No More Parades 8 страница

Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother, who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs Wannop had said:

“What does your wife think about it? ”

Tietjens had answered:

“Oh, Mrs Tietjens is a pro-German… Or no, that isn't exact! She has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war. She can't bear the thought of physical suffering. I can't blame her. ”

Mrs Wannop was no longer listening: her daughter was.

For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man and far less of an inclination—the war and Mrs Duchemin between them. He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on. She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him.

One Friday afternoon at Macmaster's she had had a long talk with him: the first she had had since the drive and the accident.

Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons—and that had been some time before the war—Valentine Wannop had accompanied Mrs Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the rectory. Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs Duchemin drifting about the large book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists.

On this occasion—a November day of very chilly wet—there had been next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually full. Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin had taken a Mr Spong, an architect, into the dining-room to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi's Views of Rome that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster. A Mr Jegg and a Mrs Haviland were sitting close together in the far window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr Jegg used the word “inhibition. ” Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat side by side on the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire warming their backs. He said:

“Well, Miss Wannop. What have you been doing? ” and they drifted into talking of the war. You couldn't not. She was astonished not to find him so loathsome as she had expected, for, just at that time, with the facts that were always being driven into her mind by the pacifist friends of her brother and with continual brooding over the morals of Mrs Duchemin, she had an automatic feeling that all manly men were lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of sadism. She knew that this view of Tietjens was wrong, but she cherished it.

She found him—as subconsciously she knew he was—astonishingly mild. She had too often watched him whilst he listened to her mother's tirades against the Kaiser, not to know that. He did not raise his voice, he showed no emotion. He said at last:

“You and I are like two people…” He paused and began again more quickly: “Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read 'Monkey's Soap'; if you look back when you've passed it's 'Needs no Rinsing. '… You and I are standing at different angles, and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet a third… But I hope we respect each other. We're both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect you and I hope you respect me. ”

She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr Jegg, across the room, said: “The failure to co-ordinate…” and then dropped his voice.

Tietjens looked at her attentively.

“You don't respect me? ” he asked. She kept obstinately silent.

“I'd have liked you to have said it, ” he repeated.

“Oh, ” she cried out, “how can I respect you when there is all this suffering? So much pain! Such torture… I can't sleep… Never… I haven't slept a whole night since… Think of the immense spaces, stretching out under the night… I believe pain and fear must be worse at night…” She knew she was crying out like that because her dread had come true. When he had said: “I'd have liked you to have said it, ” using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, too, was going.

And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her: like that, using the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word “we”—and perhaps without intention—he had let her know that he loved her.

Mr Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs Haviland was already at the door.

“We'll leave you to have your war talk out, ” Mr Jegg said. He added: “For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of things that's preservable. I can't help saying that. ”

She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:

“Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He must! ” The deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair—like the scent of the skin of an apple, but very faint. “You must! You must! ” she said to herself. There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall… She saw the white disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm night…

Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great dining-room at the Duchemins'. He got down from the fire-seat with a weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue:

“Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the office. That, too, won't be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor Vinnie thinks matters. ” He added: “It's queer, dear…” In the tumult of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said “dear. ”…“Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at night… And she, too, said that she could not respect me…”

She sprang up.

“Oh, ” she said, “she didn't meant it. I didn't mean it. Almost every man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don't you see it's a desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men? ” She added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned: “Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from your point of view! You're more useful—you know you're more useful to your country here than…”

He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great gentleness and concern.

“I can't reconcile it with my conscience, ” he said. “In this affair there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don't mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on. We ought. But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul. ”

The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit heather landscape of the north, where naï vely he had made his tranquil resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again.

That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing straightforward: for him or for any man. One could have fought with a clean heart for a civilization: if you like for the eighteenth century against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a cat's-paw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was just bearable. One could keep at one's job—which was faking statistics against the other fellow—until you were sick and tired of faking and your brain reeled. And then some!

It was probably impolitic to fake—to overstate! —a case against enemy nations. The chickens would come home to roost in one way or another, probably. Perhaps they wouldn't. That was a matter for one's superiors. Obviously! And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows. Stupid, but relatively disinterested. But now! … What was one to do? … He went on, almost mumbling…

She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily unselfish. He didn't betray one thought of self-interest… not one!

