No More Parades 7 страница

“I meant to, ” Mark said. “I meant to do it myself. But I hate writing letters. I put it off. I didn't much like having dealings with the fellow I thought you were. I suppose that's another thing you won't forgive me for? ”

“No. I shan't forgive you for not writing to me, ” Christopher said. “You ought to write business letters. ”

“I hate writing 'em, ” Mark said. Christopher was moving on. “There's one thing more, ” Mark said. “I suppose the boy is your son? ”

“Yes, he's my son, ” Christopher said.

“Then that's all, ” Mark said. “I suppose if you're killed you won't mind my keeping an eye on the youngster? ” “I'll be glad, ” Christopher said.

They strolled along the Embankment side by side, walking rather slowly, their backs erected and their shoulders squared because of their satisfaction of walking together, desiring to lengthen the walk by going slow. Once or twice they stopped to look at the dirty silver of the river, for both liked grim effects of landscape. They felt very strong, as if they owned the land!

Once Mark chuckled and said:

“It's too damn funny. To think of our both being… what is it? … monogamists? Well, it's a good thing to stick to one woman… you can't say it isn't. It saves trouble. And you know where you are. ”

Under the lugubrious arch that leads into the War Office quadrangle Christopher halted.

“No. I'm coming in, ” Mark said. “I want to speak to Hogarth. I haven't spoken to Hogarth for some time. About the transport waggon parks in Regent's Park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more. ”

“They say you do it damn well, ” Christopher said. “They say you're indispensable. ” He was aware that his brother desired to stay with him as long as possible. He desired it himself.

“I damn well am! ” Mark said. He added: “I suppose you couldn't do that sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses. ”

“I could, ” Christopher said, “but I suppose I shall go back to liaison work. ”

“I don't think you will, ” Mark said. “I could put in a word for you with the transport people. ”

“I wish you would, ” Christopher said. “I'm not fit to go back into the front line. Besides, I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of. ”

They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to save the ratepayers' money.

With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:

“Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it! ”

The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day.

Tietjens had fallen back a step off the kerb of the pavement that ran round the quadrangle. He said:

“I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have to. They're two different patterns that we see. ” He added: “This is my brother Mark. ”

She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She said to Mark:

“I didn't know Mr Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I've never heard him speak of you. ”

Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his hat.

“I don't suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of him, ” he said, “but he's my brother all right! ”

She stepped on to the asphalt carriage-way and caught between her fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher's khaki sleeve.

“I must speak to you, ” she said; “I'm going then. ”

She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard and ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard; it was as if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world.

The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her voice was hard between her little teeth. She said:

“Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife says you were. ”

Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said vaguely:

“Ethel! Who's she? ” In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr and Mrs Macmaster called each other always “Gug Gums! ” Christopher had in all probability never heard Mrs Duchemin's Christian names. Certainly he had never heard them since his disaster had swept all names out of his head.

He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb.

The girl said:

“Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs Macmaster that is! ” She was obviously waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness:

“No! Certainly not! … What was said? ”

Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the green-stained shelter, like a child over a brook-side. He was obviously waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any preparation at all: the girl repeated, without any preparation at all:

“You'd better keep off the grass if you're the Wannop girl. Mrs Duchemin is my husband's mistress already. You keep off! ”

Christopher said:

“She said that, did she? ” He was wondering how Mark kept his balance, really. The girl said nothing more. She was waiting. With an insistence that seemed to draw him: a sort of sucking in of his personality. It was unbearable. He made his last effort of that afternoon.

He said:

“Damn it all. How could you ask such a tomfool question? You! I took you to be an intelligent person. The only intelligent person I know. Don't you know me? ”

She made an effort to retain her stiffening.

“Isn't Mrs Tietjens a truthful person? ” she asked. “I thought she looked truthful when I saw her at Vincent and Ethel's. ”

He said:

“What she says she believes. But she only believes what she wants to, for the moment. If you call that truthful, she's truthful. I've nothing against her. ” He said to himself: “I'm not going to appeal to her by damning my wife. ”

She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water.

“Oh, ” she said, “it isn't true. I knew it wasn't true. ” She began to cry.

