs. Wannop’s to-night. Don’t dress; I shan’t.’ He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair.

  Macmaster said:

  ‘All right. It’s near here, isn’t it? … I’ve got an engagement just after …’ Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse …

  Mrs. Duchemin said with swift jealousy:

  ‘You let him order you about …’ Tietjens was gone.

  Macmaster said absently:

  ‘Who? Chrissie? Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me… . We make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby… .’ Feeling that she didn’t appreciate his friend he was abstractly piling on commendations: ‘He’s making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England could make. But he’s going …’

  An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself quote:

  “‘Since when we stand side by side”!’ His voice trembled.

  ‘Ah yes!’ came in her deep tones: ‘The beautiful lines … They’re true. We must part. In this world …’ They seemed to her lovely and mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:

  ‘We must wait.’ He added fiercely: ‘But to-night, at dusk!’ He imagined the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight under the window.

  ‘Yes! yes!’ she said. ‘There’s a little white gate from the lane.’ She imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects half seen. So much of glamour she could allow herself.

  Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh… . And then: long, circumspect years… .

  Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!

  VI

  TIETJENS LIT A pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won’t corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket, Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten-foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: ‘Pink! pink!’ The young woman had an agreeable back.

  This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous; he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people, their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church – two clergy – the State, two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids.

  Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer! ammer from the Middle High German for ‘finch’), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as ‘dishwasher’. (These charming local dialect names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze; grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow; coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin,
Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our Lady’s bed-straw, dead-nettle, bachelor’s button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear), so interesting! Cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French pasque, meaning Easter); burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers, of course, over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!) … Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets! Dead silent, unable to talk, from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt; tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (No! Not genuine willow-pattern, of course, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port … for the gentleman! … and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10.15. Midday now!

  ‘God’s England!’ Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. ‘“Land of Hope and Glory!” – F natural descending to tonic, C major: chord of 6–4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major… . All absolutely correct! Double basses, ’cellos, all violins, all woodwind, all brass. Full grand organ, all stops, special vox humana and key-bugle effect… . Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew… . Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth; ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman’s back. English midday midsummer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad!’ Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!