He was saying:

“But now! … with this crowd of boodlers! … Supposing one's asked to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to, say, Salonika—when they and you and common sense and everyone and everything else, know it's disastrous? … And from that to monkeying with our own forces… Starving particular units for political…” He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said:

“I can't, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations. ”

She said passionately.

“They're not! They're not! How dare you say such a thing? ” He answered:

“It doesn't matter… No! I'm sure you're not… But, anyhow, these things are official. One can't, if one's scrupulous, even talk about them… And then… You see it means such infinite deaths of men, such an infinite prolongation… all this interference for side-ends! … I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over their heads… And then… I'm to carry out their orders because they're my superiors… But helping them means unnumbered deaths…”

He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile:

“You see! ” he said, “we're perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn't think you're the only one that sees all the deaths and all the sufferings. All, you see: I, too, am a conscientious objector. My conscience won't let me continue any longer with these fellows…”

She said:

“But isn't there any other…”

He interrupted:

“No! There's no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these affairs. I suppose I'm more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I'm not. But my conscience won't let me use my brain in this service. So I've a great, hulking body! I'll admit I'm probably not much good. But I've nothing to live for: what I stand for isn't any more in this world. What I want, as you know, I can't have. So…”

She exclaimed bitterly:

“Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two bullets in front of two small anaemic fellows. And how can you say you'll have nothing to live for? You'll come back. You'll do your good work again. You know you did good work…”

He said:

“Yes I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I've come to believe I did… But no! They'll never let me back. They've got me out, with all sorts of bad marks against me. They'll pursue me systematically… You see, in such a world as this, an idealist—or perhaps it's only a sentimentalist—must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf… No; they'll get me, one way or the other. And some fellow—Macmaster here—will do my jobs. He won't do them so well, but he'll do them more dishonestly. Or no. I oughtn't to say dishonestly. He'll do them with enthusiasm and righteousness. He'll fulfil the orders of his superiors with an immense docility and unction. He'll fake figures against our allies with the black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when that war comes, he'll do the requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priests of Baal. And he'll be right. It's all we're fitted for. We ought never to have come into this war. We ought to have snaffled other peoples” colonies as the price of neutrality…”

“Oh! ” Valentine Wannop said, “how can you so hate your country? ”

He said with great earnestness:

“Don't say it! Don't believe it! Don't even for a moment think it! I love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey, mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a grosser name… and all the rest of the rubbish—you remember the field between the Duchemins' and your mother's—and we have always been boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so we've built up the great tradition that we love… But, for the moment, it's painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than Walpole's. But one's too near them. One sees of Walpole that he consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt: one doesn't see his methods… My son, or his son, will only see the glory of the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won't know about the methods. They'll teach him at school that across the counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew… Though that was another discreditable affair…”

“But you! ” Valentine Wannop exclaimed. “You! what will you do! After the war! ”

“I! ” he said rather bewilderedly. “I! … Oh, I shall go into the old furniture business. I've been offered a job…”

She didn't believe he was serious. He hadn't, she knew, ever thought about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage sale. She cried out:

“Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once? ” for in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.

He said:

“Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably not itself for the minute…” He was obviously thinking of something else.

“I've probably been a low cad, ” he said, “wringing your heart with my doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always been—or we've seemed always to me—so alike in our thoughts. I daresay I wanted you to respect me…”

“Oh, I respect you! I respect you! ” she said. “You're as innocent as a child. ”

He went on:

“And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late that one has had a quiet room and a fire and… you! To think in front of. You do make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very muddled till to-day… till five minutes ago! Do you remember our drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul… But you see… Don't you see? ”

She said:

“No! What am I to see? I remember…”

He said:

“That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for me! ”

She said:

“Did I say that? … Yes, I said that! ”

The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out her arms… She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word of love or she would have held it! it began with: “Well, I must be…” He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room…

The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and unrelenting. Her mother's paper cut down her money; no orders for serials came in: her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then her brother went to prison: somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. For three days Mrs Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace, after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let his mother use her influence—of which she had still some—to get him appointed as an A. B. on a mine-sweeper. Great winds became an agony to Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better: she took pride in having a son in a Service. She was then the more able to appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs Wannop in effigy in front of their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs Wannop ran out and in the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs Wannop's grey hair in the firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to London.

The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts: the air above it filled with aeroplanes: the roads covered with military cars. There was then no getting away from the sounds of the war.