Christopher said:

“Come along. I've been answering tomfool questions all day. I've got another tomfool to see here, then I'm through. ”

She said:

“I can't come with you, crying like this. ”

He answered:

“Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry. ” He added: “Besides, there's Mark. He's a comforting ass. ” He delivered her over to Mark.

“Here, look after Miss Wannop, ” he said. “You want to talk to her anyhow, don't you? ” and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shopwalker into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn't come soon to an unemotional ass in red, green, blue, or pink tabs, who would have fish-like eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was a place where men cried, too!

He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair: not dustbins.

The dark man said to him at once:

“Look here! What's the matter with the Command Depots? You've been lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies about? Is it rotten old colonels in command? ”

Tietjens said amiably:

“Look here! I'm not a beastly spy, you know! I've had hospitality from the rotten old colonels. ”

The dark man said:

“I daresay you have. But that's what you were sent round for. General Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He's gone out now, worse luck… What's the matter with the Command Depots? Is it the men? Or is it the officers! You needn't mention names. ”

Tietjens said:

“Kind of Campion. It isn't the officers and it isn't the men. It's the foul system. You get men who think they've deserved well of their country—and they damn well have! —and you crop their heads…”

“That's the M. O. s, ” the dark man said. “They don't want lice. ”

“If they prefer mutinies…” Tietjens said. “A man wants to walk with his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don't like being regarded as convicts. That's how they are regarded. ”

The dark man said:

“All right. Go on. Why don't you sit down? ”

“I'm a little in a hurry, ” Tietjens said. “I'm going out tomorrow and I've got a brother and people waiting below. ” The dark man said:

“Oh, I'm sorry… But damn. You're the sort of man we want at home. Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don't. ”

Tietjens hesitated for a moment.

“Yes! ” he said eventually. “Yes, I want to go. ”

For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; but whether or no the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night with the girl who was crying downstairs…

He heard in his ear, perfectly distinctly, the lines:

“The voice that never yet

Made answer to my word…”

He said to himself:

“That was what Sylvia wanted! I've got that much! ” The dark man had said something. Tietjens repeated: “I'd take it very unkindly if you stopped my going… I want to go. ”

The dark man said:

“Some do. Some do not. I'll make a note of your name in case you come back… You won't mind going on with your cinder-sifting, if you do? … Get on with your story as quick as you can. And get what fun you can before you go. They say it's rotten out there. Damn awful! There's a hell of a strafe on. That's why they want all of you. ”

For a moment Tietjens saw the grey dawn at rail-head with the distant sound of a ceaselessly boiling pot from miles away. The army feeling re-descended upon him. He began to talk about Command Depots, at great length and with enthusiasm. He snorted with rage at the way men were treated in these gloomy places. With ingenious stupidity!

Every now and then the dark man interrupted him with:

“Don't forget that a Command Depô t is a place where sick and wounded go to get made fit. We've got to get 'em back as soon as we can. ”

“And do you? ” Tietjens would ask.

“No, we don't, ” the other would answer. “That's what this enquiry is about. ”

“You've got, ” Tietjens would continue, “on the north side of a beastly clay hill nine miles from Southampton three thousand men from the Highlands, North Wales, Cumberland… God knows where, as long as it's three hundred miles from home to make them rather mad with nostalgia… You allow 'em out for an hour a day during the pub's closing time; you shave their heads to prevent 'em appealing to local young women who don't exist, and you don't let 'em carry the swagger-canes! God knows why! To prevent their poking their eyes out if they fall down, I suppose. Nine miles from anywhere, with chalk down roads to walk on and not a bush for shelter or shade… And, damn it, if you get two men, chums, from the Seaforths or the Argylls you don't let them sleep in the same hut, but shove 'em in with a lot of fat Buffs or Welshmen, who stink of leeks and can't speak English…”

“That's the infernal medicals' orders to stop 'em talking all night. ”

“To make 'em conspire all night not to turn out for parade, ” Tietjens said. “And there's a beastly mutiny begun… And, damn it, they're fine men. They're first-class fellows. Why don't you—as this is a Christian land—let 'em go home to convalesce with their girls and pubs and friends and a little bit of swank, for heroes? Why in God's name don't you? Isn't there suffering enough? ”

