Parade's End Page 19

  She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressment which a man would develop about herself at the first glance – the amount and the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on introduction couldn’t conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner, diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket, diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so, rather more quickly away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong – from the milder note to the more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of ‘turnings down’. The poor fellows next day would change their boot-makers, their sock merchants, their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts; they would sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that calamity came from the fact that she hadn’t deigned to look into their eyes… . Perhaps hadn’t dared was the right word!

  Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have been. She knew that, like her intimates – all the Elizabeths, Alixs, and Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly journals – she was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their intimacy as of their eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed paper. They went about in bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather boas floating above them, though to be sure no one wore feather boas; they shortened their hairs and their skirts and flattened, as far as possible, their chest developments, which does give, oh, you know … a certain … They adopted demeanours as like as possible – and yet how unlike – to those of waitresses in tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads in police court reports of raids what those are! Probably they were, in action, as respectable as any body of women; more respectable, probably, than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly spotless by comparison with their own upper servants whose morals, merely as recorded in the divorce court statistics – that she had from Tietjens – would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that he was sure her butler would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an angel – and, as such, delicately minded – wouldn’t have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan’s offences.

  And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn’t really even believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn’t believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call the maîtresse en tître of any particular man. Passion wasn’t, at least, their strong suit: they left that to more – or to less – august circles. The Duke of A— and all the little As might be the children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B— instead of the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A—. Mr. C, the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E—. The Whig front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes trading off these – again French – collages sérieux against the matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F— and Mr. G—. But those amorous of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the parties to them didn’t, for one thing, photograph well, being old, uglyish and terribly badly dressed. They were matter rather for the memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for fifty years… .

  The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard of such country houses, but she didn’t know of any. She imagined that they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had patronymics ending in schen, stein, and baum. There were getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She had in her that much of the papist.

  Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord mayors, and common councilmen. They were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne – of champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual circumstances – fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental lewdness.

  In her own case – years ago now – she had certainly been taken advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed: intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When, in a scare that had been as much her mother’s as her own, she had led Tietjens on and married him in Paris to be out of the way – though it was fortunate that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the scene of her mother’s marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an ostensible reason! – there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been very near death. She had wanted death.

  And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper – her mother’s influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House, her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were recorded in gazettes – nay, she had only involuntarily to think of that night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into her palms and groan slightly… . She had to invent a chronic stitch in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and seemed to herself to degrade her… .

  The miserable memory would come, ghost-like, at any time, anywhere. She would see Drake’s face, dark against the white things; she would feel the thin night-gown ripping off her shoulder; but most of all she would seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the longing for the brute who had mangled her, the dreadful pain of the mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him… . She had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake… .

  Her ‘turnings down’ then of the really nice men, if it were a sport, was a sport not without a spice of danger. She imagined that, after a success, she must feel much of the exhilaration that men told her they felt after bringing off a clean right and left, and no doubt she felt some of the emotions that the same young men felt when they were out shooting with beginners. Her personal chastity she now cherished much as she cherished her personal cleanliness and persevered in her Swedish exercises after her baths before an open window, her rides afterwards, and her long nights of dancing which she would pursue in any room that was decently ventilated. Indeed, the two sides of life were, in her mind, intimately connected: she kept herself attractive by her skilfully selected exercises and cleanlinesses; and the same fatigues, healthful as they were, kept her in the mood for chastity of life. She had done so ever since her return to her husband; and this not because of any attachment to her husband or to virtue as such, as because she had made the pact with herself out of caprice and meant to keep it. She had to have men at her feet; that was, as it were, the price of her – purely social – daily bread as it was the price of the daily bread of her intimates. She was, and had been for many years, absolutely continent. And so very likely were, and had been, all her Moiras, and Megs, and Lady Marjories – but she was perfectly aware that they ha
d to have, above their assemblies as it were, a light vapour of the airs and habits of the brothel. The public demanded that … a light vapour, like the slight traces of steam that she had seen, glutinously adhering to the top of the water in the crocodile-houses of the Zoo.

  It was, indeed, the price; and she was aware that she had been lucky. Not many of the hastily married young women of her set really kept their heads above water in her set: for a season you would read that Lady Marjorie and Captain Hunt, after her presentation at Court on the occasion of her marriage, were to be seen at Roehampton, at Goodwood, and the like: photographs of the young couple, striding along with the palings of the Row behind them, would appear for a month or so. Then the records of their fashionable doings would transfer themselves to the lists of the attendants and attachés of distant vice-regal courts in tropics bad for the complexion. ‘And then no more of he and she,’ as Sylvia put it.

  In her case it hadn’t been so bad, but it had been nearish. She had had the advantage of being an only daughter of a very rich woman; her husband wasn’t just any Captain Hunt to stick on a vice-regal staff. He was in a first-class office and when Angélique wrote notes on the young ménage she could – Angélique’s ideas of these things being hazy – always refer to the husband as the future Lord Chancellor or Ambassador to Vienna. And their little, frightfully expensive establishment – to which her mother, who had lived with them had very handsomely contributed – had floated them over the first dangerous two years. They had entertained like mad, and two much-canvassed scandals had had their beginnings in Sylvia’s small drawing-room. She had been quite established when she had gone off with Perowne.

  And coming back had not been so difficult. She had expected it would be, but it hadn’t. Tietjens had stipulated for large rooms in Gray’s Inn. That hadn’t seemed to her to be reasonable; but she imagined that he wanted to be near his friend and, though she had no gratitude to Tietjens for taking her back and nothing but repulsion from the idea of living in his house, as they were making a bargain, she owed it to herself to be fair. She had never swindled a railway company, brought dutiable scent past a custom-house, or represented to a second-hand dealer that her clothes were less worn than they were, though with her prestige she could actually have done this. It was fair that Tietjens should live where he wished and live there they did, their very tall windows looking straight into those of Macmaster across the Georgian quadrangle.