Just as they had decided to move Tietjens came back. It was for a moment heaven to have him in this country. But when, a month later, Valentine Wannop saw him for a minute, he seemed very heavy, aged and dull. It was then almost as bad as before, for it seemed to Valentine as if he hardly had his reason.

On hearing that Tietjens was to be quartered—or, at any rate, occupied—in the neighbourhood of Ealing, Mrs Wannop at once took a small house in Bedford Park, whilst, to make ends meet—for her mother made terribly little—Valentine Wannop took a post as athletic mistress in a great school in a not very near suburb. Thus, though Tietjens came in for a cup of tea almost every afternoon with Mrs Wannop in the dilapidated little suburban house, Valentine Wannop hardly ever saw him. The only free afternoon she had was the Friday, and on that day she still regularly chaperoned Mrs Duchemin: meeting her at Charing Cross towards noon and taking her back to the same station in time to catch the last train to Rye. On Saturdays and Sundays she was occupied all day in typing her mother's manuscript.

Of Tietjens, then, she saw almost nothing. She knew that his poor mind was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said he was a great help to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory conclusions—or quite startling and attractive theories—with extreme rapidity. This Mrs Wannop found of the greatest use to her whenever—though it wasn't now very often—she had an article to write for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing…

Mrs Duchemin, then, Valentine Wannop still chaperoned, though there was no bond any more between them. Valentine knew, for instance, perfectly well that Mrs Duchemin, after she had been seen off by train from Charing Cross, got out at Clapham Junction, took a taxicab back to Gray's Inn after dark and spent the night with Macmaster, and Mrs Duchemin knew quite well that Valentine knew. It was a sort of parade of circumspection and rightness, and they kept it up even after, at a sinister registry office, the wedding had taken place, Valentine being the one witness and an obscure-looking substitute for the usual pew opener another. There seemed to be, by then, no very obvious reason why Valentine should support Mrs Macmaster any more on these rather dreary occasions, but Mrs Macmaster said she might just as well, until they saw fit to make the marriage public. There were, Mrs Macmaster said, censorious tongues, and even if these were confuted afterwards it is difficult, if not impossible, to outrun scandal. Besides, Mrs Macmaster was of opinion that the Macmaster afternoons with these geniuses must be a liberal education for Valentine. But, as Valentine sat most of the time at the tea-table near the door, it was the backs and side faces of the distinguished rather than their intellects with which she was most acquainted. Occasionally, however, Mrs Duchemin would show Valentine, as an enormous privilege, one of the letters to herself from men of genius: usually North British, written, as a rule, from the Continent or more distant and peaceful climates, for most of them believed it their duty in these hideous times to keep alive in the world the only glimmering spark of beauty. Couched in terms so eulogistic as to resemble those used in passionate love-letters by men more profane, these epistles recounted, or consulted Mrs Duchemin as to, their love affairs with foreign princesses, the progress of their ailments or the progresses of their souls towards those higher regions of morality in which floated their so beautiful-souled correspondent.

The letters entertained Valentine and, indeed, she was entertained by that whole mirage. It was only the Macmasters' treatment of her mother that finally decided Valentine that this friendship had died; for the friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing disillusionments, and Valentine Wannop was a woman of more than usual loyalty. Indeed, if she couldn't respect Mrs Duchemin on the old grounds, she could very really respect her for her tenacity of purpose, her determination to advance Macmaster and for the sort of ruthlessness that she put into these pursuits.

Valentine's affection had, indeed, survived even Edith Ethel's continued denigrations of Tietjens—for Edith Ethel regarded Tietjens as a clog round her husband's neck, if only because he was a very unpopular man, grown personally rather unpresentable and always extremely rude to the geniuses on Fridays. Edith Ethel, however, never made these complaints that grew more and more frequent as more and more the distinguished flocked to the Fridays, before Macmaster. And they ceased very suddenly and in a way that struck Valentine as odd.