“I wish you wouldn't say 'you, '” the dark man said. “It isn't me. The only A. C. I. I've drafted was to give every Command Depot a cinema and a theatre. But the beastly medicals got it stopped… for fear of infection. And, of course, the parsons and Nonconformist magistrates…”

“Well, you'll have to change it all, ” Tietjens said, “or you'll just have to say: thank God we've got a navy. You won't have an army. The other day three fellows—Warwicks—asked me at question time, after a lecture, why they were shut up there in Wiltshire whilst Belgian refugees were getting bastards on their wives in Birmingham. And when I asked how many men made that complaint over fifty stood up. All from Birmingham…”

The dark man said:

“I'll make a note of that… Go on. ”

Tietjens went on; for as long as he stayed there he felt himself a man, doing work that befitted a man, with the bitter contempt for fools that a man should have and express. It was a letting up: a real last leave.

Mark Tietjens, his umbrella swinging sheepishly, his bowler hat pushed firmly down on to his ears to give him a sense of stability, walked beside the weeping girl in the quadrangle.

“I say, ” he said, “don't give it to old Christopher too beastly hard about his militarist opinions… Remember, he's going out to-morrow and he's one of the best. ”

She looked at him quickly, tears remaining upon her cheeks, and then away.

“One of the best, ” Mark said. “A fellow who never told a lie or did a dishonourable thing in his life. Let him down easy, there's a good girl. You ought to, you know. ”

The girl, her face turned away, said:

“I'd lay down my life for him! ”

Mark said:

“I know you would. I know a good woman when I see one. And think! He probably considers that he is… offering his life, you know, for you. And me, too, of course! … It's a different way of looking at things. ” He gripped her awkwardly but irresistibly by the upper arm. It was very thin under her blue cloth coat. He said to himself:

“By Jove! Christopher likes them skinny. It's the athletic sort that attracts him. This girl is as clean run as… He couldn't think of anything as clean run as Miss Wannop, but he felt a warm satisfaction at having achieved an intimacy with her and his brother. He said:

“You aren't going away? Not without a kinder word to him. You think! He might be killed… Besides. Probably he's never killed a German. He was a liaison officer. Since then he's been in charge of a dump where they sift army dustbins. To see how they can give the men less to eat. That means that the civilians get more. You don't object to his giving civilians more meat? … It isn't even helping to kill Germans…”

He felt her arm press his hand against her warm side. “What's he going to do now? ” she asked. Her voice wavered.

“That's what I'm here about, ” Mark said. “I'm going in to see old Hogarth. You don't know Hogarth? Old General Hogarth? I think I can get him to give Christopher a job with the transport. A safe job. Safeish! No beastly glory business about it. No killing beastly Germans either… I beg your pardon, if you like Germans. ”

She drew her arm from his hand in order to look him in the face.

“Oh! ” she said, “you don't want him to have any beastly military glory! ” The colour came back into her face: she looked at him open-eyed.

He said:

“No! Why the devil should he? ” He said to himself: “She's got enormous eyes: a good neck: good shoulders: good breasts: clean hips: small hands. She isn't knockkneed: neat ankles. She stands well on her feet. Feet not too large! Five foot four, say! A real good filly! ” He went on aloud: “Why in the world should he want to be a beastly soldier? He's the heir to Groby. That ought to be enough for one man. ”

Having stood still sufficiently long for what she knew to be his critical inspection, she put her hand in turn, precipitately, under his arm and moved him towards the entrance steps.

“Let's be quick then, ” she said. “Let's get him into your transport at once. Before he goes to-morrow. Then we'll know he's safe. ”

He was puzzled by her dress. It was very business-like, dark blue and very short. A white blouse with a black silk, man's tie. A wide-awake, with, on the front of the band, a cipher.