  They had two floors of a great building, and that gave them a great deal of space; the breakfast-room, in which during the war they also lunched, was an immense room, completely lined with books that were nearly all calf-backed, with an immense mirror over an immense, carved, yellow and white marble mantelpiece, and three windows that, in their great height, with the spideriness of their divisions and their old, bulging glass – some of the panes were faintly violet in age – gave to the room an eighteenth-century distinction. It suited, she admitted, Tietjens, who was an eighteenth-century figure of the Dr. Johnson type – the only eighteenth-century type of which she knew, except for that of the beau something who wore white satin and ruffles, went to Bath, and must have been indescribably tiresome.

  Above, she had a great white drawing-room, with fixings that she knew were eighteenth-century and to be respected. For Tietjens – again she admitted – had a marvellous gift for old furniture; he despised it as such, but he knew it down to the ground. Once when her friend Lady Moira had been deploring the expense of having her new, little house furnished from top to toe under the advice of Sir John Robertson, the specialist (the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some American), Tietjens, who had come in to tea and had been listening without speaking, had said, with the soft good nature, rather sentimental in tone, that once in a blue moon he would bestow on her prettiest friends:

  ‘You had better let me do it for you.’

  Taking a look round Sylvia’s great drawing-room, with the white panels, the Chinese lacquer screens, the red lacquer and ormolu cabinets, and the immense blue and pink carpet (and Sylvia knew that if only for the three panels by a fellow called Fragonard, bought just before Fragonards had been boomed by the late King, her drawing-room was something remarkable), Lady Moira had said to Tietjens, rather flutteringly and almost with the voice with which she began one of her affairs:

  ‘Oh, if you only would.’

  He had done it, and he had done it for a quarter of the estimate of Sir John Robertson. He had done it without effort, as if with a roll or two of his elephantine shoulders, for he seemed to know what was in every dealer’s and auctioneer’s catalogue by looking at the green halfpenny stamp on the wrapper. And, still more astonishingly, he had made love to Lady Moira – they had stopped twice with the Moiras in Gloucestershire and the Moiras had three times week-ended with Mrs. Satterthwaite as the Tietjens’ invités. Tietjens had made love to Lady Moira quite prettily and sufficiently to tide Moira over until she was ready to begin her affair with Sir William Heathly.

  For the matter of that, Sir John Robertson, the specialist in old furniture, challenged by Lady Moira to pick holes in her beautiful house, had gone there, poked his large spectacles against cabinets, smelt the varnish of table tops and bitten the backs of chairs in his ancient and short-sighted way, and had then told Lady Moira that Tietjens had bought her nothing that wasn’t worth a bit more than he had given for it. This increased their respect for the old fellow: it explained his several millions. For, if the old fellow proposed to make out of a friend like Moira a profit of 300 per cent – limiting it to that out of sheer affection for a pretty woman – what wouldn’t he make out of a natural – and national – enemy like a United States senator!

  And the old man took a great fancy to Tietjens himself – which Tietjens, to Sylvia’s bewilderment, did not resent. The old man would come in to tea and, if Tietjens were present, would stay for hours talking about old furniture. Tietjens would listen without talking. Sir John would expatiate over and over again about this to Mrs. Tietjens. It was extraordinary. Tietjens went purely by instinct: by taking a glance at a thing and chancing its price. According to Sir John one of the most remarkable feats of the furniture trade had been Tietjens’ purchase of the Hemingway bureau for Lady Moira. Tietjens, in his dislikeful way, had bought this at a cottage sale for £3 10s., and had told Lady Moira it was the best piece she would ever possess: Lady Moira had gone to the sale with him. Other dealers present had hardly looked at it; Tietjens certainly hadn’t opened it. But at Lady Moira’s, poking his spectacles into the upper part of the glazed piece, Sir John had put his nose straight on the little bit of inserted yellow wood by a hinge, bearing signature, name, and date: ‘Jno. Hemingway, Bath, 1784.’ Sylvia remembered them because Sir John told her so often. It was a lost ‘piece’ that the furnishing world had been after for many years.

  For that exploit the old man seemed to love Tietjens. That he loved Sylvia herself, she was quite aware. He fluttered round her tremulously, gave fantastic entertainments in her honour and was the only man she had never turned down. He had a harem, so it was said, in an enormous house at Brighton or somewhere. But it was another sort of love he bestowed on Tietjens: the rather pathetic love that the aged bestow on their possible successors in office.

  Once Sir John came in to tea and quite formally and with a sort of portentousness announced that that was his seventy-first birthday, and that he was a broken man. He seriously proposed that Tietjens should come into partnership with him with the reversion of the business – not, of course, of his private fortune. Tietjens had listened amiably, asking a detail or two of Sir John’s proposed arrangement. Then he had said, with the rather caressing voice that he now and then bestowed on a pretty woman, that he didn’t think it would do. There would be too much beastly money about it. As a career it would be more congenial to him than his office … but there was too much beastly money about it.

  Once more, a little to Sylvia’s surprise – but men are queer creatures! – Sir John se
emed to see this objection as quite reasonable, though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn’t have Tietjens he couldn’t; and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old-furniture trade: that was why he hadn’t persisted. But he sent by Sylvia a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens did come to be in want of money …

  Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people – as they sometimes did – told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of caprice – like her own; and, since she knew that most of her own manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of thinking much about him.

  But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had discussed the change at Lobscheid – or rather when Sylvia had unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens! – he had predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the affair of her mother’s cousin’s opera box that had most impressed her. He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering with her social level, and he was convinced that he was not going to. He had thought about it a good deal.