Mrs Duchemin's grievance against Tietjens was that, Macmaster being a weak man, Tietjens had acted as his banker until, what with interest and the rest of it, Macmaster owed Tietjens a great sum: several thousand pounds. And there had been no real reason: Macmaster had spent most of the money either on costly furnishings for his rooms or on his costly journeys to Rye. On the one hand Mrs Duchemin could have found Macmaster all the bric-à -brac he could possibly have wanted from amongst the things at the rectory, where no one would have missed them and, on the other, she, Mrs Duchemin, would have paid all Macmaster's travelling expenses. She had had unlimited money from her husband, who never asked for accounts. But, whilst Tietjens still had influence with Macmaster, he had used it uncompromisingly against this course, giving him the delusion—it enraged Mrs Duchemin to think! —that it would have been dishonourable. So that Macmaster had continued to draw upon him.

And, most enraging of all, at a period when she had had a power of attorney over all Mr Duchemin's fortune and could, perfectly easily, have sold out something that no one would have missed for the couple of thousand or so that Macmaster owed, Tietjens had very forcibly refused to allow Macmaster to agree to anything of the sort. He had again put into Macmaster's weak head that it would be dishonourable. But Mrs Duchemin—and she closed her lips determinedly after she had said it—knew perfectly well Tietjens' motive. So long as Macmaster owed him money he imagined that they couldn't close their doors upon him. And their establishment was beginning to be a place where you met people of great influence who might well get for a person as lazy as Tietjens a sinecure that would suit him. Tietjens, in fact, knew which side his bread was buttered.

For what, Mrs Duchemin asked, could there have been dishonourable about the arrangements she had proposed? Practically the whole of Mr Duchemin's money was to come to her: he was by then insane; it was therefore, morally, her own. But immediately after that, Mr Duchemin having been certified, the estate had fallen into the hands of the Lunacy Commissioners and there had beno further hope of taking the capital. Now, her husband being dead, it was in the hands of trustees, Mr Duchemin having left the whole of his property to Magdalen College and merely the income to his widow. The income was very large; but where, with their expenses, with the death duties and taxation, which were by then merciless, was Mrs. Duchemin to find the money? She was to be allowed, under her husband's will, enough capital to buy a pleasant little place in Surrey, with rather a nice lot of land—enough to let Macmaster know some of the leisures of a country gentleman's lot. They were going in for Shorthorns, and there was enough land to give them a small golf-course and, in the autumn, a little—oh, mostly rough! —shooting for Macmaster to bring his friends down to. It would just run to that. Oh, no ostentation. Merely a nice little place. As an amusing detail the villagers there already called Macmaster “squire” and the women curtsied to him. But Valentine Wannop would understand that, with all these expenses, they couldn't find the money to pay off Tietjens. Besides, Mrs Macmaster said she wasn't going to pay off Tietjens. He had had his chance once: now he could go without, for her. Macmaster would have to pay it himself, and he would never be able to, his contribution to their housekeeping being what it was. And there were going to be complications. Macmaster wondered about their little place in Surrey, saying that he would consult Tietjens about this and that alteration. But over the doorsill of that place the foot of Tietjens was never going to go! Never! It would mean a good deal of unpleasantness; or rather it would mean one sharp: “C-r-r-unch! ” And then: Napoo finny! Mrs Duchemin sometimes, and with great effect, condescended to use one of the more picturesque phrases of the day.

To all these diatribes Valentine Wannop answered hardly anything. It was no particular concern of hers; even if, for a moment, she felt proprietarily towards Christopher as she did now and then, she felt no particular desire that his intimacy with the Macmasters should be prolonged, because she knew he could have no particular desire for its prolongation. She imagined him turning them down with an unspoken and good-humoured gibe. And, indeed, she agreed on the whole with Edith Ethel. It was demoralising for a weak little man like Vincent to have a friend with an ever-open purse beside him. Tietjens ought not to have been princely: it was a defect, a quality that she did not personally admire in him. As to whether it would or wouldn't have been dishonourable for Mrs Duchemin to take her husband's money and give it to Macmaster, she kept an open mind. To all intents and purposes the money was Mrs Duchemin's, and if Mrs Duchemin had then paid Christopher off it would have been sensible. She could see that later it had become very inconvenient. There were, however, male standards to be considered, and Macmaster, at least, passed for a man. Tietjens, who was wise enough in the affairs of others, had, in that, probably been wise; for there might have been great disagreeablenesses with trustees and heirs-in-law had Mrs Duchemin's subtraction of a couple of thousand pounds from the Duchemin estate afterwards come to light. The Wannops had never been large property owners as a family, but Valentine had heard enough of collateral wranglings over small family dishonesties to know how very disagreeable these could be.

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