“You're in uniform yourself, ” he said. “Does your conscience let you do war work? ”

She said:

“No. We're hard up. I'm taking the gym classes in a great big school to turn an honest penny… Do be quick! ”

Her pressure on his elbow flattered him. He resisted it a little, hanging back, to make her more insistent. He liked being pleaded with by a pretty woman: Christopher's girl at that.

He said:

“Oh, it's not a matter of minutes. They keep 'em weeks at the base before they send 'em up… We'll fix him up all right, I've no doubt. We'll wait in the hall till he comes down. ”

He told the benevolent commissionaire, one of two in a pulpit in the crowded grim hall, that he was going up to see General Hogarth in a minute or two. But not to send a bellboy. He might be some time yet.

He sat himself beside Miss Wannop, clumsily, on a wooden bench, humanity surging over their toes as if they had been on a beach. She moved a little to make room for him and that, too, made him feel good. He said:

“You said just now: 'we' are hard up. Does 'we' mean you and Christopher? ”

She said:

“I and Mr Tietjens. Oh, no! I and mother! The paper she used to write for stopped. When your father died, I believe. He found money for it, I think. And mother isn't suited to free-lancing. She's worked too hard in her life. ”

He looked at her, his round eyes protruding.

“I don't know what that is, free-lancing, ” he said. “But you've got to be comfortable. How much do you and your mother need to keep you comfortable? And put in a bit more so that Christopher could have a mutton-chop now and then! ”

She hadn't really been listening. He said with some insistence: “Look here! I'm here on business. Not like an elderly admirer forcing himself on you. Though, by God, I do admire you too… But my father wanted your mother to be comfortable…”

Her face, turned to him, became rigid.

“You don't mean…” she began. He said:

“You won't get it any quicker by interrupting. I have to tell my stories in my own way. My father wanted your mother to be comfortable. He said so that she could write books, not papers. I don't know what the difference is: that's what he said. He wants you to be comfortable too… You've not got any encumbrances! Not… oh, say a business: a hat shop that doesn't pay? Some girls have…”

She said: “No. I just teach… oh, do be quick…”

For the first time in his life he dislocated the course of his thoughts to satisfy a longing in someone else.

“You may take it to go on with, ” he said, “as if my father had left your mother a nice little plum. ” He cast about to find his scattered thoughts.

“He has! He has! After all! ” the girl said. “Oh, thank God! ”

“There'll be a bit for you, if you like, ” Mark said, “or perhaps Christopher won't let you. He's ratty with me. And something for your brother to buy a doctor's business with. ” He asked: “You haven't fainted, have you? ” She said:

“No. I don't faint. I cry. ”

“That'll be all right, ” he answered. He went on: “That's your side of it. Now for mine. I want Christopher to have a place where he'll be sure of a mutton-chop and an armchair by the fire. And someone to be good for him. You're good for him. I can see that. I know women! ”

The girl was crying, softly and continuously. It was the first moment of the lifting of strain that she had known since the day before the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier, near a place called Gemmenich.

It had begun with the return of Mrs Duchemin from Scotland. She had sent at once for Miss Wannop to the rectory, late at night. By the light of candles in tall silver stocks, against oak panelling she had seemed like a mad block of marble, with staring, dark eyes and mad hair. She had exclaimed in a voice as hard as a machine's:

“How do you get rid of a baby? You've been a servant. You ought to know! ”

That had been the great shock, the turning-point, of Valentine Wannop's life. Her last years before that had been of great tranquillity, tinged of course with melancholy because she loved Christopher Tietjens. But she had early learned to do without, and the world as she saw it was a place of renunciations, of high endeavour, and sacrifice. Tietjens had to be a man who came to see her mother and talked wonderfully. She had been happy when he had been in the house—she in the housemaid's pantry, getting the tea-things. She had, besides, been very hard-worked for her mother; the weather had been, on the whole, good, the corner of the country in which they lived had continued to seem fresh and agreeable. She had had excellent health, got an occasional ride on the qui-tamer with which Tietjens had replaced Joel's rig; and her brother had done admirably at Eton, taking such a number of exhibitions and things that, once at Magdalen, he had been nearly off his mother's hands. An admirable, gay boy, not unlikely to run for, as well as being a credit to, his university, if he didn't get sent down for his political extravagances. He was a Communist!

And at the rectory there had been the Duchemins, or rather Mrs Duchemin and, during most week-ends, Macmaster somewhere about.

The passion of Macmaster for Edith Ethel and of Edith Ethel for Macmaster had seemed to her one of the beautiful things of life. They seemed to swim, in a sea of renunciations, of beautiful quotations, and of steadfast waiting. Macmaster did not interest her personally much, but she took him on trust because of Edith Ethel's romantic passion and because he was Christopher Tietjens' friend. She had never heard him say anything original; when he used quotations they would be apt rather than striking. But she took it for granted that he was the right man—much as you take it for granted that the engine of an express train in which you are is reliable. The right people have chosen it for you…

With Mrs Duchemin, mad before her, she had the first intimation that her idolized friend, in whom she had believed as she had believed in the firmness of the great sunny earth, had been the mistress of her lover—almost since the first day she had seen him… And that Mrs Duchemin had, stored somewhere, a character of an extreme harshness and great vulgarity of language. She raged up and down in the candlelight, before the dark oak panelling, screaming coarse phrases of the deepest hatred for her lover. Didn't the oaf know his business better than to…? The dirty little Port of Leith fish-handler…

What, then, were tall candles in silver sticks for? And polished panelling in galleries?

Valentine Wannop couldn't have been a little ashcat in worn cotton dresses, sleeping under the stairs, in an Ealing household with a drunken cook, an invalid mistress, and three over-fed men, without acquiring a considerable knowledge of the sexual necessities and excesses of humanity. But, as all the poorer helots of great cities hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance and suave wealth, she had always considered that, far from the world of Ealing and its county councillors who over-ate and neighed like stallions, there were bright colonies of beings, chaste, beautiful in thought, altruist and circumspect.

And, till that moment, she had imagined herself on the skirts of such a colony. She presupposed a society of beautiful intellects centring in London round her friends. Ealing she just put out of her mind. She considered: she had, indeed, once heard Tietjens say that humanity was made up of exact and constructive intellects on the one hand and on the other of stuff to fill graveyards… Now, what had become of the exact and constructive intellects?

Worst of all, what became of her beautiful inclination towards Tietjens, for she couldn't regard it as anything more? Couldn't her heart sing any more whilst she was in the housemaid's pantry and he in her mother's study? And what became, still more, of what she knew to be Tietjens' beautiful inclination towards her? She asked herself the eternal question—and she knew it to be the eternal question—whether no man and woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. And, looking at Mrs Duchemin, rushing backwards and forwards in the light of candles, blue-white of face and her hair flying, Valentine Wannop said: “No! no! The tiger lying in the reeds will always raise its head! ” But tiger… it was more like a peacock…

Tietjens, raising his head from the other side of the tea-table and looking at her with his long, meditative glance from beside her mother: ought he then, instead of blue and protruding, to have eyes divided longitudinally in the blacks of them—that should divide, closing or dilating, on a yellow ground, with green glowings of furtive light?

She was aware that Edith Ethel had done her an irreparable wrong, for you cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same. Or not for years. Nevertheless she stayed with Mrs Duchemin until far into the small hours, when she fell, a mere parcel of bones in a peacock-blue wrapper, into a deep chair and refused to move or speak; nor did she afterwards slacken in her faithful waiting on her friend…

On the next day came the war. That was a nightmare of pure suffering, with never a let-up, day or night. It began on the morning of the fourth with the arrival of her brother from some sort of Oxford Communist Summer School on the Broads. He was wearing a German corps student's cap and was very drunk. He had been seeing German friends off from Harwich. It was the first time she had ever seen a drunken man, so that was a good present for her.

Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his father, he had his mother's hooked nose and was always a little unbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn't hitherto mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper: her brother, when he had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption. But her mother had only chuckled.

The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood and to torture: neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as if—so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived with her—in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture and flay off all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling and vitriolic, one hand clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom Edward Wannop affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being ducked in a horse-pond, shot, or otherwise martyrized. That made it obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war. If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled and terrorized millions would have thrown down their arms!

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